Gender locked race?

[Melichoir]

Just from a pure production standpoint, it is way easier for the dev team to create a demo reel featuring only female viera since Fran's model is pretty much done and all they have to do is swap the head out (which is pretty much what they did). They didnt have to do a whole lot on that end to put together somethign that shows off Viera. So, atleast in the current state of things, its not really a pandering thing but rather just simple pragmatism.

We also have to consider we have 1 more fanfest to go, and theyre not likely to show off ALL the things before then. It is likely that we will see a Male Viera preview in the last fanfest as well as the dancer job class (I think its dancer right?) among a few other bits and things.

People can call this stuff pandering if we get to the xpac to find out its only female viera. That would be an oddity since I think it was YoshiP who was against gender locking races in the first place (He put in Male Miqote I believe with ARR, but I could be wrong so take that with a grain of salt.)

[Kupocoubo]

Just from a pure production standpoint, it is way easier for the dev team to create a demo reel featuring only female viera since Fran's model is pretty much done and all they have to do is swap the head out (which is pretty much what they did). They didnt have to do a whole lot on that end to put together somethign that shows off Viera. So, atleast in the current state of things, its not really a pandering thing but rather just simple pragmatism.

We also have to consider we have 1 more fanfest to go, and theyre not likely to show off ALL the things before then. It is likely that we will see a Male Viera preview in the last fanfest as well as the dancer job class (I think its dancer right?) among a few other bits and things.

People can call this stuff pandering if we get to the xpac to find out its only female viera. That would be an oddity since I think it was YoshiP who was against gender locking races in the first place (He put in Male Miqote I believe with ARR, but I could be wrong so take that with a grain of salt.)

I don't understand why they wanted to announce female first, the two genders for Au ra were announced at the same time during fan fest

[Melichoir]

As I said, from a pure production standpoint, its easier for them to simply just headswap a pre-existing model and run with it. Notice that for the reveal its all basic stuff. Handful of basic emotes, walk/run/sprint cycle, standing poses. Thats it. No weapons, no advanced posing/emotes, none of that. Theyre all wearing the exact same garbs as Fran, so on so forth. It's highly reasonable to assume that this preview was made using existing resources (fran model) for production reasons. They could very well still be working out the kinks wit the male models.

Furthermore, since the lore is more about Female Viera than males, splitting the two and using them as separate reveals makes sense because this thread even illustrates peoples curiosity/interest in the idea of Male Viera or what the male counter part to Viera will be. With AuRa, who were a new addition all-together, it wasnt really a speculation of both male and female, it was assumed. We dont have that assumption right away due to the nature of Viera and their pre-existing lore and expectations.

So currently, there is plenty of plausible reasons why we only saw female Viera in this short clip. Im sitting more in the camp of waiting till atleast the next fan fest before talking about Gender Locked races or what not. Seems more pragmatic

[DevilsDontFly]

I don't understand why they wanted to announce female first, the two genders for Au ra were announced at the same time during fan fest

But they were both announced at the very last fanfest. So tecnically with Viera they are ahead of schedule and probably wanted to show the females to just boost pre-orders. They all have the same face and the only thing showcased was a sprint animation, so at least to me it seems like a very early in-the-works project that they wanted to show, probably to have a higher income of pre-order money and put some of it in the budget for further development.
Pior to the last fanfest the only thing we had when it comes to Au Ra was a silhouette picture, and we didn't even know what they would be called until much later on fanfests.
Not even Dark Knight or Astrologian were announced until the very end because they used male and female Au Ra to showcase the jobs.

So yeah, to me it all seems like a tactic to boost sales a bit before big announcements, on top of wanting to leave the male Viera for the JP fanfest.
If you think about it there is nothing new to female Viera. We all know the lore, we all know how they looked like and we all know how they behave. But when it comes to the males it is a big, new reveal, with a whole new perspective of a race within the franchise that not only is going to affect XIV, but all every single future installment of Final Fantasy that features Viera as a race. If I was eastern and my company was also eastern, and the games we develop were first released to our home audience, I would like to make such huge changes and announcements on my homeland, since it all started there.