They do now for sure. Morrowind at least was a lot harsher. It wasn't just racists. There were groups who still practiced race-based chattel slavery. Now they are mostly too scared to even mention it as a possibility.

(Although I would argue Starfield is pretty racist in it's creation. A large portion of black characters have African accents. This is long after colonization, and theoretically there would have been lots of race/nationality mixing after leaving earth. Sure, some places may retain or even strengthen their accents, but it probably wouldn't be race based anymore, or at least not the same as in modern day earth. It's so uncreative and uninteresting, and seemingly racist in its portrayal. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who noticed this, but it aggravated me.)

[–] HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 19 points 8 months ago

Oh great, they stopped the fun kind of racism and gave us actual racism.

[–] thecrotch@sh.itjust.works 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not just Africans. It doesn't make sense that Indian/Hispanic/Russian/American accents exist either. Earth ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and there are no homogenous cultures anymore (except the va'ruun, their accent makes sense). In Bethesdas effort to be inclusive they treated accents like they're a racial attribute rather than cultural. In reality there would be a UC accent, a freestar accent, etc but the accents depicted in game would be long extinct.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I disagree on the accents not existing at all. For example, The Expanse does it well. The belters have a distinct working class Irish accent, but there's nothing there to do with race really. Accents can be used to show where groups come from, but for scifi to work things need to actually be thought about.

[–] wolfshadowheart@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I had no issues with the accents so much as who had which. Except for the Engineer Pilot NPCs who always had illfitting voice lines to their NPC look