FFXIV 2nd expansion: Viera-like race still a possibility?

[Sylve]

Yet, EQ2 and WoW both made anthro animals and the armor fits them just fine. Helmets(and hoods) got special models that essentially mold to the head, and the boots have everything below the ankle removed.

Except they didnt make helmets fit the anthro races properly. All they did was stretch the back end to reach the neck (half the time, they didn't even do that, you could often see the rear side of the hoods clipping through the neck entirely). And it looked absolutely awful.
Hood type helmets look absolutely awful on Worgens and Taurens, because their nose/mouth just pokes out of the front of the hood (even when the hood had a face hiding visual effect), this even happens with male Trolls and Pandaren to a lesser extent.
It was easy for WoW to 'adjust'gear for tails. They didn't actually need to do anything. Why? Because WoW leg armor is literally just a skin texture.
The ankle cutoff thing for the bestial races just essentially hid the majority of boots and applied a small colored patch above the ankle. If they even did that sometimes.

XIVs attention to detail with regards to Armor and clothing is its own downfall in some regards. Because the gear not simply a fancy texture directly applied to the skin of our characters, it makes it very difficult to give us races that are not mostly humanoid.
Add in the fact that our gear is is literally tailored to fit each race properly instead of simply creating a texture and stretching it as required for who is wearing it and the difficulty multiplies.
Could they do it? Absolutely. Technically speaking, the task of creating secondary appearances for boots isn't difficult. But it IS time consuming. Especially as the team involved with doing that is also trying to create the race itself.

It's unfortunate the visual quality of our gear is presently limiting our racial options, but its not an impossible thing to overcome.
It's possible that (not even being sarcastic) the PS3s might be limiting their options also. Having to work around such a tiny memory total is bound to cause problems.

[Nadirah]

Except they didnt make helmets fit the anthro races properly. All they did was stretch the back end to reach the neck (half the time, they didn't even do that, you could often see the rear side of the hoods clipping through the neck entirely). And it looked absolutely awful.
Hood type helmets look absolutely awful on Worgens and Taurens, because their nose/mouth just pokes out of the front of the hood (even when the hood had a face hiding visual effect), this even happens with male Trolls and Pandaren to a lesser extent.
It was easy for WoW to 'adjust'gear for tails. They didn't actually need to do anything. Why? Because WoW leg armor is literally just a skin texture.
The ankle cutoff thing for the bestial races just essentially hid the majority of boots and applied a small colored patch above the ankle. If they even did that sometimes.

Did you honestly expect extra special work done on hoods? Seriously?


if you have a snout, I expect it to stick out.

And when I mentioned the helmets, I was referring specifically to EQ2. Sarnak have metal and cloth plates that appear on their heads in place of helmets, if you look at the image I linked you'll see what I'm talking about. There was tail armor for Iksar and Sarnak as well, Ratonga and Kerra did not have it.

The boots that "added a patch above the ankle" were mostly boots that had no model, but were just texture instead. With the sheer number of available models, this wasn't an issue. Pandas had holes cut in all theirs for their toes ffs.

Even though I love the Sarnak the armor/weapon/animations for them are horrible.

The point was that they tailored it specifically for the race.

The boots is the standard way of dealing with beast feet. Could go the Morrowind route where they can't wear shoes at all and no closed helmets.

Course, people would bitch about that, too.

[Samcaesar]

Its the player base being sexist not the Dev team. The player base would be the ones making judgements based on the appearance of that sexual variation of the race not the dev team. .

Actually, considering the Dev tried incredibly hard to make the girl Au Ra any notion of tough looking (4 incredibly boring faces all high in neoteny, the height being locked so small, et cetera) while giving the dudes a unique look is kinda sexist on their fault. Their reasoning for why the girls are so cutesy is "Well the player base likes cutesy, look at where most of the races are", which would mean your thought process isn't wrong.. But then you've got to take in mind how the male Au Ra look, the logic falls apart. The male Au Ra of course look much more like Elezen (A very unpopular race as well) in body structure, while also still possessing way more scales than the girls, so the design decision to go "Well, we're making the guys look like cool and fierce" was something the Dev team made without thinking "Well most of the playerbase does x, so the new race will look like x".. If the thought process for the girls was applied to the men, we'd get a slightly shorter than M!Miqo'te with hardly any scales on their bodies. That and it's not like they had to make the Xaela (I say this because we already saw our main Raen lady, Yugiri) just as cutesy as the Raen, it makes little sense considering the cultural motif of the Xaela.. Or heck, it still doesn't explain why on earth the girl Au Ra (And arguable the same for Midlander and Miqo'te) have hardly an options whatsoever ( none at all imho) to make their base self look tough, when Roegadyn women can be made into a kinda Pugly sorta cute and Highlander women have a very distinct young looking face.

The thing about the cat girls being similar is all well and good but it'd be really nice to have a female character that was less teenager and more woman. Mysoginistic notions aside all of the races atm with the exception of highlander and rho (both of which I can't stand sorry) are basically slightly different teenage or younger girls.viera females are traditionally more adult looking.

Hmm, could you explain what you mean by the whole "misogynistic notions aside"? I mean, even then Viera don't really bring much to the table that a dark skinned Elezen or Roe wearing bunny ears wouldn't already, while still keeping in the whole "super cutesy teenagery look" outside of the eye brows.

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The issue is a cute beast race doesn't solve the issue, it's not that we need a beast like race, we need a race that's like 95% tough for the men and women, the issue is the Viera don't really solve this (I'm sorry, but anything based on skinny rabbit women who wear battle bikinis aren't what I'd call tough looking in the least) and neither would a cute beast race.

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I don't think the men Au Ra look Asian at all (Not to mention, grouping a giant content filled with a lot of different ethnicities under one distinct term is a little rude) while the girl's just look.. Young. Like, my younger sister has a face incredibly similar to them and we're white as heck. Let's just be frank here, the girl's look like teenagers and tweens, the guys however don't. The guys look young, sure, but they look like mid 20's young, not mid teen's young.

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Eeh, Viera have long hands I'll give you that, but their "weird looking feet" look more like regular feet with long pointy nails (And maybe minus a toe or two?).. The real "Weird looking" part comes from the high heels which makes the feet look way more animal like than they actually are. The male Au Ra look like they've got much more distinct look due to facial structures (The chin crests aid in this for example), far more coverage with their scales (With the exception of the calf area), and the large horns.. Due to the down size and much more cute look to the girls, I'd agree with you there on your comments, but definitely not with the men.

[KisaiTenshi]

I don't think the men Au Ra look Asian at all (Not to mention, grouping a giant content filled with a lot of different ethnicities under one distinct term is a little rude) while the girl's just look.. Young. Like, my younger sister has a face incredibly similar to them and we're white as heck. Let's just be frank here, the girl's look like teenagers and tweens, the guys however don't. The guys look young, sure, but they look like mid 20's young, not mid teen's young.

I was pointing out how the (female) Au Ra look vs the Hyur, vs how the Miqo'te look vs the Hyur. The entire context of my statement was regarding how SE painted themselves into a corner when they removed the unique gear treatments for the Miqo'te they also removed the unique gear treatments for all current and future races. The (female) Au Ra's only defining attributes are the horns, tail and face shape vs the standard Hyur model. Face shapes aren't really a big deal, it's the horns and ears that are. The Miqote have articulated ears, so all the animation sets have to take that into account. If all SE did was make it so that only head gear was unique, (given all the different ear shapes) we'd not be having this argument. But in the V1.0 gear all the gear was unique per race and gender. With V2.0 all the gear for the Hyur and Miqo'te was folded together. So we have a lot of visually annoying clipping issues with regards to tails and hair. When the Au Ra were added, they used same gearsets as the Miqo'te. The only reason the Lalafell have unique gear is because the shape of their body parts aren't the same scale as a Hyur.

Like when it comes down to it, adding another race that is "different" is actually a lot of work, because every new piece of gear must be multiplied by the number of races and genders the game has. That slows down content development.

Adding something that is basically "a tall Miqo'te with bunny ears" involves no gear reworking at all, save maybe changing hoods to have larger ear spaces. Adding a "canine" race that actually has a completely different way of walking ( digitigrade ) requires far more work that can't be done since it's not part of the existing gear animation set. If we didn't get unique Au Ra animations, we're not going to get unique Viera or any other race that walks on it's toes.

This all could have been avoided if they left Miqo'te butts alone :P but hey maybe there's more flexibility that SE is letting on. I don't see SE "fixing" this, ever. So don't expect playable furries.

You haven't seen the spirit possessing another race's body yet, but that certainly doesn't mean that it's not possible.

And what would happen in this instance? That's a good question, that would be answered when/if it happened. It could work in any multitude of ways, either altering the new host's body, or not altering it at all.
If I recall correctly, the last thing the Sahagin chief had was a bullet in his brain, by your logic the new Sahagin should've been the proud owner of one as soon as he was possessed. So clearly, the consciousness, or the soul, is the only thing that's transferred.

Lore functions to make the world consistent. If the changes made to it are also consistent, then it's functioning perfectly as intended.

Honestly, lore-wise the game is consistent with this... how do you think the game excuses changing race? When ko'd we also revive at a crystal. "Putting" your body into something else is completely within the lore of the game, albeit I don't think Hydaelyn would support it.