Beta is next week now. They just posted a dev journal about needing to rewrite some black slavery jokes in the quests...

I noticed a nasty Guelph joke.  Obviously added by some damn Ghibelline.

Now you've got me doing it.  Shame on you.

There IS a variety of skin tones when you "construct" a custom race. You just can't change it in the unit designer in game. You also cannot change you sovereigns skincolour once the game has started.

That could be a new building "body surgery an facial reconstruction", necessary for the perk "doppelganger", which would give your built units the possibility of replacing the other nations sovereigns, giving you an insta-win. Great!

I hope this option to add different skin tones to different custom factions would be in the final product.

As far as racial bias is concerned the lore of Elemental deals with the Men of the West. The slight differences in physical characteristics of the kingdom factions right now might be due to the close proximity the kingdoms are from each other.  

Maybe we can get some vastly different cultures(with their own physical characteristics, histories, magic, tech trees, weapons, etc.)  as the world of  Elemental matures. 

Actually skin color is why I always create my custom factions with my own faction generator.  I like my factions to have either blue or green skin most of the time.  Don't know why.

You remind me of one of the big issues we grumbled about in Oblivion while modding it: any attempt to create new, reasonably attractive Redguard (black) male and female faces was made much harder because the controls for shadow planing and facial structure were simply copied over from Imperials.  Took me part of a week to do what I managed in under an hour for the other races.  Even the Dark Elves were much easier.

A user's since come out with a completely new system of equations to handle this, and produced Better Looking Redguards, which works pretty well.  He's also edited every Redguard in Oblivion, which probably should have earned him a free copy of Skyrim.  But it was a nuisance, and didn't make modders feel any too happy about Bethsoft when we discovered some of the "shortcuts" that had been taken in the game.

My probleme with things like this leaving the fantasy settings begins when we have the "smart" asian race, the "fast" black race, the "rich white race and whatever other stereotype...THAT is actually racist.  No thanks.  I much prefer the current way built on the mysterious, draconic lore.  I personally think the title of this thread is race-baiting.  Either that or it takes basically nothing to "demonstrate" racial bias.

Don't you think such language should be reserved for actual, demonstrated racial bias?!

I think in Oblivion they didn't take modding into consideration, other than to use several of the best thought-of mods in Morrowind to provide many of their "new" features. In Skyrim, and under a different development team--and what follows is *just* my opinion--I believe they simply left a lot out knowing that modders would pick up the slack.  So the cities are tiny, the shops are few, quests pretty short, and items very few.  Modders reacted much as you'd expect.

I'm not sure why you'd stop playing Skyrim after mods appeared, though.  If you didn't want to manage them, you only had to ignore mod sites like TES Nexus completely, and load nothing but the main game.

Yep.  And even if you've installed them, the way installed mods are handled in Bethsoft games--unless they're texture-only mods--you can just turn them all off by leaving them unchecked on the data screen, before the game loads.  It's very easy to do.