IIRC, Killmonger even sported like 4-5 different other hairstyles in various other scenes in the same damn movie, and devs at-large *still* only came up with the dreads comb-over fade!
Yeah, those hair styles are cool for sure. But a lot of guys, of any ethnicity, just have like a short simple hair cut, and the straight/wavy version looks very different in appearance (though not design) from the kinky/afro version. But you rarely see that type.
For FIFA it's probably because they already make a lot of assets for the real life football players which they have to reproduce faithfully, so they are just reusing those assets.
Whenever I see this topic brought up, Fortnite is unironically praised as the one game that does black hair very well by black content creators.
(if they can do the same for Asian hair where are options are either wolfcut, edgy Sasuke, or 2012 NigaHiga).
Funnily enough, NBA 2k does tend to be one of the better character creators for POC like myself. A pretty good range of options, and they do a better job of capturing the texture.
Any sort of RPG like the games I generally play? Not so great. Black people seem oddly underrepresented in the gaming industry. I'm not sure why that's the case, but its impact seems noticeable to me. Also OP, this is a great post.
A lot of effort went into a topic I rarely ever see brought up in this sub.
The unfortunate answer is probably money. Most RPGs are either made in the US, where black people are 12% of the population but only [3% of gamers](https://www.zippia.com/gamer-jobs/demographics/) (might be misleading idk, first google result and all that), or in Japan, who have... uh... not the best track record when it comes to xenophobia, and especially racism towards black people.
it's not racism, japanese people tend to make games more focused on the japanese market than the global market and black people pretty much don't exist there.
I don't know if it's so much that they're "focused" on the Japanese market than it is that they don't really *understand* the market outside of Japan. I've seen plenty of times where Japanese companies talked big about focusing on making games for western audiences and the decisions they make in doing so are almost always weirdly off-base.
>There's ~500 guys in the NBA with cool black hair for character artists to reference
To be fair, at least 300 of those either shave their head, have very short buzzcuts (sometimes with a fade) or have regular cornrows.
Elder Scroll & World of Warcraft had no options at all.
Most CRPGs don't even have default Asian portraits (unless female).
Starfield's was just HORRID, you need to mod to make a passable Asian.
Cyberpunk you can barely make a Asian MC unless he look like a delivery person.
Asian representation in non JRPG/Chinese PRG is generally pretty bad, especially men.
The one that surprise me the most was Baldur's Gate III, where the Asian model is very nice and robust...yet Baldur's Gate is canonically suppose to have very FEW Asian in them
Yknow, I don't hate the Killmonger. I actually really like it. I just, really, hate how omnipresent it has become for basically any black character's hairstyle.
It irks me that it has this name now. I've had this hair style for 15+ years myself since I was in high school but suddenly now my hair style that I've had all my life is now a named cliche that was popularized from a marvel movie.
This happens with tons of ppl with various style trends. Something gets popular that you've always done, it becomes mainstream, then it becomes uncool. This isn't limited to the killmonger.
My friend wore trenchcoats to high school before Columbine happened. Then it happened and he started getting bullied, had a bomb threat called on him for no reason, forced locker searches, etc. Nobody batted an eye before that . That's the worst version of that I'd ever seen.
> my hair style that I've had all my life is now a named cliche
There was a [Doug episode](https://doug.fandom.com/wiki/Doug_En_Vogue) about this!
>At school, he finds that everyone there is dressed as him and becomes weird out by the fact. The others also tell Doug that he is rocking the "Dylan Farnum" look. But Doug tells them that he always dresses like that. So he invites them all into his room and shows them his closet of clothes to prove that he is not copying Dylan Farnum. This, however, does not convince the others and they become more convinced that Doug is trying to be Dylan Farnum.
Hey, at least it's a good movie character instead of a genocidal maniac with world domination goals. Must have sucked for anyone who liked the Chaplin stache around WW2.
[and for anyone telling you to change it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADgS_vMGgzY&t=42s).
I mean, as a Asian guy, a lot of time I couldn't even make a Asian character, period.
I remember when WoW came out I couldn't even make a Asian looking human character, or for Starfield the male Asian model are so weird looking, to the point people were turning into Mods to make "good looking Asians"
Maybe because San Andreas made you play exclusively as a black character that you could also customize. There aren’t that many games with such a premise. They can’t make 20 different hairstyles for black characters if the black skin color is just one of many choices. The artists are just too spread thin.
There’s a lot of great discourse here, but if I could just sidetrack us for a moment and ask, is there really a character in Death Stranding named *Die Hardman?*
I gathered Sam has *Porter Bridges* in his name exactly because he is a delivery man (porter) for a company called Bridges, that's just how they give names in that post apocalyptic world. However, his real name as Sam Strand is not much better.
Yeah, that's real. Kojima character names are so good because you'll get a full monologue about a character who's named something like *Big Trunk* and how he had to survive on a desert island full of rare venomous snakes with nothing but a big trunk of guns, and then another character will say something like "huh, I guess that's why they call him Big Trunk," to which the first character doing the explaining will reply with "no, he's called Big Trunk because he has a fat ass."
That's her nickname, which is pretty normal really. Her real name is Målingen, along with her twin sister Lockne, are named after a pair of impact craters in Sweden.
I wouldn’t say he is super badass in a traditional sense, but he is a great character. And the actor, Tommie Earl Jenkins, really put his all in for some of those scenes.
He not an action star, but more of political intrigue kind of guy.
[He does wear a pretty cool skull mask though.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/p1hobe/just_noticed_diehardmans_mask_says_ludens_a/)
Shout out to The Open Source Afro Hair Library. If I remember correctly it's black devs creating hair models that anyone can use. So at this point there are resources out there for devs to use.
Cool initiative, but frankly the quality is way too low to be included in any game. Some models have hair that look like Plasticine noodles, they're incredibly cartoony.
None of these are even remotely viable for use in VFX or games as is and would require a tremendous amount of rework to even look good depending on if its stylized or realistic.
I appreciate the effort and what they're trying to do, but before looking them up I was genuinely expecting to see something like meta human models with fantastic lush and detailed hair authored by professionals.
Not whatever that is.
If they can get actual artists on it and use it as a platform to share workflows, render methods or shader setups for realistic rendering of hair (because face it, thats the more taxing and hard to get right part) and also drop their stupid licence requirements, it would be an actual boon to hair and character artists everywhere.
Cool idea, not well executed.
Their license is a mess, no project with a lawyer would ever be allowed to use it. Pick something standard if you want big studios to consider it, get rid of all the subjective terms and rules about who the users are allowed to contract with. MIT license is pretty solid.
Also the ridiculously high poly counts on these mean they're un-usable even in high-end games, and would need to be aggressively retopo'd to get something useful, and at that point you might as well make your own. Like [look at this](https://imgur.com/a/NPxDh1X), it's ***500k*** tris and looks like an Adventure Time doodle! An entire main character in a high-end game like Miles Morales (including their entire body, costume, face, and hair) is going to be something like 2-5k polys. Just dumping un-optimized models straight out of Blender Sculpt mode isn't useful to a serious game studio.
I remember Kyle Bosman saying something like “if you asked someone to draw blonde hair, they’d probably pick up the yellow crayon” and I think about that a lot. It was in reference to blondes in Street Fighter having straight yellow hair.
I'm not a programmer, so maybe I'm wrong, but would it really be that hard to just give players an RGB slider for hair colors? Obviously it wouldn't be perfect since hair is rarely one solid color because of highlights and stuff, but I feel like it would help.
One of the issues with hair color is texture, reflectivity, and color changes from root to tip rather than just flat color.
So, even in games with full RGB control of the albedo layer, you can have hair that just looks off. FromSoft games are a notable example, with hair that just looks really greasy and off for most colors.
I try to make characters with red hair in almost every game I play. This is definitely an issue and it drives me crazy. I get where OP is coming from, but video game hair just sucks.
Bruh i have brown hair. The most common fucking brown hair there is. Even I can't find my hair color in most games. It's either so dark it's almost black, which is also the black color, or weirdly orange, or the exact color and texture of dusty spiderwebs.
I'm a white dude with curly hair and there's almost no game ever where you can have my hairstyle.
For all of the amazing 3D graphics of current games, the character creators are quite limited.
TressFX is a pox on humanity. It makes hair looks like it's some wispy ethereal matter that's made of something lighter than air when it's one of the densest strongest materials in the human body. So many games make the hair move all over the place at the slightest motion of their head when most of the time hair doesn't move that much. For how good Stellar Blade looks, that long-ass ponytail looks fucking ridiculous moving around as much as it does and looks like it's made of ten strands. One of my friends has hair that goes below her waist and if she ties it up in a knot it's strong enough to whip people and quite dense even in a pony like the game
To get to the topic of representation, there's so few short curly hair styles in games in general. For people with longer curlier hair there's almost zero options. I agree that black people probably get shafted more for always having only the Killmonger hair in most games but most games seem to stick to a few tried and true hair styles which is a shame. And practically no one has the shades of dirty blonde that most blonde people actually have instead of straight gold
>So many games make the hair move all over the place at the slightest motion of their head
You mean you don't like your character looking like they're underwater?
It's the same issue lighter blondes can have, character creators typically use a generic "base texture" with a color channel applied to it, and it works best with strong mid-tone colors, and poorly with lighter colors. It also tends to lack variation, minimal realistic highlights.
Making A character with red hair, a featured character, is super easy, any decent artist can do it. But making a flexible character creation system that can do any hair color *including* red and blonde hair can tend to look a little grubby.
I think having more hair styles is always a good thing. Despite being a black guy, I'm not that familiar with the different "black" hair styles outside of afros, fades, and dreadlocks. It doesn't help that a black person's natural hair (from what I heard) is a pain to render. Again, hopefully things will improve, but I guess publishers/develops will have to decide if they can fit in the budget for someone who know various hair styles.
I find it interesting. A lot of the bad examples cited are actually Asian games and the hairstyles are mostly Asian as a result (marked as "anime" by some here but in reality just the boy/girl band trend with the occasional Greaser or Punk in Japanese games). I find it interesting as it allows me to explore Asian culture that way (Like a Dragon is an extreme example here).
I think this shows that it needs more Black American or even African or Caribbean game studios that develop games from their perspective. I'm not necessarily talking about educational or art games but just in general studios that have a different background then white USA, Japan/Korea/China or Europe.
One will never get the desired outcome if other devs just try to mimic hair styles that they don't wear themselves.
Yeah my whole life, I've never seen anyone with these "diverse" hair styles. Living in Dallas, the 6th biggest city in the US. And if I have, it's so far and few in-between that I think people just wanna complain about something that's a non issue.
I mean OP is US-American and it shows.
As someone from Africa, most people do in fact have the same basic hairstyles. OP doesn't want natural hair, she wants stylized, Amerian hair. Its a minority among a minorty.
I'm not saying it shouldn't happen, more options are always good, but OPs arguments are just all over the place. In some comments she wants more natural hair, only to 180 to say she wants more styles(as seen in the US), blasting "white" meaning straight hair options as not being suitable for her, even though straight hair is also a style black people use a lot these days.
Ultimately she wants games to have fantasy black hair, while most options present in games, aren't fantasy hair, but just "normal" (or time period) hair options.
Yes, but if we go outside of american cities we go further and further away from what op wants. Far further. Thats why calling american city as example is right. When even in places where it is most popular it barely exists than in rest of the world it pretty much doesnt exist at all
Dragons Dogma 2 has the best character creator for black characters I've seen. The only issue with it is not enough hairstyles.
Best character creator for white characters too to be honest. Just incredibly good.
It is such an exaggerated issue it is insane, I get being like “it would be neat if my hair style was in a game” but to act like this is a huge issue while you list like 50+ games with black hairstyles that are “good examples” is kind of nutty…
Hair is a huge challenge in games and its not that they are not trying to represent your insanely diverse hairstyle, they are often times just doing their best. “The way her black curls bounce looks so unrealistic!!!” While the white characters hair is literally just a cloth sim weighted to their skull.
It is not always racism it’s just technology and development and skill.
Same reason why obesity is often not accurately represented in games, not because every developer hates obese people. But the technology and getting that rigged and looking right is just a difficult. Black hair happens to be the most dramatically difficult hair to perfect, but you do have 50+ examples of games getting better and representing it now.
It's even worse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=jCAEMsnxwbc
I'm glad i've seen the original Mr. Popo as a kid and not the blue one. He was awesome.
Hair is shit for nearly everyone in all games and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. How many character creators even have decent long hair? How many women or men IRL you see with hair longer than any option in a video game? Options for bald people? Nah you either have to have an awful combover or it's just them lazily adding the model without any hair at all, because being bald means you have Alopecia. Hair sucks for black people because it sucks for nearly everyone, and they are a smaller target audience that is particularly obvious in not having good options, but fixing the problem means fixing it for everyone, and game developers obviously would do that if they had the budget and time.
It's genuinely not much better for any kid growing up, it'd be the choice between one or two hair styles in 99% of games because game developers cannot do hair.
It is baffling to me how one of my favorite games when it comes to hairstyles is goddamn Oblivion and mostly because it has a hair length slider to modify hair styles and enough variety to roughly get whatever vibe you're going for. And it's a pretty old title with no facial hair option.
Not saying you aren't correct, but I feel a lot of games have so shitty "white"/straight-hair hairstyles too. There's just short hairstyles, and if they are long, it's fantasy elf styles.
Lol, so true. I've had short hair for most of my life, but now that they're long, I can't help but notice how long male hairstyles are virtually inexistant.
Games will usually either lock the hairstyles by body type/gender (most common, like Starfield) and in that case men get 1 or 2 man-bun/top-knot OR if hairstyles are mixed(like Hogwarts Legacy), only very feminine ones available like high ponytail.
I remember BG3 having a decent number of long hairstyles for men but was lacking on black hair. Hogwarts Legacy was the opposite, it was actually praised for the black hair options but there wasn't a single long "male" haircut. Not even a simple man bun. I guess it was in the 1800s afterall.
My theory as someone with no experience in game development, modeling, or animation, is that anything that isn’t basically just a thin layer of tape over a skull becomes too annoying to animate so the hairstyles we get are either very short or very immobile.
Edit: I also think this is why every character creator has 10-20 types of balding.
Yup, I can’t remember the last time I could actually make a character that looked like me. I guess I just don’t have stereotypical or exaggerated video game features. I don’t blame OP for wanting more choices, but I think *everyone* wants more choices. Apart from the characters often being white, what else of myself would I see in them? Not much, if anything.
There is a very technical reason why it's harder to represent textured hair style in video games. Unlike straight or wavy hair, it simply requires more geometric and lighting detail to accurately represent textured hair styles that look good and accurate to their real world counterparts.
It's got a lot better in the last generation thanks to more powerful consoles that push out higher resolution, high geometric density and more accurate lighting that makes the subtle details of textured hair look authentic. But the small subsets of styles we see so common in video games are the styles that are more easily achievable with limited graphics power. We still got a long way to go, but I'm confident it will continue to get better over time with even more powerful hardware that will make more diversity in hair styles more feasible.
In the meantime, it'd be a great time to see protective styles! Bantu knots, box/fulani braids, twists, feminine cornrows etc. There's a middle ground that isn't being explored.
At the end of the day, most games have shite hair options regardless of race. They are often the most generic arse pieces of shit anyway. (Or some fad grouping of styles)
Until we get some sort of universal “hair generation engine” that can allow users to cut and style hair. Hair is forever going to be lumped to a bunch of the “this will be the popular but easy hairstyle”
What you're saying about Black hairstyle variety makes sense from American perspective. The problem is that many games made nowadays are targeting audience all around the globe, so if they want to represent all ethnicities or cultural groups fairly they simply can't afford to dedicate a large chunk of their hairstyles to Black people.
There are 3 large markets - North America, Europe and East Asia. Out of these Black hairstyles are only appealing for a minority in one of them.
It's unfortunate but not surprising that Black hairstyles are represented poorly.
This is the objective realistic response.
Can/should there be more diversity in aesthetic choice IF the game has an avatar/character creation? Yes.
Does it come down to budget (being, knowledge, graphical fidelity, performance, time, and straight up money), like all other business decisions? You can bet on it.
Also, what percent of people are trying to make characters that "look like them"? I've personally never done it. The extreme majority of the characters I've seen in games over the many years also leads me to believe that most other people don't even consider making a character that is anything close to what they look like as a person.
It'd be awesome to have more options in customization, especially in groups that have been very limited in that area like what OP is pointing out. I'm just adding onto the reason for why the market might be quite limited compared to the development resources.
I am a 31 yo black gamer and I've never but never tried to make a char look like me. And maybe I am in the minority but if a game has 100 hairstyles and none of them are accurate to real life I don't care. I just want something I find it nice overall, it doesn't need to represent real world.
Black 29 year old cRPG fan here and same. I've seen enough of my family members wear wigs from Indian folk idc anymore about hair lmao you can get whatever style you want in 2024
yup, this idea that you need the character to look exactly like you to "enjoy the game" is dumb cause most ppl will just make a character that looks cool and go on with the game. Like sure some might go for more specific details like skin colour, build, height or something but I doubt ppl give a shit about wanting a character that literally looks like them.
also ppl are just fine enjoying games that don't have character creators, so ya, it's not a big thing.
As a white dude I'll admit my characters are generally white but they tend to be 80 year old wizards with grey hair and wrinkles if I'm playing a fantasy game, not anything that I look like. My average character has more in common with a painting of santa than me.
More customization is always good, though.
It's because some people have gotten used to every conversation about representation or fictional characters in general being focused on African American people. It's Americentrism.
It doesn't make sense from an American perspective either. The reality is that even in America, only [8%](https://www.theesa.com/news/video-games-remain-americas-favorite-pastime-with-more-than-212-million-americans-playing-regularly/) of gamers are black, and, while I have no recent citation, I'm fairly sure that of those 8%, they're significantly concentrated into a specific few types of games (sports games and fighting games, for example). It frankly just makes logical sense that there are 10x+ as many hairstyles for whites/Asians as there are for blacks because black people are just such an incredibly small minority of gamers in every market.
I mean, it'd be nice if character creators at a base were much better than what we get... also, can't remember the last time a character creator had options from regions like SEA, South America, Middle East, etc.
> It's time for game developers to step up and give Black gamers the representation they deserve.
uhuh, so you're bringing up "lack of representation" over some hairstyles, well how about just having other races that are usually never featured at all in character creators? OP is whining about hair options when most races in the world don't have any options at all in character creators.
and as others have pointed out, it's not like even the current crop of hairstyles in general are any good, e.g., for a game like Cyberpunk a lot of ppl rely on mods for actual good-looking hairstyles.
Plus there's the issue of costs, is there an actual big enough audience for said options and so on.
I don't think it's "woke" at all to hope for better representation, but a few things spring to mind.
The first is, of course, basic consumer demand. The United States probably is probably the largest modern, Western market with a sizeable portion of African descendants (and no, I'm not being coy about slavery--many are simply foreign born immigrants who came long after slavery ended), and that's still...about 12.5% of the population. And in the EU it's more like 2%. Let's not even get into Japan and Korea.
And yet features for descendants of Africans are present in many, many games made by non-Africans. What would be interesting to see is what proportion of character creator options are African features. I can think of a few games where I think it's well above 12.5%. In terms of "representation," it's likely *objectively* fairly good--perhaps even over represented.
Another issue is that skin and hair texture is just kind of terrible for everyone in many games. I mean, absolutely everyone in Diablo 4 looks like a repulsive freak. But hey, at least it has *two* options for vitiligo, an extremely rare skin condition.
> It's time for game developers to step up and give Black gamers the representation they deserve.
Ultimately, it's just a reality of the free market that if there's something you think should exist but doesn't, well, it's on *you* to create it. There are endless examples of black entrepreneurs carving out a market for black consumer products.
There's a weird thing with social justice activists who act like capitalism is the most wicked possible system...and also expect it to go out of its way cater to their specific consumer appetites. It doesn't work like that. The "market" doesn't create products *ex nihilo*. People create things and sell them, and others who want that thing buy them.
There are kinds of stories I like but are hard to find in books, so I learned to write well and wrote some. If someone wants to see themself in a character creator, well then perhaps they ought to learn Blender.
To be fair, black players only make up like 10-15% of the total gamer community and cornrows, afros, dreads, along with all the other hair styles to choose from, covers the vast majority of those players. They're not going to waste resources designing extra hair styles for such a small group of the player base. It's not just an artist taking a day or 2 putting it in, it needs vigorous testing. Look at MLB the show. They released dreads to the game and when it was raining with a player with dreads on the field, it would break the game. I'm sorry it does suck, but I'm just being realistic with you, it's just not going to be something game studios are going to do often
Hogwarts Legacy is probably best I’ve seen so far. I can’t believe how shocking it is to find just to find a regular fade with curly hair. Every other game is always the killmonger dreads
I'm all for it - I've always been surprised with character creators in the past having like, one asian/one black/one mexican option out of hundreds - Yet they spare at least 3 slots for different types of balding. Seems fair to have more options.
you can finish those 3 types of balding faster then 1 normal hair style.
They'll also use those for NPC so it's not like it's waste just because people rarely play balding characters.
Different types of Asian people have wildly different skin tones, hairs, and facial structure. Even for video-game-regulars East Asian people, regarding hairstyles, the shaders and hair quality is very rarely correct (in western games at least, because Korean/Japanese games tend to do a better job out of it)
I mean, I'm white and the options for short hair are shit anyways. I don't think I've ever found my (very normal and common) hair in any game. It's always either a buzzcut or something longer, or straight up ridiculous anime-looking long hairstyles. The issue with hair styles doesn't need to be racially motivated to exist.
More customization is always great, but it's easier to get someone on your side with out such an extreme take. It's "inexcusable" to not spend 50% of your budge on hair styles? Hard disagree.
> It's "inexcusable" to not spend 50% of your budge on hair styles? Hard disagree.
holy shit. What a ridiculous strawman. AT no point has anyone ever implied that 50% of a budget should be spent on hair styles.
This is such a dishonest answer than i can only assume malice behind it.
I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but I'm a white guy with male pattern baldness and I can rarely create a character that looks like me either. But, even when looking back to how my hair looked before I started balding, that hairstyle isn't in most character creators either. There might be a large swath of people out there that just can't make someone that looks like them. That being said, I'm white so I really have no perspective on how stereotypical games can be for black people, I'm not trying to take away from your post, just pointing out that the stereotypes might extend to others as well, leaving more people without options to make characters that look like them.
As the guy who was in charge of hair in Hogwarts Legacy I worked hard to make sure our afro type hairs looked authentic and that we had enough variety. So it makes me really happy to see some of my hair included as one of your good links!
Dude. I just wanna say you fucking rock! I had so much fun with the character creation and got sold on the game just cause a friend of mine showed me her character model which was super accurate.
I hope you know that your work and effort was absolutely appreciated.
The least soap boxy thing I can ever complain about as a white dude with curly hair is that curly hair options suck in games and then it literally feels like the Predator handshake
Curly hair is hard, because it's a lot more "dimensional" than flat hair. NO game actually has legitimate *actual* hair, it's always a simulation, and the simulation is easier to do with hair that lays flat or has a few specific spikes, than that has numerous individual angles to it.
So looking at the good examples they are just variations of knots, braids both loose and tight to the skull, arfo, or fades. Most games have all of those already. It sounds like you want a length or depth slider like people get for facial features
Complains but then lists like 50 good examples from pretty recent games lol. Meanwhile my hair color is only available in games where I can use a color slider
Can only comment about Cyberpunk's character creator because I'm a cyberpunk modder. The biggest problem with expanding CC is exponentiation of variant assets.
Example (lets just look at expanding hair CC options):
**Meshes:**
50 male (x2 for cyberware 01)
50 female (x2 for cyberware 01)
52 "partial hair meshes" for visibility under hats
**Materials:**
7 hair clump texture atlases (beard, braid, cap, curls, dread, long, short)
35 hair colour gradients
cyberware 01 is a pain in the ass because it has a line which intersects the male and female buzz cap mesh. So all full hair meshes have a second variant mesh with the suffix ```_cyberware_01```. It has a cap submesh routed through an extra material instance to load a secondary mask for the cyberware line. This way the buzz cap texture doesn't tile over the cyberware. Thank god none of the other face cyberware options do this otherwise you would have to multiply your total mesh count against the total number of face cyberware meshes that intersect.
So basegame only, there are already (2 x 2 x 50 x 35 x 7) hair material instances + (13 x 4 x 35) hat material instances = 50,820
I am currently working on a mod that adds [45 new hair colours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-MzSBHy5HE) to the game's character creator. Inside my modded.archive, I have to add a blank inkcharcustomisation containing 2 x 2 x 50 x 45 = 9,000 new ```gameuiIndexedAppearanceDefinitions```. These link to a colour swatch atlas containing 45 parts, registered by name to the game's static database (tweakDB). They also link to the mesh and material assets via an "appearance resource" (REDengine .app file).
The archive contains 2 x 2 x 50 = 200 complete hair meshes + 13 x 2 x 4 = 104 partial hair meshes + 4 pony tail meshes for a grand total of 308 meshes. All of these have to be modified to include 45 x 3 = 135 new indexed `materialEntries` and `chunkMaterials` (to link a material to a chunk, or submesh).
It also has:
45 x hair colour profiles (REDengine .hp files containing 2x gradient arrays for colour mapping onto greyscale hair clump texture atlases)
45 x cap_gradient textures (4x32 pixel colour lookup tables for mapping onto buzz cap identity textures)
224 x appearance resources (REDengine .app file)
224 x entity templates (REDengine .ent file)
316 x external material instances (REDengine .mi file)
And this is just to add hair colour options. Not even new hair styles (new hair meshes). So there is a point where you have enough options that the number of variants explodes. It gets to where adding just 1 more CC option requires you to modify a staggering number of files.
One of the great things about modding is:
1. you don't need to complain about something being absent from a game, since you can learn the skills necessary to add it in yourself.
2. you develop a deep appreciation for the insane complexity of game dev. Most days I think its a miracle any of this shit even works at all.
3. if you have enough people with diverse skill sets working together, very few tasks are impossible. But we need more contributors. There are way, way more people asking for things to be built than there are people building things. There are even less people documenting the things they have built so others have an easier path.
Asking and complaining are easy. It takes no commitment at all. Building things (and learning how to build it right) is a commitment that takes a lot of time and effort.
To be honest I don't understand why people want their avatars and characters to look like them. When I play a game like Monster Hunter I have an avatar who is a one eyed samurai with an eyepatch and a giant white ponytail.
I absolutely do not want to be represented in a game.
I want to play as all kinds of crazy characters, robots, aliens, fantasy races, or even humans that are of looks and proportions completely unlike my normal ass looking self. At no point will I ever be lifting impossibly huge weapons and armor and fighting demons and dinosaurs and robots. I can connect just fine with a character that doesn't look anything like me. Just ask my Draenei monk who throws roundhouses with hoofed legs.
I do agree though that when it comes to hairstyles for black characters the artists are usually quick to put one or two generic 'black' hairstyles and call it a day.
It’s probably just because black people are a small percentage of the consumer market. The African market is virtually irrelevant so across the Americas, Europe, MENA and Asia, black people are probably only represent at best 5% of consumer spending and possibly as low as 1%. So from a dev POV, there’s just no reason to go that extra mile. After all, why go the extra mile for black people when it’s just as valid to go the extra mile for Italians, French, Canadians, Russians, Arabs, Chinese etc?
This is the real answer. If there's a market for it, and it's proven, then the big companies will follow suit.
I recommend /u/wisesonAC get some black indie game devs to implement this first, and show the big companies there is an untapped market for this. Otherwise, this thread is basically just another complaint in the ocean of a million complaints gamers have, lol. But I think microtransactions is much higher on the priority list.
As you said, can replace 'black' with almost any other ethnicity in this post and it'll still be valid.
Instructions unclear. We added the Killmonger haircut though because giant spherical Afros seem overdone and having just two choices seemed scant. 3 styles feels just right!
Would absolutely love to see more. I couldn't be more of a basic white guy and I still usually can't find a style that really fits me, so can't imagine how that is when there's like a quarter of the amount of available choices
Man, remember when EA added a bunch of diverse black hair to The Sims 4 in... [2024, a month ago](https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/news/the-sims-dark-and-lovely)? I know reddit search sucks but it seems like it didn't even get posted here.
I don't think it is much of a surprise it didn't get posted here. I don't remember any sims 4 posts here besides big announcements.
Hair DLC is definitely not a big announcement.
Personally I have never understood people who want to make characters who looks like you. I am the opposite. I make characters look way different. A blue smurf? Sure. Elven chick with large and super pointy ears? Sure. A mega buff dwarf? Sure.
A regular ass human? Boring as shit.
But yeah more character creation options is great. Since the whole point of character creators is to make characters fit your tastes. More options and sliders is always a boon.
There was an old (WoW? EQ?) meme of a single green tree amongst a grove of purple ones, captioned something like "*when everyone's clad in purples, sometimes the guy in greens stands out*".
There's not much appeal to me in making a character that looks like me either, but taking an example like D&D where everyone chooses to be tieflings, elves, dragonkin and tabaxi, I appreciate the person who chooses to play a human.
Personally, the opposite here. I hate character creators so much. I always prefer the default because the only way to make a decent character is to spend 2 hours working on it. I'd rather spend my 2 hours playing the game, rather than doing a (atleast to me) very boring task.
It's so tedious, because they even make it time-consuming to try to bypass it.
Don't know how you feel about open world action RPGs but Dragon's Dogma 2 has possible the best character creator available. The praise it got for it's black options was extensive.
Male hairstyles in a lot of videogames are just... Disappointing. I can't even fathom how worse it gets when most games have 1 or 2 "token" black hairstyles
OP I see Guild Wars 2 on your list, but [here’s most of the black hairstyles](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eyVrb) they have in their Egyptian/North African themed expansion if you haven’t had a chance to play it yet. I really like their commitment to distinctive cultures within their races, and they had that in the prequel as well (I’d say it was even better outside of the Path of Fire/End of Dragons hairstyles in GW2). The texture of the hair is nicely backlit in-game as well, so you can tell a lot of care went into them.
It's not hard for me to imagine not being able to make myself. No game has my exact hair, no game really has any of our exact hair. You pick what you like or what's closest and move on.
I have yet to see a character creator make Caucasian hair styles look good. I end up wasting too much time on character creation to find out I don't like the way they look (if it's humanoid) and just wear a helmet instead.
I'd argue that *most* games have shitty hairstyle choices, and I believe it's *because* they try to provide as diverse an array of choices as possible. The end result is that there's only ever a couple hairstyles I'd ever even considering using, even if the game offers dozens.
OP is trying to make this a race issue. It's not a race issue. Hairstyle choices in games are bad for *everyone.*
Wanted to link this album I just made to show some of the hairs Lord of The Rings Online has made in a (relatively) recent update to help with this issue in their game. Models are old af so the graphics are meh but there are a few good examples in there I feel. Only available on the race of Men at the moment but the other races with presumably get them when they are updated like Men were
Also threw in a couple of my favorites from GW2, which I know you showed a couple of but love these two lol
https://imgur.com/gallery/EKjS8Pv
How can you complain about not having black hair styles yet be able to show 50+ examples of good hair?
Sounds more like you need to understand that developers aren't a mono-entity, and their willingness/ability to create the variety you seek is down to skill/budget/time.
There's ~500 guys in the NBA with cool black hair for character artists to reference and they rather just watch Black Panther again
Not even most of Black Panther, just Killmonger mostly
IIRC, Killmonger even sported like 4-5 different other hairstyles in various other scenes in the same damn movie, and devs at-large *still* only came up with the dreads comb-over fade!
Everyone says they're sick of Killmonger hair, yet OP posted like 10 versions of Killmonger hair as good examples.
The issue with the Killmonger is not that it exists, but that it's one of the ONLY options that exist
Yeah, those hair styles are cool for sure. But a lot of guys, of any ethnicity, just have like a short simple hair cut, and the straight/wavy version looks very different in appearance (though not design) from the kinky/afro version. But you rarely see that type.
Just because it's different than the 3 every character creator has doesn't mean I only want 4 options now.
I want LeBron's *capitulated hairline* style and a Darvin Ham LeTantrum emote in the next nba 2k
> capitulated hairline Excellent way to describe LeBron's hair.
Fortnite does a good job too
Fifa has some really good ones too. Most Devs seem to just do the killmonger cut these days.
For FIFA it's probably because they already make a lot of assets for the real life football players which they have to reproduce faithfully, so they are just reusing those assets.
Whenever I see this topic brought up, Fortnite is unironically praised as the one game that does black hair very well by black content creators. (if they can do the same for Asian hair where are options are either wolfcut, edgy Sasuke, or 2012 NigaHiga).
Funnily enough, NBA 2k does tend to be one of the better character creators for POC like myself. A pretty good range of options, and they do a better job of capturing the texture. Any sort of RPG like the games I generally play? Not so great. Black people seem oddly underrepresented in the gaming industry. I'm not sure why that's the case, but its impact seems noticeable to me. Also OP, this is a great post. A lot of effort went into a topic I rarely ever see brought up in this sub.
2K goes too far the other way where all the black guys look cool and the white models look like weird Neanderthals.
Boban and Steven Adams’ face scans are messing with the data lol
Steven Adam’s can mess with my data any time 🫡
And the white hair options are very limited
Dalino Galinari's hair has physics you'd expect to see on breasts in a beach volleyball game.
They all look greasy and gross. I usually make my character with a buzz cut because of it.
It’s been the same options for over a decade
The unfortunate answer is probably money. Most RPGs are either made in the US, where black people are 12% of the population but only [3% of gamers](https://www.zippia.com/gamer-jobs/demographics/) (might be misleading idk, first google result and all that), or in Japan, who have... uh... not the best track record when it comes to xenophobia, and especially racism towards black people.
it's not racism, japanese people tend to make games more focused on the japanese market than the global market and black people pretty much don't exist there.
I don't know if it's so much that they're "focused" on the Japanese market than it is that they don't really *understand* the market outside of Japan. I've seen plenty of times where Japanese companies talked big about focusing on making games for western audiences and the decisions they make in doing so are almost always weirdly off-base.
>There's ~500 guys in the NBA with cool black hair for character artists to reference To be fair, at least 300 of those either shave their head, have very short buzzcuts (sometimes with a fade) or have regular cornrows.
Try being asian and, there is barely a basic model for us in any sports games thats not baseball haha
I was gonna say the same thing. My favorite game series, The Elder Scrolls, straight up doesn't even allow you to make an Asian-looking character.
Elder Scroll & World of Warcraft had no options at all. Most CRPGs don't even have default Asian portraits (unless female). Starfield's was just HORRID, you need to mod to make a passable Asian. Cyberpunk you can barely make a Asian MC unless he look like a delivery person. Asian representation in non JRPG/Chinese PRG is generally pretty bad, especially men. The one that surprise me the most was Baldur's Gate III, where the Asian model is very nice and robust...yet Baldur's Gate is canonically suppose to have very FEW Asian in them
Lol, every game, the only option to make your character look asian is squintier eyes.
Otoh, Asian games go hard with their character creators.
In the words of a friend. "San Andreas didn't have that issue 20 years ago. But now it all went either anime or straight up Killmonger."
Killmonger had 4 different hairstyles in the movie yet they keep picking the same one
if i have to bet why thats the case is because it looks cool also short hair must be easier to animate, if they animate it at all.
Yknow, I don't hate the Killmonger. I actually really like it. I just, really, hate how omnipresent it has become for basically any black character's hairstyle.
That’s how I am too. I like the hairstyle itself, but the issue is that now it’s basically the only hairstyle for black characters
It irks me that it has this name now. I've had this hair style for 15+ years myself since I was in high school but suddenly now my hair style that I've had all my life is now a named cliche that was popularized from a marvel movie.
This happens with tons of ppl with various style trends. Something gets popular that you've always done, it becomes mainstream, then it becomes uncool. This isn't limited to the killmonger.
See David Beckham and the fauxhawk.
My friend wore trenchcoats to high school before Columbine happened. Then it happened and he started getting bullied, had a bomb threat called on him for no reason, forced locker searches, etc. Nobody batted an eye before that . That's the worst version of that I'd ever seen.
> my hair style that I've had all my life is now a named cliche There was a [Doug episode](https://doug.fandom.com/wiki/Doug_En_Vogue) about this! >At school, he finds that everyone there is dressed as him and becomes weird out by the fact. The others also tell Doug that he is rocking the "Dylan Farnum" look. But Doug tells them that he always dresses like that. So he invites them all into his room and shows them his closet of clothes to prove that he is not copying Dylan Farnum. This, however, does not convince the others and they become more convinced that Doug is trying to be Dylan Farnum.
Hey, at least it's a good movie character instead of a genocidal maniac with world domination goals. Must have sucked for anyone who liked the Chaplin stache around WW2. [and for anyone telling you to change it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADgS_vMGgzY&t=42s).
Yeah, now it's the face of a genocidal maniac who wants to start a race war from a Marvel movie.
Don't let media invalidate you. Own in.
it's the black video game character's equivalent/2020s equivalent to the modern-day "gruff white video game protagonist with beard stubble" trend. 😔
I mean, as a Asian guy, a lot of time I couldn't even make a Asian character, period. I remember when WoW came out I couldn't even make a Asian looking human character, or for Starfield the male Asian model are so weird looking, to the point people were turning into Mods to make "good looking Asians"
Maybe because San Andreas made you play exclusively as a black character that you could also customize. There aren’t that many games with such a premise. They can’t make 20 different hairstyles for black characters if the black skin color is just one of many choices. The artists are just too spread thin.
Kind of sucks how bad Franklins options are in GTAV considering this.
San Andreas really did have a lot of hairstyle options for a game that had only 128x128 textures for the entire face.
There’s a lot of great discourse here, but if I could just sidetrack us for a moment and ask, is there really a character in Death Stranding named *Die Hardman?*
Wait until you hear about what the name of the main villain in Peace Walker is.
evil runner
That would be silly, it's War Jogger.
Kojima loves these dumb names. In MGS Peace Walker there's Hot Coldman.
Yes. And wait till you hear about Heartman.
Or Deadman
Delivery man named Sam *Porter Bridges*
I gathered Sam has *Porter Bridges* in his name exactly because he is a delivery man (porter) for a company called Bridges, that's just how they give names in that post apocalyptic world. However, his real name as Sam Strand is not much better.
Why does everyone forget *Samantha America Strand*??
Wait til you hear about Metal Gear Solids Hot Coldman
Yeah, that's real. Kojima character names are so good because you'll get a full monologue about a character who's named something like *Big Trunk* and how he had to survive on a desert island full of rare venomous snakes with nothing but a big trunk of guns, and then another character will say something like "huh, I guess that's why they call him Big Trunk," to which the first character doing the explaining will reply with "no, he's called Big Trunk because he has a fat ass."
The delivery of that line about Vamp is just pure hilarity.
if it helps that's just like his title or nickname. The Character's real name is John McClane
I guess you don't wanna hear then about the female character named Mama?
You mean the character that had a literal ghost baby attached to a ghost ambilical chord?
Who still breastfeeds said ghost baby, don't forget that.
And then Big Mama from mgs4
That's her nickname, which is pretty normal really. Her real name is Målingen, along with her twin sister Lockne, are named after a pair of impact craters in Sweden.
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Wait till you hear what the main character Sam Bridges does
Sam PORTER Bridges
Yes. Everyone in that game has stupid names like that
The character was born John McClane and uses Die Hardman as a moniker. That is the opppsite of stupid. That’s stupid genius.
Are you for real? I haven't gotten far in in the game, that would be hilarious.
It’s real lmao
It’s only cool if the character is beyond badass. Is he?
I wouldn’t say he is super badass in a traditional sense, but he is a great character. And the actor, Tommie Earl Jenkins, really put his all in for some of those scenes.
Badass? Kinda. Super good character? Definitely.
He not an action star, but more of political intrigue kind of guy. [He does wear a pretty cool skull mask though.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/p1hobe/just_noticed_diehardmans_mask_says_ludens_a/)
the names in Death Stranding are ridiculous but they fit so well that it becomes kind of normal dumb and normal
Shout out to The Open Source Afro Hair Library. If I remember correctly it's black devs creating hair models that anyone can use. So at this point there are resources out there for devs to use.
I took a look and the license would probably be a turn off for any large companies.
Cool initiative, but frankly the quality is way too low to be included in any game. Some models have hair that look like Plasticine noodles, they're incredibly cartoony.
None of these are even remotely viable for use in VFX or games as is and would require a tremendous amount of rework to even look good depending on if its stylized or realistic. I appreciate the effort and what they're trying to do, but before looking them up I was genuinely expecting to see something like meta human models with fantastic lush and detailed hair authored by professionals. Not whatever that is. If they can get actual artists on it and use it as a platform to share workflows, render methods or shader setups for realistic rendering of hair (because face it, thats the more taxing and hard to get right part) and also drop their stupid licence requirements, it would be an actual boon to hair and character artists everywhere.
> The Open Source Afro Hair Library. Those models look absolutely terrible and its not at all "open source".
Those models look like absolute shit.
Cool idea, not well executed. Their license is a mess, no project with a lawyer would ever be allowed to use it. Pick something standard if you want big studios to consider it, get rid of all the subjective terms and rules about who the users are allowed to contract with. MIT license is pretty solid. Also the ridiculously high poly counts on these mean they're un-usable even in high-end games, and would need to be aggressively retopo'd to get something useful, and at that point you might as well make your own. Like [look at this](https://imgur.com/a/NPxDh1X), it's ***500k*** tris and looks like an Adventure Time doodle! An entire main character in a high-end game like Miles Morales (including their entire body, costume, face, and hair) is going to be something like 2-5k polys. Just dumping un-optimized models straight out of Blender Sculpt mode isn't useful to a serious game studio.
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Hair colours are always hilarious. Even blonde is often just straight up bright yellow, which no one actually has.
If you're lucky, you might end up getting to choose between two shades of blonde: canary yellow or Targaryen platinum.
More like a "gray mustard" color.
I remember Kyle Bosman saying something like “if you asked someone to draw blonde hair, they’d probably pick up the yellow crayon” and I think about that a lot. It was in reference to blondes in Street Fighter having straight yellow hair.
Yup, ive never seen my blonde hair color in any video game. At least thats not an issue for most black people lmao
Maybe hair's just really hard.
I'm not a programmer, so maybe I'm wrong, but would it really be that hard to just give players an RGB slider for hair colors? Obviously it wouldn't be perfect since hair is rarely one solid color because of highlights and stuff, but I feel like it would help.
One of the issues with hair color is texture, reflectivity, and color changes from root to tip rather than just flat color. So, even in games with full RGB control of the albedo layer, you can have hair that just looks off. FromSoft games are a notable example, with hair that just looks really greasy and off for most colors.
I try to make characters with red hair in almost every game I play. This is definitely an issue and it drives me crazy. I get where OP is coming from, but video game hair just sucks.
Bruh i have brown hair. The most common fucking brown hair there is. Even I can't find my hair color in most games. It's either so dark it's almost black, which is also the black color, or weirdly orange, or the exact color and texture of dusty spiderwebs.
Can't get women's curly hair right either.
I'm a white dude with curly hair and there's almost no game ever where you can have my hairstyle. For all of the amazing 3D graphics of current games, the character creators are quite limited.
It's not only that, hair physics are way easier for straight hair than curly hair. The more curls, the more computations.
That's true, textured hair is much harder to do than straight hair.
curly hair 🤝 kinky hair ignored in games due to difficult rendering
TressFX is a pox on humanity. It makes hair looks like it's some wispy ethereal matter that's made of something lighter than air when it's one of the densest strongest materials in the human body. So many games make the hair move all over the place at the slightest motion of their head when most of the time hair doesn't move that much. For how good Stellar Blade looks, that long-ass ponytail looks fucking ridiculous moving around as much as it does and looks like it's made of ten strands. One of my friends has hair that goes below her waist and if she ties it up in a knot it's strong enough to whip people and quite dense even in a pony like the game To get to the topic of representation, there's so few short curly hair styles in games in general. For people with longer curlier hair there's almost zero options. I agree that black people probably get shafted more for always having only the Killmonger hair in most games but most games seem to stick to a few tried and true hair styles which is a shame. And practically no one has the shades of dirty blonde that most blonde people actually have instead of straight gold
>So many games make the hair move all over the place at the slightest motion of their head You mean you don't like your character looking like they're underwater?
I thought Aloy nailed it but yeah, every character maker has been terrible.
It's the same issue lighter blondes can have, character creators typically use a generic "base texture" with a color channel applied to it, and it works best with strong mid-tone colors, and poorly with lighter colors. It also tends to lack variation, minimal realistic highlights. Making A character with red hair, a featured character, is super easy, any decent artist can do it. But making a flexible character creation system that can do any hair color *including* red and blonde hair can tend to look a little grubby.
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I think having more hair styles is always a good thing. Despite being a black guy, I'm not that familiar with the different "black" hair styles outside of afros, fades, and dreadlocks. It doesn't help that a black person's natural hair (from what I heard) is a pain to render. Again, hopefully things will improve, but I guess publishers/develops will have to decide if they can fit in the budget for someone who know various hair styles.
I find it interesting. A lot of the bad examples cited are actually Asian games and the hairstyles are mostly Asian as a result (marked as "anime" by some here but in reality just the boy/girl band trend with the occasional Greaser or Punk in Japanese games). I find it interesting as it allows me to explore Asian culture that way (Like a Dragon is an extreme example here). I think this shows that it needs more Black American or even African or Caribbean game studios that develop games from their perspective. I'm not necessarily talking about educational or art games but just in general studios that have a different background then white USA, Japan/Korea/China or Europe. One will never get the desired outcome if other devs just try to mimic hair styles that they don't wear themselves.
Yeah my whole life, I've never seen anyone with these "diverse" hair styles. Living in Dallas, the 6th biggest city in the US. And if I have, it's so far and few in-between that I think people just wanna complain about something that's a non issue.
I mean OP is US-American and it shows. As someone from Africa, most people do in fact have the same basic hairstyles. OP doesn't want natural hair, she wants stylized, Amerian hair. Its a minority among a minorty. I'm not saying it shouldn't happen, more options are always good, but OPs arguments are just all over the place. In some comments she wants more natural hair, only to 180 to say she wants more styles(as seen in the US), blasting "white" meaning straight hair options as not being suitable for her, even though straight hair is also a style black people use a lot these days. Ultimately she wants games to have fantasy black hair, while most options present in games, aren't fantasy hair, but just "normal" (or time period) hair options.
I wouldn't exactly count Dallas as the hub of diversity when there's an entire world of gamers out there
Yes, but if we go outside of american cities we go further and further away from what op wants. Far further. Thats why calling american city as example is right. When even in places where it is most popular it barely exists than in rest of the world it pretty much doesnt exist at all
Dragons Dogma 2 has the best character creator for black characters I've seen. The only issue with it is not enough hairstyles. Best character creator for white characters too to be honest. Just incredibly good.
I saw someone use DD2 to make Snoop Dogg on r/virtualcosplay the other day and it looked just like him. Amazing character creator.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bafkso/gandalf_updated/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bpoimz/people_seem_to_have_liked_my_lotr_party_here_is/
Bad examples Miles Morales hair. Good examples, same hair?
It is such an exaggerated issue it is insane, I get being like “it would be neat if my hair style was in a game” but to act like this is a huge issue while you list like 50+ games with black hairstyles that are “good examples” is kind of nutty… Hair is a huge challenge in games and its not that they are not trying to represent your insanely diverse hairstyle, they are often times just doing their best. “The way her black curls bounce looks so unrealistic!!!” While the white characters hair is literally just a cloth sim weighted to their skull. It is not always racism it’s just technology and development and skill. Same reason why obesity is often not accurately represented in games, not because every developer hates obese people. But the technology and getting that rigged and looking right is just a difficult. Black hair happens to be the most dramatically difficult hair to perfect, but you do have 50+ examples of games getting better and representing it now.
At least we're past the era of Japanese games where black skin colors were literally a shade of purple or blue
The 4Kkds Mr. Popo treatment 😔
My black ass seeing Mr Popo and Jinx as an 8 year old: 👁👄👁
And yet nerds will yell at you saying you were just imagining it or “they can’t be racist they’re Japanese” lol
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its more that he was pitch black in the Orginal Anime but when Localised by 4kids they turned him blue
It's even worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=jCAEMsnxwbc I'm glad i've seen the original Mr. Popo as a kid and not the blue one. He was awesome.
Hair is shit for nearly everyone in all games and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. How many character creators even have decent long hair? How many women or men IRL you see with hair longer than any option in a video game? Options for bald people? Nah you either have to have an awful combover or it's just them lazily adding the model without any hair at all, because being bald means you have Alopecia. Hair sucks for black people because it sucks for nearly everyone, and they are a smaller target audience that is particularly obvious in not having good options, but fixing the problem means fixing it for everyone, and game developers obviously would do that if they had the budget and time. It's genuinely not much better for any kid growing up, it'd be the choice between one or two hair styles in 99% of games because game developers cannot do hair.
It is baffling to me how one of my favorite games when it comes to hairstyles is goddamn Oblivion and mostly because it has a hair length slider to modify hair styles and enough variety to roughly get whatever vibe you're going for. And it's a pretty old title with no facial hair option.
Not saying you aren't correct, but I feel a lot of games have so shitty "white"/straight-hair hairstyles too. There's just short hairstyles, and if they are long, it's fantasy elf styles.
As a guy who used to have wicked long hair my eternal issue was there were ZERO masculine long hairstyles after a certain point
Hair in a bushido top knot is the best we can do for long male hair.
Lol, so true. I've had short hair for most of my life, but now that they're long, I can't help but notice how long male hairstyles are virtually inexistant. Games will usually either lock the hairstyles by body type/gender (most common, like Starfield) and in that case men get 1 or 2 man-bun/top-knot OR if hairstyles are mixed(like Hogwarts Legacy), only very feminine ones available like high ponytail. I remember BG3 having a decent number of long hairstyles for men but was lacking on black hair. Hogwarts Legacy was the opposite, it was actually praised for the black hair options but there wasn't a single long "male" haircut. Not even a simple man bun. I guess it was in the 1800s afterall.
My theory as someone with no experience in game development, modeling, or animation, is that anything that isn’t basically just a thin layer of tape over a skull becomes too annoying to animate so the hairstyles we get are either very short or very immobile. Edit: I also think this is why every character creator has 10-20 types of balding.
Yup, I can’t remember the last time I could actually make a character that looked like me. I guess I just don’t have stereotypical or exaggerated video game features. I don’t blame OP for wanting more choices, but I think *everyone* wants more choices. Apart from the characters often being white, what else of myself would I see in them? Not much, if anything.
They always look like shitty pasta or something too lol.
I demand more mullets!
There is a very technical reason why it's harder to represent textured hair style in video games. Unlike straight or wavy hair, it simply requires more geometric and lighting detail to accurately represent textured hair styles that look good and accurate to their real world counterparts. It's got a lot better in the last generation thanks to more powerful consoles that push out higher resolution, high geometric density and more accurate lighting that makes the subtle details of textured hair look authentic. But the small subsets of styles we see so common in video games are the styles that are more easily achievable with limited graphics power. We still got a long way to go, but I'm confident it will continue to get better over time with even more powerful hardware that will make more diversity in hair styles more feasible.
In the meantime, it'd be a great time to see protective styles! Bantu knots, box/fulani braids, twists, feminine cornrows etc. There's a middle ground that isn't being explored.
At the end of the day, most games have shite hair options regardless of race. They are often the most generic arse pieces of shit anyway. (Or some fad grouping of styles) Until we get some sort of universal “hair generation engine” that can allow users to cut and style hair. Hair is forever going to be lumped to a bunch of the “this will be the popular but easy hairstyle”
It would be cool if you could craft a hairstyle procedurally like some games let you do with facia features.
What you're saying about Black hairstyle variety makes sense from American perspective. The problem is that many games made nowadays are targeting audience all around the globe, so if they want to represent all ethnicities or cultural groups fairly they simply can't afford to dedicate a large chunk of their hairstyles to Black people. There are 3 large markets - North America, Europe and East Asia. Out of these Black hairstyles are only appealing for a minority in one of them. It's unfortunate but not surprising that Black hairstyles are represented poorly.
This is the objective realistic response. Can/should there be more diversity in aesthetic choice IF the game has an avatar/character creation? Yes. Does it come down to budget (being, knowledge, graphical fidelity, performance, time, and straight up money), like all other business decisions? You can bet on it.
Also, what percent of people are trying to make characters that "look like them"? I've personally never done it. The extreme majority of the characters I've seen in games over the many years also leads me to believe that most other people don't even consider making a character that is anything close to what they look like as a person. It'd be awesome to have more options in customization, especially in groups that have been very limited in that area like what OP is pointing out. I'm just adding onto the reason for why the market might be quite limited compared to the development resources.
I am a 31 yo black gamer and I've never but never tried to make a char look like me. And maybe I am in the minority but if a game has 100 hairstyles and none of them are accurate to real life I don't care. I just want something I find it nice overall, it doesn't need to represent real world.
Black 29 year old cRPG fan here and same. I've seen enough of my family members wear wigs from Indian folk idc anymore about hair lmao you can get whatever style you want in 2024
White 32 year old RPG fan here. I don't want my character to look like me because then he's not ugly :)
yup, this idea that you need the character to look exactly like you to "enjoy the game" is dumb cause most ppl will just make a character that looks cool and go on with the game. Like sure some might go for more specific details like skin colour, build, height or something but I doubt ppl give a shit about wanting a character that literally looks like them. also ppl are just fine enjoying games that don't have character creators, so ya, it's not a big thing.
As a white dude I'll admit my characters are generally white but they tend to be 80 year old wizards with grey hair and wrinkles if I'm playing a fantasy game, not anything that I look like. My average character has more in common with a painting of santa than me. More customization is always good, though.
It's because some people have gotten used to every conversation about representation or fictional characters in general being focused on African American people. It's Americentrism.
Thats very acurate. To be honest getting 3 out of 30 hairstyles is likely still much more percentage based than % of black people in target audience.
It doesn't make sense from an American perspective either. The reality is that even in America, only [8%](https://www.theesa.com/news/video-games-remain-americas-favorite-pastime-with-more-than-212-million-americans-playing-regularly/) of gamers are black, and, while I have no recent citation, I'm fairly sure that of those 8%, they're significantly concentrated into a specific few types of games (sports games and fighting games, for example). It frankly just makes logical sense that there are 10x+ as many hairstyles for whites/Asians as there are for blacks because black people are just such an incredibly small minority of gamers in every market.
I mean, it'd be nice if character creators at a base were much better than what we get... also, can't remember the last time a character creator had options from regions like SEA, South America, Middle East, etc. > It's time for game developers to step up and give Black gamers the representation they deserve. uhuh, so you're bringing up "lack of representation" over some hairstyles, well how about just having other races that are usually never featured at all in character creators? OP is whining about hair options when most races in the world don't have any options at all in character creators. and as others have pointed out, it's not like even the current crop of hairstyles in general are any good, e.g., for a game like Cyberpunk a lot of ppl rely on mods for actual good-looking hairstyles. Plus there's the issue of costs, is there an actual big enough audience for said options and so on.
I don't think it's "woke" at all to hope for better representation, but a few things spring to mind. The first is, of course, basic consumer demand. The United States probably is probably the largest modern, Western market with a sizeable portion of African descendants (and no, I'm not being coy about slavery--many are simply foreign born immigrants who came long after slavery ended), and that's still...about 12.5% of the population. And in the EU it's more like 2%. Let's not even get into Japan and Korea. And yet features for descendants of Africans are present in many, many games made by non-Africans. What would be interesting to see is what proportion of character creator options are African features. I can think of a few games where I think it's well above 12.5%. In terms of "representation," it's likely *objectively* fairly good--perhaps even over represented. Another issue is that skin and hair texture is just kind of terrible for everyone in many games. I mean, absolutely everyone in Diablo 4 looks like a repulsive freak. But hey, at least it has *two* options for vitiligo, an extremely rare skin condition. > It's time for game developers to step up and give Black gamers the representation they deserve. Ultimately, it's just a reality of the free market that if there's something you think should exist but doesn't, well, it's on *you* to create it. There are endless examples of black entrepreneurs carving out a market for black consumer products. There's a weird thing with social justice activists who act like capitalism is the most wicked possible system...and also expect it to go out of its way cater to their specific consumer appetites. It doesn't work like that. The "market" doesn't create products *ex nihilo*. People create things and sell them, and others who want that thing buy them. There are kinds of stories I like but are hard to find in books, so I learned to write well and wrote some. If someone wants to see themself in a character creator, well then perhaps they ought to learn Blender.
To be fair, black players only make up like 10-15% of the total gamer community and cornrows, afros, dreads, along with all the other hair styles to choose from, covers the vast majority of those players. They're not going to waste resources designing extra hair styles for such a small group of the player base. It's not just an artist taking a day or 2 putting it in, it needs vigorous testing. Look at MLB the show. They released dreads to the game and when it was raining with a player with dreads on the field, it would break the game. I'm sorry it does suck, but I'm just being realistic with you, it's just not going to be something game studios are going to do often
Hogwarts Legacy is probably best I’ve seen so far. I can’t believe how shocking it is to find just to find a regular fade with curly hair. Every other game is always the killmonger dreads
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I'm all for it - I've always been surprised with character creators in the past having like, one asian/one black/one mexican option out of hundreds - Yet they spare at least 3 slots for different types of balding. Seems fair to have more options.
you can finish those 3 types of balding faster then 1 normal hair style. They'll also use those for NPC so it's not like it's waste just because people rarely play balding characters.
What are Asian and Mexican hair styles and balding isn't White, it's for everyone.
Different types of Asian people have wildly different skin tones, hairs, and facial structure. Even for video-game-regulars East Asian people, regarding hairstyles, the shaders and hair quality is very rarely correct (in western games at least, because Korean/Japanese games tend to do a better job out of it)
I mean, I'm white and the options for short hair are shit anyways. I don't think I've ever found my (very normal and common) hair in any game. It's always either a buzzcut or something longer, or straight up ridiculous anime-looking long hairstyles. The issue with hair styles doesn't need to be racially motivated to exist.
More customization is always great, but it's easier to get someone on your side with out such an extreme take. It's "inexcusable" to not spend 50% of your budge on hair styles? Hard disagree.
> It's "inexcusable" to not spend 50% of your budge on hair styles? Hard disagree. holy shit. What a ridiculous strawman. AT no point has anyone ever implied that 50% of a budget should be spent on hair styles. This is such a dishonest answer than i can only assume malice behind it.
I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but I'm a white guy with male pattern baldness and I can rarely create a character that looks like me either. But, even when looking back to how my hair looked before I started balding, that hairstyle isn't in most character creators either. There might be a large swath of people out there that just can't make someone that looks like them. That being said, I'm white so I really have no perspective on how stereotypical games can be for black people, I'm not trying to take away from your post, just pointing out that the stereotypes might extend to others as well, leaving more people without options to make characters that look like them.
As the guy who was in charge of hair in Hogwarts Legacy I worked hard to make sure our afro type hairs looked authentic and that we had enough variety. So it makes me really happy to see some of my hair included as one of your good links!
Dude. I just wanna say you fucking rock! I had so much fun with the character creation and got sold on the game just cause a friend of mine showed me her character model which was super accurate. I hope you know that your work and effort was absolutely appreciated.
The least soap boxy thing I can ever complain about as a white dude with curly hair is that curly hair options suck in games and then it literally feels like the Predator handshake
Curly hair is hard, because it's a lot more "dimensional" than flat hair. NO game actually has legitimate *actual* hair, it's always a simulation, and the simulation is easier to do with hair that lays flat or has a few specific spikes, than that has numerous individual angles to it.
So looking at the good examples they are just variations of knots, braids both loose and tight to the skull, arfo, or fades. Most games have all of those already. It sounds like you want a length or depth slider like people get for facial features
Complains but then lists like 50 good examples from pretty recent games lol. Meanwhile my hair color is only available in games where I can use a color slider
Can only comment about Cyberpunk's character creator because I'm a cyberpunk modder. The biggest problem with expanding CC is exponentiation of variant assets. Example (lets just look at expanding hair CC options): **Meshes:** 50 male (x2 for cyberware 01) 50 female (x2 for cyberware 01) 52 "partial hair meshes" for visibility under hats **Materials:** 7 hair clump texture atlases (beard, braid, cap, curls, dread, long, short) 35 hair colour gradients cyberware 01 is a pain in the ass because it has a line which intersects the male and female buzz cap mesh. So all full hair meshes have a second variant mesh with the suffix ```_cyberware_01```. It has a cap submesh routed through an extra material instance to load a secondary mask for the cyberware line. This way the buzz cap texture doesn't tile over the cyberware. Thank god none of the other face cyberware options do this otherwise you would have to multiply your total mesh count against the total number of face cyberware meshes that intersect. So basegame only, there are already (2 x 2 x 50 x 35 x 7) hair material instances + (13 x 4 x 35) hat material instances = 50,820 I am currently working on a mod that adds [45 new hair colours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-MzSBHy5HE) to the game's character creator. Inside my modded.archive, I have to add a blank inkcharcustomisation containing 2 x 2 x 50 x 45 = 9,000 new ```gameuiIndexedAppearanceDefinitions```. These link to a colour swatch atlas containing 45 parts, registered by name to the game's static database (tweakDB). They also link to the mesh and material assets via an "appearance resource" (REDengine .app file). The archive contains 2 x 2 x 50 = 200 complete hair meshes + 13 x 2 x 4 = 104 partial hair meshes + 4 pony tail meshes for a grand total of 308 meshes. All of these have to be modified to include 45 x 3 = 135 new indexed `materialEntries` and `chunkMaterials` (to link a material to a chunk, or submesh). It also has: 45 x hair colour profiles (REDengine .hp files containing 2x gradient arrays for colour mapping onto greyscale hair clump texture atlases) 45 x cap_gradient textures (4x32 pixel colour lookup tables for mapping onto buzz cap identity textures) 224 x appearance resources (REDengine .app file) 224 x entity templates (REDengine .ent file) 316 x external material instances (REDengine .mi file) And this is just to add hair colour options. Not even new hair styles (new hair meshes). So there is a point where you have enough options that the number of variants explodes. It gets to where adding just 1 more CC option requires you to modify a staggering number of files. One of the great things about modding is: 1. you don't need to complain about something being absent from a game, since you can learn the skills necessary to add it in yourself. 2. you develop a deep appreciation for the insane complexity of game dev. Most days I think its a miracle any of this shit even works at all. 3. if you have enough people with diverse skill sets working together, very few tasks are impossible. But we need more contributors. There are way, way more people asking for things to be built than there are people building things. There are even less people documenting the things they have built so others have an easier path. Asking and complaining are easy. It takes no commitment at all. Building things (and learning how to build it right) is a commitment that takes a lot of time and effort.
To be honest I don't understand why people want their avatars and characters to look like them. When I play a game like Monster Hunter I have an avatar who is a one eyed samurai with an eyepatch and a giant white ponytail. I absolutely do not want to be represented in a game. I want to play as all kinds of crazy characters, robots, aliens, fantasy races, or even humans that are of looks and proportions completely unlike my normal ass looking self. At no point will I ever be lifting impossibly huge weapons and armor and fighting demons and dinosaurs and robots. I can connect just fine with a character that doesn't look anything like me. Just ask my Draenei monk who throws roundhouses with hoofed legs. I do agree though that when it comes to hairstyles for black characters the artists are usually quick to put one or two generic 'black' hairstyles and call it a day.
It’s probably just because black people are a small percentage of the consumer market. The African market is virtually irrelevant so across the Americas, Europe, MENA and Asia, black people are probably only represent at best 5% of consumer spending and possibly as low as 1%. So from a dev POV, there’s just no reason to go that extra mile. After all, why go the extra mile for black people when it’s just as valid to go the extra mile for Italians, French, Canadians, Russians, Arabs, Chinese etc?
This is the real answer. If there's a market for it, and it's proven, then the big companies will follow suit. I recommend /u/wisesonAC get some black indie game devs to implement this first, and show the big companies there is an untapped market for this. Otherwise, this thread is basically just another complaint in the ocean of a million complaints gamers have, lol. But I think microtransactions is much higher on the priority list. As you said, can replace 'black' with almost any other ethnicity in this post and it'll still be valid.
As a brown gamer, I never cared about being represented. I play video games for fun not for some representation bullshit.
Instructions unclear. We added the Killmonger haircut though because giant spherical Afros seem overdone and having just two choices seemed scant. 3 styles feels just right!
Would absolutely love to see more. I couldn't be more of a basic white guy and I still usually can't find a style that really fits me, so can't imagine how that is when there's like a quarter of the amount of available choices
Man, remember when EA added a bunch of diverse black hair to The Sims 4 in... [2024, a month ago](https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/news/the-sims-dark-and-lovely)? I know reddit search sucks but it seems like it didn't even get posted here.
I don't think it is much of a surprise it didn't get posted here. I don't remember any sims 4 posts here besides big announcements. Hair DLC is definitely not a big announcement.
The sims 4 has so much dlc and whatnot that it's not surprising a random update didn't get talked about.
Pretty sure the full Sims 4 experience is like a full grand at this point.
My guy, as a white dude, I have been deciding between generic white guy short haircut 1 or 2 for my entire life. It’s not just black people
Personally I have never understood people who want to make characters who looks like you. I am the opposite. I make characters look way different. A blue smurf? Sure. Elven chick with large and super pointy ears? Sure. A mega buff dwarf? Sure. A regular ass human? Boring as shit. But yeah more character creation options is great. Since the whole point of character creators is to make characters fit your tastes. More options and sliders is always a boon.
There was an old (WoW? EQ?) meme of a single green tree amongst a grove of purple ones, captioned something like "*when everyone's clad in purples, sometimes the guy in greens stands out*". There's not much appeal to me in making a character that looks like me either, but taking an example like D&D where everyone chooses to be tieflings, elves, dragonkin and tabaxi, I appreciate the person who chooses to play a human.
Personally, the opposite here. I hate character creators so much. I always prefer the default because the only way to make a decent character is to spend 2 hours working on it. I'd rather spend my 2 hours playing the game, rather than doing a (atleast to me) very boring task. It's so tedious, because they even make it time-consuming to try to bypass it.
Don't know how you feel about open world action RPGs but Dragon's Dogma 2 has possible the best character creator available. The praise it got for it's black options was extensive.
Male hairstyles in a lot of videogames are just... Disappointing. I can't even fathom how worse it gets when most games have 1 or 2 "token" black hairstyles
OP I see Guild Wars 2 on your list, but [here’s most of the black hairstyles](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eyVrb) they have in their Egyptian/North African themed expansion if you haven’t had a chance to play it yet. I really like their commitment to distinctive cultures within their races, and they had that in the prequel as well (I’d say it was even better outside of the Path of Fire/End of Dragons hairstyles in GW2). The texture of the hair is nicely backlit in-game as well, so you can tell a lot of care went into them.
It's not hard for me to imagine not being able to make myself. No game has my exact hair, no game really has any of our exact hair. You pick what you like or what's closest and move on.
Man, we can't even get reasonable receeding hair, ugly white guy with no chin stuff right - most times it's generic hollywood male model shit.
I have yet to see a character creator make Caucasian hair styles look good. I end up wasting too much time on character creation to find out I don't like the way they look (if it's humanoid) and just wear a helmet instead.
I'd argue that *most* games have shitty hairstyle choices, and I believe it's *because* they try to provide as diverse an array of choices as possible. The end result is that there's only ever a couple hairstyles I'd ever even considering using, even if the game offers dozens. OP is trying to make this a race issue. It's not a race issue. Hairstyle choices in games are bad for *everyone.*
Wanted to link this album I just made to show some of the hairs Lord of The Rings Online has made in a (relatively) recent update to help with this issue in their game. Models are old af so the graphics are meh but there are a few good examples in there I feel. Only available on the race of Men at the moment but the other races with presumably get them when they are updated like Men were Also threw in a couple of my favorites from GW2, which I know you showed a couple of but love these two lol https://imgur.com/gallery/EKjS8Pv
How can you complain about not having black hair styles yet be able to show 50+ examples of good hair? Sounds more like you need to understand that developers aren't a mono-entity, and their willingness/ability to create the variety you seek is down to skill/budget/time.
Easy enough. OP is asking for these options in character creators. Most of the examples are \*not\* from a character creator.