Hummingways - The best choice for the next playable race

[Galaticus]

I personally would like to see Viera, the concept art looks promising.

[Mimilu]

I personally would like to see Viera, the concept art looks promising.

Supposedly, the reason they didn't continue with the Viera was that there were some fans were worried that they were a one-gender race (which they are not) or that the males and females didn't get along. :B
Personally, I don't think they need to carbon-copy XII's Vieras, just get inspired by them. >w>

[myahele]

PuPu seems the most logical:

Or the survivors of the Lunar Kingdom

[Lucidbro]

If you just look at the available races, it's apparent that they're clearly missing a "fiercer" or more "bestial" race. There are plenty of cute things already, it's proper to at least have one for those of us wanting it. The Roegadyn don't really address it, something more along the lines of Taurens, Trolls, Worgen or even the Undead from WoW. Just being a big red/blue human isn't interesting. After that I don't really care how many furry blobs they add into the game. Say what you want about WoW but Blizzard at least understands the concept of having something for everyone. At the moment there are some people left in the ditch.

But lets at least have something a bit more different than "a human with cat ears" or a "human with horns".

Well, I would argue female Highlanders are pretty far in that end of the spectrum as well.

Why do you have such an impression? That's like saying normal women are "big and fierce". Their height ranges from 173cm to 187cm, well within the normal height ranges of a western woman. Regarding their physiques they're just in average fit shape. And you say they're on a "pretty far end of the spectrum", I can only wholeheartedly disagree with that, and I don't think it's really a matter of opinion.

[Nestama]

Took awhile to find, but if we were to get a new race, I'm hoping it would be this:



It's not cute like a Hummingway and it's not Human like the Viera. It's different.

[Mimilu]

Took awhile to find, but if we were to get a new race, I'm hoping it would be this:



It's not cute like a Hummingway and it's not Human like the Viera. It's different.

You could have borrowed this picture from my post, if you'd have liked. >w>

[Nestama]

Bah. I could have looked at the second page, but noooo. I had to do things the hard way >_>

[Zyrusticae]

Why do you have such an impression? That's like saying normal women are "big and fierce". Their height ranges from 173cm to 187cm, well within the normal height ranges of a western woman. Regarding their physiques they're just in average fit shape. And you say they're on a "pretty far end of the spectrum", I can only wholeheartedly disagree with that, and I don't think it's really a matter of opinion.

Um. I guess I have a different idea of what qualifies as 'big and fierce'.

For the record, they can be built like MMA fighters, and I would consider those women to be 'big and fierce'. Especially next to Hyur Midlanders, femMiqo'te, and femRa (and Lalafell, but I shouldn't need to mention them). They also have some of the sharpest facial features available to female characters, which is one of the reasons I never rolled one (the other being that I don't want my character to be... that tall, heh).

If my perspective seems skewed, consider that the grand majority of players will roll female characters in the 149-160cm range, with many never even approaching the realm of the 173cm+ range. See this chart from a survey of PSO2 characters for an illustrative example. Thus, by this standard female Highlanders are definitely in the realm of 'big and fierce' when compared to their counterparts in every race except Roegadyn.

Unfortunately, this chart is also a great example of why female Au Ra are so dissimilar to their male counterparts - they just wouldn't be anywhere near as often played. They'd be stuck in the realm of Roegadyn as far as popularity goes, and obviously, Square Enix has found that it is simply not worth the monetary investment.

All that being said, I would agree that a more bestial race would fill a niche that neither Roegadyn nor Highlanders currently occupy. It's just that none of the metrics available to SE indicate that such a race would be popular, and so here we are.

[Cendres]

This is the concept art I was talking about:

Part of me wishes this is what we got instead of Au Ra. I'm a big Fran fan and wanted to roll Viera since XI...

[Lucidbro]

-snip-

Well, concerning the female Highlanders, people's preferences don't really have anything to do with what we're discussing here. They're average sized women on western standards. The fact that you have female bodybuilders, whom are in much greater shape than what you can have a character be in the game, doesn't mean the women of the entire species are "big and fierce".
When compared with the other races, the only thing this tells us is that there's a severe lack of races with larger women not that a normal sized female is "big and fierce". You're playing a fantasy game, you have to keep things in perspective, it's flat out impossible to consider something you're several centimeters taller to be big and/or fierce.
Also you may correct me if I'm wrong but the poll does seem to be Japanese, you can usually add around 10cm to both male and female characters to have it be closer to western tastes.


Also, I don't really understand this attitude of everything having to follow whats most popular. When adding races, traditionally MMO's or otherwise, rather than catering to the same group of people gaming companies have attempted to add in races for different types of audiences. It's not about popularity of the race itself it's about expanding the audience to increase the overall player base, rather than pumping out races that are similar to each other. The obvious example being WoW, where each added race has been an attempt to target a different niche.