SE is responsible for leading the hype-train and setting expectations

[Colino]

Square-Enix are ultimately the ones responsible for setting up the expectations for male viera and dancer. Square-Enix is the company that released the male viera promo art, and they're the ones who said we would be getting viera as a new race.

That literally never happened.

Also it wasn't promo art, it was CONCEPT art. We have seen literally hundreds of pieces of concept art that were either put into the game eventually in some form or not. Do you realize that if we held them accountable for every single piece of concept art they show, they would not show us any at all?

[LyraKuroneko]

Most likely, they've been looking at different suggestions over the years, and the two biggest fanservice race suggestions were Viera and Ronso.
They wanted to do both, but only had plans for one more race.
They can't just keep adding races, the biggest resource drain with new races is remodelling all of the existing equipment, and all of the future equipment requiring an additional variant, it's an exponentially increasing workload.

Could there have been less backlash if they just went with Viera and never even mentioned anything remotely like Ronso? Probably.
That doesn't mean this decision was made out of spite against male Viera fans.

The remodelling is an excuse. The stuff currently isn't modelled after every race to begin with. And from the size of one added, they may not even need to adjust anything besides helmets.

[Valenth]

I think what solidified most of the expectations for most (including yours truly) was they gave us a huge lore dump on Male Viera's, combined with the concept art and all that. They went out of their way to say "hey look, they exist" and essentially put attention on male Viera. The Hrothgar are coming out of nowhere though, we still haven't even seen a single shred of lore about them and SE basically have to create lore and reasons for them to be a thing, to go out of their way a lot more than male Viera. In a way they're giving themselves a lot more work to make Hrothgar fit into the lore and game world than they would had they stuck to male bunnies instead.

Let's be honest here, there is a pretty big possibility we are not getting male Viera because we know from plenty of Yoshi's reactions he and perhaps (a large part of) his dev team are weirded out by the idea of male bunnies. Think of his responses every time we asked for the male bunny costumes for example, and how that took like a year to implement after several Live Letters of him going all "urgh, omg, what are they asking me to do?". Also, let's be honest, this will probably be a question on every Q&A from now on - when will male Viera come?

[Valenth]

The remodelling is an excuse. The stuff currently isn't modelled after every race to begin with. And from the size of one added, they may not even need to adjust anything besides helmets.

True, currently we have three base models on which they make armor for - Lalafell, Hyur and Roegadyn and they essentially stretch out armor along points on the body for it. Only Lalafell and (male?) Roegadyn use their own body shapes, the rest of the races use the Hyur base to stretch body armor over (yes, even Elezen and Au Ra). I will not be surprised if the Viera will use the female Hyur base and the Hrothgar will use the male Roegadyn one. However, they of course have to check if the stretching goes right when designing armor and adjust where neccessary.

[cicatriz313]

I was reading another post where someone mentioned Diablo Immortal. When did companies stop paying attention to their playerbase? People even asked about male Viera last fanfest. What are companies doing? Was Blizzard just sitting on Diablo Immortal thinking that everyone would cheer when the entire community was clamouring for Diablo 4 for months. What the heck did they think was going to happen?

And again with this. People have been talking about male viera for months now. Did Yoshi P just think everyone would forget if he didn't mention it? Did he think just blowing it off wouldn't have a reaction? Man, gaming companies are weird these days. I wish they'd just tell us what to expect and let us get hyped about confirmed things rather working us up about other things.

I don't care about the male bunny thing so much, but that Diablo announcement really burned me. Would it kill those companies to just be honest? "Like hey, we're not working on Diablo 4 for another 5 years, but we're making a mobile game!" I would have shrugged that off instead of being outraged at the "oh boy, you guys are expecting Diablo 4--I can't wait until I tell you otherwise!"

I can't fathom that gaming companies aren't aware of the public expectations of their playerbases. They can't be that short-sighted--can they?

Lmao. Wish everyone would quit saying every new reveal is another Diablo immortal. They listen to their fan base, that's why we got Viera in the first place. Viera has always been one gender in games and we got exactly that. Dancer was highly requested and despite not getting a new healer, they could have good reworks for current healers.

[Ashgarth]

I don't agree with all of the constant backlash from players against other players who are upset.

Square-Enix are ultimately the ones responsible for setting up the expectations for male viera and dancer. Square-Enix is the company that released the male viera promo art, and they're the ones who said we would be getting viera as a new race. Square-Enix is the company that solidified male viera in lore books. And Square-Enix is the company that proved that just because a gender is rare (like male cats) that they can be playable characters. Square-Enix has tight control over the information they put on the internet, and they're responsible for guiding the hype train and ensuring that people's expectations are in check.

I know people are disappointed, but please don't harass each other for false expectations when the company responsible for planting those seeds did so intentionally. They knew this was going to happen, and they did it anyways. They control how the information gets shared.

If anything can be learned from this is just don't buy into the hype, and don't trust anything Square-Enix hints at without proof. It sucks that they're squandering their trust this way--but that's ultimately their decision to make.

SE has never, ever mentioned Dancer until the Fanfest and if you got hyped about REJECTED concept art, well. That's not SE's fault.

[TaiyoShikasu]

Lmao, the leaks never even said what role DNC was going to be. Ya'll just decided it'd be a healer and treated it as gospel, so you have literally no one, but yourselves to blame.

Hell, there wasn't even any official indication DNC would even exist until the keynotes.

[Lumis_Arvalo]

With regards to male Viera, it is 100% on SE. Yeah, they were never promised, but SE knew MONTHS ago that there wouldn't be male Viera and I guarantee you if they had just been HONEST AND UPFRONT about that when they announced Viera instead of waiting for a more receptive crowd to give that news, the backlash wouldn't be as huge as it is right now. They were even asked in interviews about male Viera and chose to be intentionally vague about it instead of honest.

I'm a lot more upset that I feel like the dev team lied to us by omission. That doesn't build my trust that they know what they're doing anymore. When information is intentionally obfuscated, that's a really poor way to make your playerbase trust you.

[Tharne]

With regards to male Viera, it is 100% on SE. Yeah, they were never promised, but SE knew MONTHS ago that there wouldn't be male Viera and I guarantee you if they had just been HONEST AND UPFRONT about that when they announced Viera instead of waiting for a more receptive crowd to give that news, the backlash wouldn't be as huge as it is right now. They were even asked in interviews about male Viera and chose to be intentionally vague about it instead of honest.

I'm a lot more upset that I feel like the dev team lied to us by omission. That doesn't build my trust that they know what they're doing anymore. When information is intentionally obfuscated, that's a really poor way to make your playerbase trust you.

They knew that leaks were around, saying "No male Viera." would have validated those leaks and they probably wanted Hrothgar to be a surprise. (Things got ruined because of the French Client leak before JP FanFest though.)

[JackHatchet]

That literally never happened.

Also it wasn't promo art, it was CONCEPT art. We have seen literally hundreds of pieces of concept art that were either put into the game eventually in some form or not. Do you realize that if we held them accountable for every single piece of concept art they show, they would not show us any at all?

Last fanfest Square-Enix confirmed and said we were getting viera as a race. You even bolded the statement that I said that--and it's true. We're getting Viera as a race. I didn't say that Square-Enix promised male viera. However, given the context clues--you can absolutely understand why people believed it.

Every new race in every triple-AAA MMO has always had both genders. So when Square-Enix says "viera are coming"--it should be assumed that men are coming too. And if they're not--Square-Enix should be responsible enough and have the foresight to temper expectations if they're going to make a radical decision that deviates from the standard people have come to expect.

Again, I'm not saying that Square-Enix shouldn't release gender-locked races. They can do what they want. But they're the ones responsible for the fallout, because they KNEW the truth, and they're the ones who control how that information is released. And while they didn't directly mislead customers--they absolutely made no attempt to course correct the people who believed in male viera.

Game companies shouldn't play along with false hype if it's going to cause a backlash. They should be correcting bad information, because they're the only ones who know the real information--therefore they're the ones responsible. You can't fault the customers for being blind. But you can fault the company for taking advantage of that blind groping to instill hype based on a false narrative.