New Races Compromise

While hrothgars may unfortunately be the final race, Yoshi P left us with the smallest amount of hope that depending on the community they might be up for doing another race in the future.

The biggest hurdle for the dev team has definitely been getting armor and hair to work with the new races. Viera and Hrothgar were initially pitched as limited races specifically because they knew how much work it was to get different models to work with current armor/hair.

The dev team was very upfront with how they weren\\\\'t prepared to fully commit to an entire new race with the Viera but naturally after getting bunny girls we wanted the boys. And since then new players unfamiliar with the original stipulation have naturally wanted hairstyle and armor to work like all the other races.

The dilemma is that players will naturally want a full and complete race if they ever are to commit to another one and the dev team is not likely to promise a \\\\'limited\\\\' race again because we\\\\'ll always want more.

The best solution, I think, and best compromise would be to allow glamours that gave us the characteristics of beast races currently in the game. This feature actually already kind of exists in game but in a very limited capacity that I\\\\'d love to see expanded.

For example, when doing beast tribe quests, several of them at the end of their quest chains reward you with a costume that can make your character appear like a member of their tribe. What is a little sad and what I\\\\'d love to see changed is that these costumes are entirely static. The animations and emotes for a vanu vanu or namazu already exist in game to some degree, and while I\\\\'m sure it would take a good deal of work to make them compatible with the rest of the emotes we have available, I also think this is considerably less work than creating an entirely new race.

I want to be able to put on a "namazu head" and have it blink, emote, and talk when my character normally would do so. I\\\\'d love to see the vanu vanu body armor be broken into pieces so I could just get their arms and still equip a different chest armor set. I\\\\'d love to get meteions legs for a bit glamour. I\\\\'d adore getting tail glamours (belts should have always been this alas). I\\\\'d love to see all of this use the new two tone dye system to allow for some very pretty variance in being a member of a beast tribe!

Yes in reality someone would just be a lalafel in a costume. But if that \\\\'costume\\\\' did all the above then I\\\\'d be so happy. And I think if we kept it clear as a costume kind of glamour then the community in general would accept that and not expect the same standards that are applied to all the other races in terms of working with hairstyles or perfectly working with every gearset.

I\\'d also love new complete races in the future but I think a compromise with the dev team is something we can also strive for in the meantime to add variety to the game.

The issue specifically with Viera and Hrothgar are their unique head features. Miqo, legolambs, and potatoes have larger ears but they aren't large to the point they can't be accommodated by a very minor change. (though Miqo glasses are a bit wierd since our ears are actually higher up on our heads than most races) They're also still small enough to also be hidden by various types of headgear as well.

At the same time part of my thoughts can't help but wander to the notion that the majority of the headgear complaints about Viera/Hrothgar are a combination of people upset that the very specific pieces they want to use weren't made visible on them and others simply doing the Whiners Can Be Losers Superfriends bit. "Batman and Robin have utility belts, Solomon Grundy wants one too"

That said, they could have at the least made sure to include Viera/Hrothgar headgear models for gear introduced after the races were added. However going back and making the models for the entire pre existing catalogue feels like a large amount of wasted time and effort. At the most possibly just do research/surveys to find out what pieces are the most popular out of the items predating the races being used as glamours and do those. That would essentially avoid making hundreds of headgear models just to have only a couple dozen actually see use by the player base.

I guess I can see what you want and why, but 'beastmen' emotes aren't that deep. I guess making them blink could be a thing, but not much more (as it is now).

There are often a few variation within a race but that would get old after a while ; Also 'full body morph' would limit the chances of 'action cutscenes' (even if those are specific to Hildibrand's quests)

Hopefully, the 7.0 graphical change that changed the models (at least Heads) to be easier to work with in the future (YoshiP dropped that he was a wolf guy recently, hint for Lupin ? XD).

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Originally Posted by Calysto

I guess I can see what you want and why, but 'beastmen' emotes aren't that deep. I guess making them blink could be a thing, but not much more (as it is now).

There are often a few variation within a race but that would get old after a while ; Also 'full body morph' would limit the chances of 'action cutscenes' (even if those are specific to Hildibrand's quests)

Hopefully, the 7.0 graphical change that changed the models (at least Heads) to be easier to work with in the future (YoshiP dropped that he was a wolf guy recently, hint for Lupin ? XD).

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The main hurdle I think that the graphical update needs to overcome is how gear is applied to the character sprite. I'm fairly sure as it is now each gear piece essentially deletes the section of the character it's supposed to cover then replaces the empty space which is why some gear pieces can alter or remove racial features like tails when worn and why Au Ra horns are prone to looking out of place on various hoods and helmets due to poking out the sides.

I think now that the dev team knows that they can get away with limited races, they don't mind the possibility of doing it again. I think they thought there would have been more pushback about hats, but a few posts on the forums and reddit is something they're fine with.