TheEmptyRoad wrote: β
May 15th, 2024, 11:03
You know, originally I didn't think a mod like this was needed. Due to the presence of the Worldwound, Mendev is a Crusader State with pilgrims and crusaders affiliated with the Good Deity's sponsoring the Crusade showing up in droves. The companion Daeran even has a whole conversation with you about how the native nobility and culture of Mendev has been and is still being slowly replaced until the country is no longer recognizable. I did not however realize just HOW MANY dark-skinned people there are in the backgrounds of hub areas. Holy **** it looks like the entire continent of Golarion's LegallyDistinctAfricaTM just up and moved. Honestly, if there's a version of the mod that just edits that and Anevia I'd be good. No need to cater to me specifically though. Seelah, Sosiel, Trevor, and like 1 in 70 background characters being the only blacks in the game would be fine. None of those three characters listed are native to Mendev, they're here for the Crusade.
Though I do understand the reasoning for this mod, I doubt I'll use it as it is. Good work though!
I don't 100% agree with your analysis but neither do I dismiss it entirely. My take is just that Sosiel and Trever are supposedly from Andoran, which (geographically) is pretty much equivalent with southeastern Europe (think Greece) and even in this world of Golarion (which is basically still Earth) the immense distances and technological limitations involved mean that black-skinned peoples in Andoran are just as unlikely as black-skinned people in medieval Greece were. As for Seelah, sure, her story is a bit more believable... but that's not the point. The wokeism has gone too far in Western media and I'm making this mod for people that want a more traditional experience: Avistan is a fictional representation of a medieval Europe, and the characters therein should reflect that.
As for the mod 'as it is', I'm currently working on trying to make it more modular so that people can pick and choose what elements they want to have (i.e. keep Seelah as she is, but change Trever and Sosiel, etc). The primary limitation I ran into when first creating this mod was the fact that edited sound files had to be reimported into the game's default sound package files, meaning I had to include in the mod package any sound package file that contained an edited file. This meant that a several-megabyte file had to be included even if only 1 of the hundreds of sound files within the package were edited. This also made it impossible to separate different mods from each other in a modular manner... it was either 'all or nothing'. That's the main reason why the mod is 2.2 GB in size too... the vast majority of that data is unedited sound data within the sound package files.
I think I've figured out a way past this limitation though. It'll let me release the mod in a more modular manner, and also dramatically reduce the download size. Stay tuned.