General disappointment with new races added

[ReiMakoto]

You'll be right less often (and things will be more exciting) if you don't take every position at once beforehand and declare victory after, lol.

Roasted. It really bugs me when people do that, either don't say anything or say loads of stuff then go "Aha look I knew this would happen", like great I'm sure you did

[mangelinabrolee]

I fully agree. the funnies thing about it is they defend viera with lore but then what about female ronso? I'm pretty sure there were a bunch of them as well. why ant we just have both genders and be happy? like I feel eorzea as a whole is very progressive they even allow gay marriage and the male miqote are now visible even though lore had said they were not seen often.

This feels like they really worked alot on female viera but then didnt have enough time for male so they took a roe and like just made a new head and added claws.

[Cilia]

I fully agree. the funnies thing about it is they defend viera with lore but then what about female ronso? I'm pretty sure there were a bunch of them as well. why ant we just have both genders and be happy?

Resources are limited and they can't do everything. At the end of the day it was introduce one whole race or two halves, and they went with the latter for diversity - and there are no plans to introduce more races, so this was their last chance.

I'm not all that happy about it either, but you can't have everything. What would you give up and why?

[AmemeAmeklin]

First of all THIS IS THE LORE FORUM SIR if you would like to voice your discontent then please do so in any of the threads on the first and second pages of General. disclaimer I don't do customer service and this is already on page two so it's a lost cause oh well

Second of all, people have been behaving in an absolutely disgraceful manner, doing everything from bawling about unsubbing to straight up personal insults, all of them jumping to wild conclusions rather than giving Yoshi-P and the entire dev team the benefit of the doubt after all they have done for us as players.

Give your feedback by all means, but make sure it is feedback and not insults, threats, hostage-taking, acting like your opinion is the opinion of an entire community, or any number of other things I've seen. Be courteous, not entitled.

Venting out of the way, I will say this: I think the main reason we're getting two half races is so they could give us what we, as a global community, wanted with the resources they have, and to do that they chose to compromise on both with the opportunity to expand on both later when resources allow.

1) People wanted Viera (both genders)
2) People wanted different body types, aka a 'beastlike' race
3) The dev team could either do one race with two genders, or two races with one gender each, in the time they had during their development time for Shadowbringers. Either way they expected this sort of backlash.
4) They don't actually want to just recycle body assets for male Viera/female Hrothgar. They wanna make new stuff for us, but that's a lot of gear and time and money.

Every time something happens that some people don't like, the NA community fusses that they are not listened to, they are not heard, that SE favors the JP community...this is not true. Though they develop things with a JP perspective, they work hard to understand and please the global market. If you have ever dealt with a foreign culture you know that's really not easy.

We have our community reps who read the forums and pass on our feedback to the devs. They scour twitter and ffxiv tags. They promote people's fan art/work on their streams. We still have a producer live letter going on. They support fans around the world, from the LGBTQ+ pride parade float in Sydney to giving frank interviews with our fanzines, our streamers, and even coming onto these forums to respond to things in several languages so everyone can understand them. They listen in little ways, too - you can see the difference between Pagos (which was developed before they got feedback on Anemos) and Pyros (implemented with feedback from Anemos). They even listen when we don't specifically speak to them, like the way they actually gave the housing community real lofts so we wouldn't have to glitch troupe stages. (Limited mainly by old housing code that would require a revamp to fix, but it's still so much better than troupe stages.) It's even easier to glitch windows onto partitions now, too.

Yoshi-P has been responding to questions about the gender lock already and no doubt he'll answer more of them again and again until he's sick to death of it, but you know what, he's tanking for the devs right now and doing his job. If you think he doesn't know us, you're wrong. He was waiting for that tankbuster.

So by all means, keep giving feedback. Just be kind and understanding, and for Twelve's sake remember that this is a game and give the FFXIV team the benefit of the doubt.

For the record I support male viera and female hrothgar as well as representation of all people in games, and I have faith that SE will listen to feedback and implement both well at a later date when they have the resources.

[LineageRazor]

Resources are limited and they can't do everything. At the end of the day it was introduce one whole race or two halves, and they went with the latter for diversity - and there are no plans to introduce more races, so this was their last chance.

I'm not all that happy about it either, but you can't have everything. What would you give up and why?

Unless this is the LAST expansion, there's absolutely no need to squeeze two races into one expansion pack. In fact, it makes MORE sense to spread them out, and make sure that each expansion has plenty of highlights to draw in buyers.

There was definitely a strong fan demand for Viera, so it's understandable that they were added sooner rather than later. The demand for Hrothgar (or, at least, a new race of some kind that's "more bestial") was quieter, but there, and could have been a feature of a later expansion. So, without ACTUALLY giving up anything, pass on Hrothgar for now, and give us the full bunny suite.

The claim that there are no plans to introduce new races is not something that can never be changed - and additionally, it may have been made AFTER plans were solidly in place to introduce the Hrothgar.

Of course, they COULD simply add the other genders in a future expansion, with the same expenditure of resources used as if they'd gone full Viera now and full Hrothgar later - but I think adding not a new race, but the same races' other gender has a lot less impact. (It also subtly implies that they made a mistake in not having them in the first place, so it becomes an issue of losing face, as well.)

[Cilia]

Unless this is the LAST expansion, there's absolutely no need to squeeze two races into one expansion pack. In fact, it makes MORE sense to spread them out, and make sure that each expansion has plenty of highlights to draw in buyers.

[...]

Of course, they COULD simply add the other genders in a future expansion, with the same expenditure of resources used as if they'd gone full Viera now and full Hrothgar later - but I think adding not a new race, but the same races' other gender has a lot less impact. (It also subtly implies that they made a mistake in not having them in the first place, so it becomes an issue of losing face, as well.)

On that note, Mr. Happy interviewed Yoshi-P shortly after the reveal. Here is the link, but the interview bit is hide-boxed below for your convenience.

“Mr. Happy: Many western players were surprised when it was revealed that Hrothgar and Viera would not have both genders available, especially after the efforts the team went through to provide more options with Miqo’te and Roegadyn in 2.0. Why did the team decide to do two different races with one gender each instead of one race with both genders?

Yoshida: The timing of the game launch, the races needed to have each gender counterpart for ARR. When I took over for ARR [A Realm Reborn], I wanted to fill the missing gender to make those races seem complete. What is different now compared to then. After multiple expansions, the situation isn’t the same as when we released the base game. My answer will be quite long…

This game has been launched for 6 years currently. It has tens of thousands of armors available. We have to make sure every race can use every outfit correctly. The more unique the appearance of the race, the more difficult these adjustments are to make.

When we create one gear, we have to make adjustments so it fits all these different races. So when we add new races, we have to adjust how to approach this process. The development cost for making a new race is very intense because of how much work we put into the graphics of the game. We also have to make sure these things all work properly. That’s why we are saying these may be the last races because of how taxing it is on the development team.

We wanted to give players options and freedom to choose more races. We envisioned adding a new race, but people really wanted the Viera to play in-game. So if we add another new race that isn’t Viera, people might wonder why we didn’t do Viera, so we had to add them for sure.

We had a big discussion back when we added Au ra in Heavensward about whether to add Au ra or Viera. We knew we only had Female Viera for reference, so we had no idea what to do for the Male variant. We would have to use our own imagination for that. There was fear about how we would approach that. Perhaps an elezen body with a miqo’te face and bunny ears. Would this be the right way to add this race to the game?

When we create a fantasy game, especially for FF14. We have a good variety of races. We don’t really need any more cute or sweet looking characters because we have so many as it is.

Especially for FF14, we have many symbols of power or strength such as Highlander and Roegadyns. We wanted something more animal like. Its not that we wanted to create a wild west of characters, but we do need a good variety. So the simple answer is: Viera was sought after so we had to add those. To expand the game and its options, we also wanted to add Hrothgar.”



Mr. Happy: As a follow up, is the team considering adding the other gender for these two races in future expansions?

Yoshida: Short answer is we haven’t made a decision on that. The reason why we can’t say for sure. We need to optimize our work flow with the existing races and the new ones. After that, perhaps we do the other gender. But we don’t know right now.

We did consider Male Viera instead of adding an extra race, but we tried to take player feedback on adding a more beast like race as well as the strong desire to receive Viera. We did expect strong feedback on the gender lock. It was a tough decision, but we decided to do our best to meet both the player feedback and our development team’s vision. It will be very costly to add a new race or genders. So I won’t say no, but I would not like to set expectations high.

We haven’t had time to look at all of the feedback since this is our first day back at the office after the Tokyo Fan Festival. What was the general feedback from NA based on your experience? Were they upset about no Male Viera, no Female Hrothgar or both?

Mr. Happy: It has been a heated topic. Some players are okay, while many players are upset about the gender locking. Many are disappointed about no Male Viera, but with the Female Hrothgar I’ve seen some people be even more upset. This is because in The First Shard they are called Ronso, and in FFX there are plenty of female Ronso.

Yoshida: Thank you for the insight. Currently, we are putting together all the feedback. Depending on the feedback we are considering an official statement on the forums.

What I gather from this is that Viera were put because they felt forced to do so by fan demand, but also wanted to include a more "beast-like but tough" race for the sake of diversity. Considering that it actually does take more resources to implement new races as the game goes on (see: making sure every piece of gear works with their model (especially headgear), designing emotes, etc.), they don't want to add more races in the future because of how much effort it takes, so this might be their last effort in doing so.

In other words, adding both sexes of one of the two races could very easily have meant permanently sacrificing the other. Fan demand for Viera was very high but they wanted to include something of their own vision (a more bestial race for the sake of diversity), so a compromise had to be made. Another interview (I don't have a reference, but) said this decision was made back in 4.1. There's nothing stopping them from adding more races or filling out the gender options on the ones introduced in 5.0, but it'll take more and more resources the longer the game goes on.

I, for one, welcome our new man-cats, and while I don't agree with gender-locked races I understand why they did what they did, appreciate the diversity Viera / Hrothgar offers, and have to respect the stones it took to do that in this day and age. (Thundercats jokes when?) I won't change my main over to one, but I'll make an alt once I clear 5.0's MSQ. Don't want to miss out on the sweet NieR: Automata gear... and I'm too used to this character; I changed to a Roegadyn briefly in 3.3, but it just felt awkward.

Side note: the interview said there were more complaints over the lack of female Hrothgar than male Viera. I'd just like to say that I find the inverse to be true - I've seen far more complaints over the Viera.