add race or pigmentation as person info

[knotty mirage]

people come in many colors, and it's really helpful to narrow people down

[chilly saddle]

did you not pay attention to the skin tone option when you entered your charater name and gender identity?

[knotty mirage]

not my character, everyone else

you can read info on haircolor

but not their skin color

in a detective game that makes a lot of sense i think

[main plume]

It would make sense, but there's also an argument to be made for skipping it due to real-world political implications of such things.

(Which is not to say that it's a bad suggestion, or that it would be an inherently bad thing to add to the game! Just another angle to consider.)

[fringe cape]

They have ethnic names, I don't see why race wouldn't be included. It's not like the game isn't accomodating already, with non-binary characters and same-sex couples.

That said I don't really care if it gets left out. I'm not super picky, but it does seem like an oversight.

you could even go a step further, when interviewing potential witnesses and have them say "he looked like a mix of Japanese and Nigerian," but have them be wrong to a degree (since it's not always easy to determine race at a glance, or in general).

[knotty mirage]

in the end it's just another keyword to narrow down searches, if someone says "he was asian or maybe white"

then you know it's at least one of those

[silk vale]

Realistic race names would be a bit jarring + potentially controversial. I think just the skin color would be enough ("very pale", "medium dark" etc)

[knotty mirage]

it could be debated. Personally i don't think we should be scared of people's races, people just are the way they are. Just a visual indicator and nothing else. Let the devs decide that one though

[silk vale]

Also if you add realistic races, you need to link the names to them too, at least most of the time

Would make no sense to have a black person with an asian or russian name for example

[knotty mirage]

i guess some names are more common for some races, but i don't think it's super important

[silk vale]

which is why I think it should be just a word for skin color instead of "asian" etc, which also implies things like hair and eye color as well as cultural background

[covert cloud]

Craniometry next update?

Just avoid this bullshit altogether

It's one of those classic no-wins

Even if you don't have an agenda, some ragebait YouTuber will put this on and claim a political slant

[knotty mirage]

jesus christ lol.
I really don't think race is a problem, it's just a visual indicator, it's perfectly logical

[muted echo]

Haha this really shouldn't be a point of contention for people

[covert cloud]

The problem comes in that moron mouth breathers will find a pattern in their game, extrapolate this to all SoD, and I can't say I would blame the devs for wanting to dodge that particular pr nightmare

[muted echo]

I suppose from a dev standpoint that does make sense. Colepowered Games is a tiny team (1 + 3?) so bad publicity could be catastrophic. Safer to avoid it

[covert cloud]

If you MUST have this in game, it needs to stick to skin tone as that's 1) actually useful in finding a subject 2) it's the least politically charged way of presenting that information

[fickle temple]

Copy and pasting the skintone set you have in the detective appearance menu into the character info cards will do. With a set of tones being tied to a phrase so NPCs can describe it if the murderer passes by them and you ask them.

[dusky tundra]

so calling someone an asian that is asian is politically motivated?

[silk vale]

Reread the few messages above. If your game generates 5 murders by "asian" people in a row, someone, somewhere, is going to think you (the dev) did it on purpose because you think all asians are murderers. So why add a feature that's really not that important, but could really bite you in the ass?

[balmy girder]

As someone else said in this thread, the game already kinda has this info in the savefile. Hard to tell how much is actually implemented at the moment, but there's at least hints of there being burroughs where people of certain ethnic decent tend to cluster, and every NPC has an ethnicity. It's just not exposed directly to the player anywhere.

[fickle temple]

The street type is what sets it I think. Since if you go to a tower that borders a chinatown street you will see far more NPCs with Asian names.

[balmy girder]

I haven't seen the effect be big enough that I've ever noticed in-game, but I noticed it when I was playing around with savegame files and thought "oh, this is detailed!"

It has what percentage of each ethnicity (I forget which term the game uses?) is in each block

[tiny lava]

uh

no

Personally, I have the most German sounding name, but I look quite peruvian

[muted echo]

I always call my character Jaroslav Beksiński

[silk vale]

that's an exception, I'm talking about the general rule, which still needs to be coded (but according to the commenters above, something like that apparently already exists in the game internally, so I might have overestimated the amount of extra work this would require)

[tiny lava]

Not really an exception

its not that rare

[dusky tundra]

in a... procedurally generated game... its a pretty easy myth to debunk.

[silk vale]

debunking myths is always worse than avoiding them being created, people are more likely to believe fake bad news, like there are still people who think vaccines cause autism despite the fact it was debunked a million times...

[dusky tundra]

I really don't think this is the same kind of issue...

[silk vale]

Psychology of spreading negative news works the same regardless of the topic, someone will say on twitter "the dev is racist, don't buy this game!!!", and most people will just believe that and avoid the game instead of doing some minimal research on it first (because that requires some time and effort). People are dumb, they don't use their brains most of the time, especially on social media. I've seen this so many times, some stupid and irrelevant thing gets blown way out of proportion, it's basically a guarantee this will happen if the game becomes popular enough.

[dusky tundra]

The closest game controversy i can think of comes to either rimworlds lgbt rep or l4d2's katrina thing. Neither of those issues destroyed either of those two games, and i really don't think it could generate an issue even in professionally angered circles.

[silk vale]

I think it's best not to risk it, especially since realistic race names don't really add much to the game. Ultimately it's up to the devs of course, but I think there's a reason why they haven't implemented it explicitly.

[sacred gyro]

You can just have "Skintone" and then a small color sample of the character's skin tone. It's generally more useful to have that than some vague color like "Medium pale" and has way less room for it to be interpereted as anything other than pure info about a character to help identify them

[tiny lava]

• it gives you the opportunity to roleplay as an American cop turned detective

[dusky tundra]

can you work that into the form of a sentence for witness testimony?

[muted echo]

His skin was a hue of Dark Brown with a hint of... Yellow?