Gender locked race?

[seraphmage]

I am a bit late to the party here but thought I would add my two cents.

On the topic of gender locking races, I believe it is an all-around bad idea. In cases where a video game is centered around a protagonist who has been iconically cast as a particular gender, I can understand a developer not providing both gender options but FFXIV is not that game. Since 2.0 all playable races have offered both gender options despite any lore-related tidbits that would suggest a given race/gender combination being rare. Moreover, the nature of FFXIV is that while there is an underlying story and lore to create a tasteful level of immersion, the producer and his team regularly color outside of the lines, examples of which have been offered in large volume throughout this thread.

I don't wish to point fingers or attack the developers at the moment because, until JP fanfest, everything boils down to speculation. This being said, -if- they have chosen to introduce one or more gender locked races I believe this is a huge step backward for a development team that has, in my mind, shown itself to be forward thinking when it comes to dated views on gender roles. To suddenly do an about-face and implement pin-up ultra feminine bunny girls and (hypothetical) super masculine lion dudes with no options in between simply feeds into all kinds of video game tropes that this team has proven themselves to be better than.

For clarity, this is not to suggest that I believe pin-up bunny girls and beefy lion boys should be excluded from the game. I find toxic anti-femininity and anti-masculinity to be just as distasteful but the point is not to alienate people when there is simply no solid justification for doing so. The lore argument, as previously noted, is weak at best. As someone who comes from a development background, the workload-related arguments also bewilder me. All the work that had to go into implementing the ears and feet for Viera females (an amount of work that should not be understated/underestimated) can most certainly be used in part if not directly for the males. Moreover, implementing the male counterpart of a race for which you've already implemented females is certainly no more work than creating an entirely separate male gender locked race.

In closing, I've not really added anything unique to the thread here but more hope that someone from the development team might see my post as an addition to the overwhelming voice that wants to avoid going down this path. I also hope that the producer and his team are smarter than this and at JP fanfest a clear path is revealed toward playable male and female genders for Viera and any other race they may be adding in the next expansion. If some insurmountable obstacle exists that prevents them from doing this then I believe it would have been far better to simply hold their cards and wait on implementing Viera until they could do so fully.

[Brynne]

To suddenly do an about-face and implement pin-up ultra feminine bunny girls and (hypothetical) super masculine lion dudes with no options in between simply feeds into all kinds of video game tropes that this team has proven themselves to be better than.

For clarity, this is not to suggest that I believe pin-up bunny girls and beefy lion boys should be excluded from the game. I find toxic anti-femininity and anti-masculinity to be just as distasteful but the point is not to alienate people when there is simply no solid justification for doing so.

You said this way better than I could've - thank you. I'm really tired of this outdated gender policing. Just gives us all the options and let us decide for ourselves.