Idea for a new race

I'm sure this has been mentioned before and I understand it's challenging to bring in a new race. However, I really wish there was a dog-themed race. We have a cat, lion/tiger, bunny even, but no dog-based race. As a big dog lover, I wish I could express this through my character.

There is already the wolf-headed lupin race found in Othard/the Far East, a few npcs of which show up during Stormblood's main scenario (and as enemies too), which there were many requests by players to have them added as a playable race, but SE instead went with adding the hrothgar for whatever reason.

Unfortunately SE have stated that there will be no more new playable races added - hrothgar and viera being the last, so alas I do not see them being added I'm sorry to say.

I think, if FFXIV is to have a 10-year plan ahead of it, that it would be unreasonable for there to be no more new races. I support the addition of a wolf-like race so long as they retain a head shape that will support already available in-game hairs and helmets. Their faces can have muzzles and other things that would be expected of the race, but it is the shape of their craniums from where most of Hrothgar's issues spring. They must endeavor to not repeat such a mistake again.

You would think it's unreasonable...but considering GW2 has been going on for about a decade as well, and has never added the Tengu as a playable race despite them having the assets and were originally planned to be playable until the last minute, it's more likely than you think. People have asked in that game for a decade to make the Tengu playable, but have basically gotten nothing...despite again, all the assets being there, the Tengu are in pretty much every expansion and almost every region of the world thus far, etc etc. I don't think it'd be much different here, even if they DID have the assets for it.

I will not settle for less than a rat race. Give us Burmecians!

If there really are 10 years more of FF XIV I really think it is not too crazy to think that they will add more races.

As other users have said, there are "wolf" races, and are really cool. I would like to have them playable, but I think that if they are going to create a new playable race it would be something entirely new.

Time will tell

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Originally Posted by Kesey

I will not settle for less than a rat race. Give us Burmecians!

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What's that, you want the Burmecians to appear in the next expansion as non-playable NPCs and as the new tribe quest givers, we have you covered! While that was a slight joke, I would BEG for Burmecians and Cleyra to appear in our next expansion, just because I always did like them and Freya in FF9...it's just a shame she got such little character development. Which btw, is one of my many complaints about FF9.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

... I always did like [the Burmecians] and Freya in FF9...it's just a shame she got such little character development. Which btw, is one of my many complaints about FF9.

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IX is a good game, but half the party's character development being heavily truncated holds it back from being great. (And I say that with a little generosity; Zidane, Vivi, and Garnet / Dagger get the lion's share of the screentime and character development, but I feel Steiner's around long enough for a significant amount of character focus compared to Freya, Quina, Eiko, and Amarant.)

On topic, if they keep using palette swaps of older gear I don't see why they couldn't add a new race? Though the ever expanding backlog of unique modeled gear (e.g. raid stuff) still means there's a big backlog, and trying to branch out from the norm makes that rather difficult as we saw with the Viera and Hrothgar.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

On topic, if they keep using palette swaps of older gear I don't see why they couldn't add a new race? Though the ever expanding backlog of unique modeled gear (e.g. raid stuff) still means there's a big backlog, and trying to branch out from the norm makes that rather difficult as we saw with the Viera and Hrothgar.

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A quiet problem with adding new races isn't necessarily with implementing them in the moment, although that's still understandably huge; you still have to implement new animations, voices and equipment models for them. You also have to remember that every single time you add a new one, you increase the load of visual things you have to do to implement new clothes or animations in the future.

Right now, we have fifteen different playable character meshes (both genders of hyur, elezen, roe, lalafel, au ra, viera, the male hrothgar, and both highlanders who are appreciably different to midlanders), eventually sixteen. If you want to add, say, a new emote, that's actually not one animation: that's fifteen different variants of the one animation, sometimes tangibly different, sometimes subtly. That's a pretty quiet mountain of work; if you haven't seen it before, there's some gifs around the internet of forcing lalafel to do non-lalafel animations, as well as non-lalafel to do lalafel animations, and they're utterly horrifying. That's an extreme example, yes, but it shows pretty well that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all animation, you have to do mesh-specific versions of all of them. Now imagine having to do the same work for every single animation you ever include for, say, a new job. And that a similar but different load of work has to go into every single piece of equipment (there's a reason they can't just snap their fingers and un-genderlock every single piece of equipment).

Chances are they cut themselves off at an eight-race maximum because they know their own workflow and know that any more than that is pushing it.

Give us bangaas already Squeenix, you cowards