A letter to the Devs, Producers, and whoever else has a say

[Greywolfamakir]

Im ok with new races...I dont care about genderlocked...they look fine, cool and nice.

[Serenno]

Agreed and signed. I hope if anything this is the thread that catches the developers' attention.

[Merceus]

I'm fairly unhappy about the genderlocking.

I think female Hrothgar should be a thing.
I think male viera should be a thing.

I'll sign up with a well written post any day, OP!

[Clover_Blake]

What they said was, I believe, that it would have been more work to do male and female of one race and easier to do one gender for two races.

Didn't they say that both Viera and Hothgar were complicated races to make because of their unique heads and / or features (which are also vastly different between them both)? I wonder if I misunderstood. To me it sounded like they took the harder path in order to make more unique races.

[Cetonis]

If there are more Hrothgar players then there would have been male Viera, they made the right decision.

Reception on Hrothgar in and of themselves has been hit/miss, so we'll see if that pans out, but my point is that SE has to consider how many players will actually fantasia to whatever it is they're making.

Sure, modern sensibilities might lead one to feel like you really aught to have female Hrothgar, but how much dev time do you want to spend / commit to for the sake of modern sensibilities? FemRoe is the least popular race, female Highlanders aren't terribly common either. There will very definitely be more female Viera than there would have been female Hrothgar. We can turn our noses up at that, but it is what it is.

Will there be more Hrothgar than we would have seen male Viera? Harder to say but I don't think SE is crazy for thinking that there will be.

[Keddera_StormMoon]

Now you see, the OP's post was thoughtful and well-structured. We need to see more like that anytime something comes up.

[Sheriyana]

I want to voice my concerns with this as well. I totally agree with the op and some posters here, we should have gotten male Viera. I don't even want to comment on the stupidity of the lore reasons against them if you still spout that nonsense you've clearly put your blindfold on and pushed your fingers so far into your ears, desperately trying to ignore every valid argument against it.

I will say that if male Viera make no sense, how does Hrothgar make sense? What are they? Where did they come from? I've never seen a bigger out of nowhere pull in this game yet, at least Viera, and yes male Viera as well were set up in the lore. We know that they exist, we know stuff about them, we can point out some areas where they live/most likely live. With Hrothgar how does it make sense that you can start the game as one? It was already a stretch with the Au Ra but now we're getting these buff catboys from another universe and can suddenly play as them.

Personally I really don't care for how Hrothgar look either and feel they're really uninspired. We already have a cat race, why do we need a new one and well they look like a Roegadyn mated with a coeurl. I get that they're supposed to be based on Ronso, and well on the First they're already called Ronso but they barely look like them, Ronso were fully covered in fur and were all blue. I was facepalming throughout the whole reveal trailer for them. I acknowledge that they're here for furry pandering and that some people have been asking for a more bestial looking race for a long time but at the very least give us the actual Ronso.

Anyway, for closing thoughts, I think they should have given us both female and male Viera for Shadowbringers and they could have used the whole of 5.X to set up the Hrothgar in the lore and then release the race in its entirety in 6.0. And just to make it absolutely clear, I don't mind that Hrothgar is a thing, I just don't like how they're introducing it, and at the cost of making two gender locked races at this point of the game when the first thing Yoshida wanted to do with ARR was to abolish the gender locks on playable races. As was pointed out, this is not progression, this is regression and anyone who celebrates it should take a long look at themselves.

[Metsonm]

I agree wholeheartedly with this letter, and hope it makes its way to them.

[Bright-Flower]

Viera are FF12 lore. Miqote are FF14 lore. There’s a difference.

Not really. FFXIV's version of Dalmasca doesn't match XII lore to the letter, why couldn't they do this with Viera? They write the lore, they could have easily made male viera if they wanted to. The lore is not the reason it's the excuse.

[Bright-Flower]

Also something I want to say on the topic of 'where was the support for male Viera BEFORE?!'

People asking for Viera probably assumed that, you know...they would come with both genders. Just like every other race in the game was updated to have both genders, and au ra were added with both genders. Also there WERE threads of people asking for male viera, here and on the lore forum. So it's not like nobody was asking for them.