The Elder Scrolls Arena let you play as a black woman in 1992. Name another game that did that.
Pretty much every game has offered a world where both races and sexes participate equally, and no one really cares (Morrowind’s racism is always made alien and upsetting thematically).
In Morrowind you can’t be a lesbian with Ahnassi (although the guy who wrote The Lusty Argonian Maid is an equal opportunity HR disaster). One of the rare characters Oblivion bothers to spend time on in a faction quest line is very clearly gay. Skyrim everyone is pan.
And a lot of this is just the same in Adventure Construction Set a series Howard explicitly took inspiration from. The game doesn’t really give that much of a shit about what you look like. It’s far more effort to code in racism, when you start with that kind of open world model.
Not really though. A lot of the positive representation in the player is incidental to providing a lot of options in character creation. All of the NPCs are essentially asexual, and the few you can marry are panromantic, but thats just easier to code so they dont have to check for gender or record different lines for rejecting you based on gender.
All of the elder scrolls games are still very rooted in amatonormativity and heteronormativity. They sort of skirt the issue by just never addressing it. Divorce is impossible in Skyrim without killing your spouse. You can only marry and live with one partner at a time. In terms of romance it’s basically the shallowest possible nuclear family simulator, with the player always in the role of the master of the house and the partner in the role of caregiver/house maintainer/slave. Any representation of queer relationships is only accidental, which for me gives them zero points. They just didn’t bother enforcing straight relationships.
Additionally they force a biological sex based gender selection. Theres no way to be trans or nonbinary, even in the sexless world of Skyrim. You choose the male body you’re he/him, you choose the female body you’re she/her. No women with facial hair, no men with boobs, no short kings or tall queens, no androgyny at all.
I agree with your complaints about Skyrim - it’s a lazily made game and the romance is pathetic. It’s possible to have well written romance in the series with the present game mechanics - see companion Vilja and the spectacular Ruined Tail’s Tale mod series (for Oblivion).
But there’s gotta be something notable in that since 1992, if you wanted to play a black female character, any mainline Elder Scrolls game has had that option, and it’s always been no big deal. Heck, one of the few games that forces you to play a set character, Redguard, despite being mechanically shit has some of the best character writing in the series and fully fleshed Cyrus out!
I’m not arguing it’s perfect. Morrowind’s bisexual character was originally only intended to harass female characters, but when they discovered they had messed up during play testing, they left it in because they thought it was fun.
The kinds of representation you are wanting are things I’ve only really seen in the Sims or indie games (as a trans guy, I think I cried on the character selection in Dream Daddy).
You are right in that it’s nice to have more representation of different bodies, but the games have always been able to adjust to that with mods. Not that Bethesda should get credit for modders work - they do tend to rest on unpaid volunteers fixing their games for them - but there has always been a community of people making those games represent and include them.
I think the Elder Scrolls and Sims series both have some of the most diverse fandoms of any game series for a lot of these reasons. A lot of my initial exploration of my gender identity personally was in those games - allowing myself to play as a male protagonist in Morrowind was my first time that I allowed myself to think of myself that way.