Yoshi-P considering feedback on the new races

[Melichoir]

It's not "bad lore" simply because you say it is. Like, that line itself triggers me, as I'm a writer that has enough lore behind my stories to fill a book shelf. Lore isn't "made up tomfoolery". It's the foundation of a story and its universe. Days, weeks, months, years, decades can be spent on creating the lore of a single world. Your statement is a spit in the face to everyone who has the creativity and determination to create such things, and I'm gonna stop this particular part of my post before I lose restraint get reported.

Pretty much "Im a writer, therefore I know things" snobbery. Get off the high horse. People have opinions, particularly if they think that the reasoning is lacking. Its not a spit in anyone's face.

Ok, lets get to this then:

Anyways, comparing Viera lore to FFXIV's lore is like comparing an elderly person to a child. Viera have been in Final Fantasy's lore for decades, and that race has been in multiple final fantasy games - all of which had no male Viera. The drawings seen of them were purely conceptual. No one actually knows what they look like, as they have never, ever, ever been seen. Not even the developers know what they look like.

This is irrelevant. FFXIV is not Tactics, 11, or any other ff game. The ff games are only vaguely related, and even then its not really by intention (more of a "What if" idea by fans that the devs kinda adopted.) The only point to argue is what the Lore is in FFXIV. And in this case, it is very very minimal. So much so that it is extremely easy to write male viera into the game. There is no crucial story point that says they cant be in the game. No crux of a major plot development.

All of what you stated about FFXIV's lore has been in....FFXIV and nowhere else. Such lore can be easily changed and easily modified. It's not set in stone, it's evolving, and it's directly governed by FFXIV's dev team. Viera however, aren't as simple, and introducing the male version of that race would be far bigger to the overarching narrative that is Final Fantasy than you might seem to think. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they would probably need direct permission from Final Fantasy's creator himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi, to do such a thing. That's speculation of course, but I highly doubt the FFXIV team would be able to implement male viera without a higher up saying they can.

This is an overselling of a point. As I said above, the lore on male viera is minimal, and is not connected to any major plot or world building exercise. A 'call to arms' sub plot would be more than sufficient given what limited lore is available in FFXIV. Any other lore from any other game is irrelevant, unless youre arguing that to know Viera as a race, you needed to play every other game that has them. This is like saying to read this one book, you needed to read 4 other books that are only loosely connected cause it was written by the same author and nothing more.

At the end of the day, these things aren't as simple as people seem to think it is. I'd be more than happy to see male Viera and even happier to see female Hrothgar (especially since those are actually a thing). What they chose to do was to try and make everyone happy with the resources they had. People wanted a beastial race as well as the Viera. Initial clamorings for Viera was NOT for male Viera, but for the female ones. In fact, they had initially wanted just the Hrothgar being the final race, but ended up replacing the female Hrothgar with Viera instead. Whether that choice was a good or bad one is up for debate. Some are fine with it, others obviously aren't. Personally I would have rather had the female Hrothgar, but I'm not going to scream bloody murder about it. Guess that's just me.

Again, the issue is youre overselling this. Its not as hard as youre portraying it. We can all agree that genderlocking is probably not what people want, but lets not defend the devs reasoning with really poorly done lore in the context of ffxiv. We wanna be frank, then lets have the devs say "Just didnt have the time and we thought people would prefer this more." Not a mouthful of "Muh Lore" shenanigans.

*edit: God my post was a mess...