It wasn't haha. I didn't even notice your previous message until you said I was unnecessarily argumentative xD
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It wasn't aimed at you specifically as it's a pretty common remark made by several people, but this notion we just didn't ask hard enough for race-exclusive hairstyles and that's why they pivoted I don't agree with.
A lot of people were very much on board with race-exclusive hairstyles originally, people loved the quality of options Viera and Hrothgar had even if it wasn't many and seeing more of that would've been great. Then came patch 5.01, 5.05, 5.08, 5.1, 5.11, 5.15, 5.18, 5.2 etc. etc. with no news beyond maybe a "wait just a bit longer please" (and eventually not even that) or a single scrap or even a doodle of concept art of these "race-exclusive" hairstyles.
"Just be patient guys, they just launched an expansion. Stop being so entitled, they said they're coming. Did you forget we're in a pandemic?" Remember that? Yeah, over time there was a decent split between "I still want my race-exclusive hairstyles" and "Everyone else got 12+ hairstyles this expansion, just give me something, anything at this point.".
All the way up until the announcements for Endwalker we didn't have a clue what we were getting, if anything at all. So unless they weren't listening the entire time we did in fact keep pushing for news on the race-specific hairstyles and only started listening when it became more split, I find it difficult to believe they had started making plans to actually go through with this.
I also vividly remember there being talk about a "wolf-like" face for Hrothgar, we never saw it and as far as I know they never brought it up again either despite saying it, so we can assume sometimes stuff gets canned before it ever makes it to release even if it was said in an interview or LL. If it wasn't a mistranslation or misunderstanding (and tbh, watching the answer in Zepla's video I could maybe see them meaning they need to make race-specific adjustments so they won't come out as fast as for the other races, hence the mentioning of pace, but that's looking at it with hindsight...) I can even see it having been an idea tossed around early on that never saw the light of day but they spoke about too soon and never bothered to clarify.
In any case, I just don't think this is something to blame on players asking for something because we all know they can very stubbornly hang on to certain ideas to the detriment of the game-mode/race/job. I believe that if they really wanted to make unique, race exclusive hairstyles they would have done so no matter what we said.
Sauce for Hrothgar wolf face since I brought it up: https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/doc...w/1176157.html
Was there ever an actual official English statement that there would be more race-exclusive hairstyles, or is there translation wiggle-room that they were only ever talking about having to rebuild existing hairstyles into a "unique" (functionally speaking) version for Viera?
I also recall from previous conversation about the "wolf face" that people decided it was likely a personal impression from Yoshida about one of the existing faces just looking wolf-like to him even though it was really just one of the cat faces. It never would have made sense to give one wolf face to a race that is otherwise entirely cat-based.
I think the only officially translated one is the Live Letter one Zepla is reading, which does in my opinion leave translation wiggle-room for being race-specific adjustments. And seeing as that's exactly what they ended up doing (RIP Hrothgar ears) may well have been the original intent.
That sounds about right, yeah. It's another statement we took at face value and ran with at first because he said so, even if it was a misunderstanding or a canned concept.
4 minute job slapping it on there and moving those two hair strands near his ear to make it look more natural
https://i.imgur.com/OPp64BV.png
And yes, it looks good with the other face types and ears with no further edits
https://i.imgur.com/jj5624X.png