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So many people coming in here to voice their concerns despite this forum being hell to navigate should mean something.
Co-signing this. I'm as white and European as can be but it doesn't take much to have basic empathy for people voicing very valid concerns about this.
Delay the patch. Change this to a recolor of a previous set if time is short. Fix your heart.
This just shows they are content to keep lying to minorities as long as it keeps making them money
as someone from latinoamerica i honestly had to laugh when i saw the 7.3 dungeon gear. i don't think there's anything wrong with throwing in more fantasy medieval armor, however the mixed aesthetics are throwing me off so badly it's almost hilarious how strange it is. like, why would you ever mix the aesthetics of mesoamerican indigenous cultures with 15th~19th century european/spanish/french armor and outfits????
it's no surprise many people are reasonably offended. it just doesn't make sense to make gear that looks like that, especially in an expansion that's supposed to be about celebrating poc cultures. i don't think the gear itself is offensive- it doesn't directly pull from actual historical conquistador armour/outfits- but it is still clearly mixing europian/colonizer aesthetics with mesoamerican/indigenous aesthetics, which is just, well. unsavory and distasteful to say the least. there are so many diverse cultures you could take inspiration from- you have an entire continent to peruse, ffs. yet you pick the colonizers...? not the time or place for that, i fear.
bumping to show my support
Like many others, I am upset by the new gearsets, but more than that, I am embarrassed. I'm embarrassed to have others know I play this game.
Alexandria's rapacious crossing of reflections to steal the life force of Turali people perfectly mimics the plunder and genocide of the Americas by the Spanish and French colonial empires. The Conquistador-inspired outfits were chosen as an aesthetic for this set specifically because this is a theme that devs wished to echo. They wanted the contexts to be the same. They did it without any consideration for how it might feel for someone to be "rewarded" with reminders of the crimes committed against their people. It's shameful.
To the devs, players talking about how much they enjoyed FFXIV was how the game got so big. The story and the characters inspired players to share the game with their friends. It is the bedrock that your company's bottom line is based on.
If you aspire to be a global company, you cannot afford to undermine that bedrock with these kinds of choices. Your company depends on it.
At first glace, they just seemed like they were inspired by like the Workor Zormor or the Ceremonial gear, but more historically trained eyes have pointed out the Conquistador similarities , and given narrative context of Dawntrail being set in a fantasy version of uncolonized Americas the armor seems wildly tone deaf, and inappropriate. Yikes.
Please consider changing them.
This new set of gear is wildly inappropriate for the setting of Tural given the historical implications of the design inspiration. Please do not release this. I know its already made and already planned but I would rather have a dyeable rework of an old gear set over this new gear. Please listen to the playerbase!!!! There is still time to change course on this decision before the patch releases! This is so hurtful to people. Yoshi P wants to talk about changing for the better and I believe that sentiment is great! But the team really needs to show it and put in the work on things like this. (And while we're at it, can we please change the New World set. Still begging for that too.) This game is played on a global scale with many cultures, histories, and people. It is possible to be respectful to them and still make a profit. Please please please reconsider this gear set.
I honestly hadn't had time to scrutinize the details of the previewed sets, but even my initial impression at a glance was "These don't look like they have ANYTHING to do with the source dungeon at all."
The Meso Terminal is physically located on another world, completely separate from Tural. It was built, and used, long before any exposure to Tural. In current MSQ, access to the Meso Terminal (and all of Living Memory) is extremely restricted. It is not, and never has been, frequented by Turali people. So it just reads, at best, as extremely bizarre for there to be Turali- (Indigenous American) inspired gear from there.
To compound on this, we've already had pretty expansive exposure to Alexandrian armor and fashion styles through Dawntrail MSQ and patch quests, too, reflecting fashion and armor spanning decades on the Ninth. Nothing we've seen so far from the Ninth, be it from Alexandria or Lindblum or any other area, resembles this gear set or reflects the clear historical European Conquistador elements in the designs.
The only teeny tiny itty bitty potential loophole I could possible imagine from a lore perspective would be the Milala. And even then, that would only possibly maybe cover the sets suspected to be for healers and casters. The Milala being the lalafellen refugees from the Source who used the Azem cup relic to hop to the Ninth, and brought their increased aetherial density and arcanima to that world to escape a calamity. We don't have much, if any, information regarding the Milala garb, and so technically some of the new gear could conceivably be attributed to Milala influence on their integration into the Ninth... but that feels like a stretch, at best. A flimsy, creatively bankrupt, and also somewhat lore contradictory stretch. The Variant dungeon Aloalo Island takes place on the ancestral Source home of the Milala; and if I remember correctly, Aloalo is based on real-world Pacific islands, NOT the Americas, so the real-world resemblance to Turali (Indigenous American) designs once again just doesn't make sense.
Even assuming this was the intended justification, it does nothing to address the disparity of real historical inspirations represented in this set, either. Which is objectively the more grievous offense.
There's nothing I can really add as I am not directly affected by this, and everyone else has said things much more eloquently than I would. However, I'm going to bump this and say that no sensitivity was shown here in the designs of the aforementioned gear. Please change this and please do better in the future.
Bumping this to show my support as well. It's very tonedeaf and disheartening to see, and more than a little baffling for an expansion where reaching out to others and making efforts to understand and respect their cultures was such a huge theme.
Bumping and agreeing. The overt Spanish and French colonial influences in two of the gearsets, in an expansion that features both South (and) North American pre-contact indigenous peoples, is an offensive an derivative design choice. A solution would be to offer dyeable gear made available previously, or to rework the designs so that their influences appear more congruent with the aesthetics of Alexandria. I understand that both of these are unlikely, but worth mentioning regardless. Their existence, as well as the discussion around them, has increased likelihood of bad-faith actors using these gearsets to intimidate Native + Latin American players, as continually seen with the New World Gear in hub cities across servers.