The idea of new playable races in a game like FFXIV confuses me.

I'm not against them exactly; I'd like to see new kinds of people walking around. I just don't understand how it's supposed to work with a game where you're really only supposed to play one character.

In other games when they add new races, you're generally restricted to one class you choose at character creation. So when new races come out, you can just play a class you haven't before. But in FFXIV, as was the case with XI, people do everything on one character that becomes increasingly more difficult to redo and that they become increasingly attached to. Just the armory system alone is reason enough to not want to start a second character (for instance if you raised CON to be able to heal and buff yourself on a fighter you probably don't want to do it again for another character with a fighter main), but if the game finally adds some meaningful and difficult content like XI had that's another reason not to start over (think fame, level cap quests, story mission completion, stuff you wouldn't want to have to do twice).

Now the two extra sexes upon PS3 release make perfect sense. If it's really going to be the "re-launch" of the game and hopefully get a whole ton of new people to start, then it's fine that there are more choices at that time. Many people will be playing for the first time, or for the first time since abandoning the game directly after PC launch, and the game in general will be able to enjoy incorporating the new choices en masse.

Additional races later on, though, don't make much sense to me. It takes a lot to motion capture new animations and retool existing equipment models to work on new races, and yet at that point it may not add much to the game in exchange. Very few people will be starting new or starting over and be able to select them. A good alternative would be to allow everyone in the game a one-time, irreversible change to anything new when added, although that would also be pretty awkward to be able to change your character's race as opposed to cosmetic things like hairstyles.

Again, I'm all for seeing player qiqirn or totally new races from some yet-unseen continent and not from any past FF game either. I'm just curious how people (or the developers) think this would all work out, because I don't see it very well.