Genderlock reminder to SE

[MrKimper]

I'm not suggesting they will cancel things already in development... those can be considered other parts of the finite resource already spent. It will 100% effect what "MAY" have been added to the game but would not be approved due to funds being allocated to this instead.

That speculation however, we have no way of knowing what they have planned to release, again you could say that...for everything. Ishgard housing "MAY" have taken away from new eureka housing, Gunbreaker "MAY" have taken away from a healing job being added, DRk reworks "MAY" take away from scholar reworks. Egi-glamours "MAY" take away from new lords of verminion content.

My key point is that that speculation isn't constructive as it relies on imaginary content that we "MAY" not have gotten because of the other races--but like BLU with ultimate it could just be because of a separately related issue, I'm sure content has been canceled for other reasons than another content taking priority. Dev interest, Resource burden, Good concept bad execution. Multitudes of things.

Edit: that's fine, my statement is that your argument for it causing cancellation of content is a fallacy. Now if in your "OPINION" you believe it is a waste of resources, that's something I can't argue with, as it is your opinion.

[WaterShield]

That speculation however, we have no way of knowing what they have planned to release, again you could say that...for everything. Ishgard housing "MAY" have taken away from new eureka housing, Gunbreaker "MAY" have taken away from a healing job being added, DRk reworks "MAY" take away from scholar reworks. Egi-glamours "MAY" take away from new lords of verminion content.

My key point is that that speculation isn't constructive as it relies on imaginary content that we "MAY" not have gotten because of the other races--but like BLU with ultimate it could just be because of a separately related issue, I'm sure content has been canceled for other reasons than another content taking priority. Dev interest, Resource burden, Good concept bad execution. Multitudes of things.

Edit: that's fine, my statement is that your argument for it causing cancellation of content is a fallacy. Now if in your "OPINION" you believe it is a waste of resources, that's something I can't argue with, as it is your opinion.

Yes it is a waste of resources in my opinion (which I am not going to attempt to get you to agree to). I don't think Blu can be compared to races being added as they come at an astronomically higher cost. Blu was a mini game afforded little resources in its current iteration.

So I see adding male viera and female hrothgar as having a larger drain on resources and therefore a larger impact on the pipeline.

Edit: Also Square did say the reason we got female only Viera and male only Hrothgar is because they felt adding male Viera and female Hrothgar as well would be too much. They did what they did in order to please as many people as they felt they could while still keeping the same amount of content coming.

[MrKimper]

Yes it is a waste of resources in my opinion (which I am not going to attempt to get you to agree to). I don't think Blu can be compared to races being added as they come at an astronomically higher cost. Blu was a mini game afforded little resources in its current iteration.

So I see adding male viera and female hrothgar as having a larger drain on resources and therefore a larger impact on the pipeline.

Again I disagree, I can respect that insight but to me I believe a job like BLU which is already planned future support in the way of unique content, spell animations, balance and probably some sort of BLU duty finder along with it's own AF gear. Most likely (to my knowledge) took more developmental time than racial modeling, at least I believe modeling does not take up the same amount of dev hands that something like BLU, Ultimate or 24 man raids would take up. The only feasible issue would be QA testing time.

But again that's my take.

Edit: It wasn't about content it was about the work burden of modeling new gear for new races as well as the dev teams desire to add in a beastial race. Nowhere did they say "Well if we didn't do this we wouldn't have gotten 24 mans or 8 mans, we would have canceled content" Yoshida stated "If we did this we wouldn't have been able to have 2 races" this implies the racial modeling division is different from the background/enemy modeling division but connected to the gear modeling division as they aren't optimized to be separated faculties yet.

[WaterShield]

Again I disagree, I can respect that insight but to me I believe a job like BLU which is already planned future support in the way of unique content, spell animations, balance and probably some sort of BLU duty finder along with it's own AF gear. Most likely (to my knowledge) took more developmental time than racial modeling, at least I believe modeling does not take up the same amount of dev hands that something like BLU, Ultimate or 24 man raids would take up. The only feasible issue would be QA testing time.

But again that's my take.

So what people don't account for, is that when you add a race you have many things to account for modeling wise. Every piece of gear that existed before needs to be adapted to the new models. Every new piece of gear from here on out will also be more work to implement, because they need more versions of it to work properly for each race. These things add up to an exponential increase in dev costs. 1 Job and its queues is nothing in comparison.

TLDR each new racial model is a massive commitment to more work for the life of the game.


"Edit: It wasn't about content it was about the work burden of modeling new gear for new races as well as the dev teams desire to add in a beastial race. Nowhere did they say "Well if we didn't do this we wouldn't have gotten 24 mans or 8 mans, we would have canceled content" Yoshida stated "If we did this we wouldn't have been able to have 2 races" this implies the racial modeling division is different from the background/enemy modeling division but connected to the gear modeling division as they aren't optimized to be separated faculties yet. "

It would have meant they would have just done Male and Female Hrothgar... and the same amount of resources would have been spent as what we're getting now. Doing both male and female of both races was never on the table.

[MrKimper]

So what people don't account for, is that when you add a race you have many things to account for modeling wise. Every piece of gear that existed before needs to be adapted to the new models. Every new piece of gear from here on out will also be more work to implement, because they need more versions of it to work properly for each race. These things add up to an exponential increase in dev costs. 1 Job and its queues is nothing in comparison.

TLDR each new racial model is a massive commitment to more work for the life of the game.

Yes exactly but the issue is assuming this is ALL the dev team does or they commit LARGE amounts of resources(Staff members, office members) to this one singular task, which isn't true. It's the same thing with emotes, each gear needs to be tested to see if it doesn't clash too heavily with emotes, actions, spells, castbars, and this STILL ends up with hiccups but each are tested to make sure visually as long as you aren't looking too closely, it's workable. It's the same reason we don't have moving capes even though cape data is in the game for odin's gear most likely.

The issue is saying for certain that races take up so much resources that they slow down the development of zones, battle content, balance, animations and conceptualization stages and require all developmental divisions to be drawn in to make sure they're completed. When that's not the case, rigging a skeleton is difficult of course but it's already been shown with fran(who's model is almost a 1 to 1 rendition of her XII model) that there are ways the dev team cuts this process down to be more feasible.

Edit: Exactly, that's what I'm stating it came at the cost of RACIAL content, not other content which is what you're stating and which I'm stating shouldn't be assumed. Whether it was off or on the table or not isn't really something any of us can 100% say as a certainty. However my point stands that if it is implemented again it will not take away from content already in the pipeline for development.

[WaterShield]

Yes exactly but the issue is assuming this is ALL the dev team does or they commit LARGE amounts of resources(Staff members, office members) to this one singular task, which isn't true. It's the same thing with emotes, each gear needs to be tested to see if it doesn't clash too heavily with emotes, actions, spells, castbars, and this STILL ends up with hiccups but each are tested to make sure visually as long as you aren't looking too closely, it's workable. It's the same reason we don't have moving capes even though cape data is in the game for odin's gear most likely.

The issue is saying for certain that races take up so much resources that they slow down the development of zones, battle content, balance, animations and conceptualization stages and require all developmental divisions to be drawn in to make sure they're completed. When that's not the case, rigging a skeleton is difficult of course but it's already been shown with fran(who's model is almost a 1 to 1 rendition of her XII model) that there are ways the dev team cuts this process down to be more feasible.

Edit: Exactly, that's what I'm stating it came at the cost of RACIAL content, not other content which is what you're stating and which I'm stating shouldn't be assumed. Whether it was off or on the table or not isn't really something any of us can 100% say as a certainty. However my point stands that if it is implemented again it will not take away from content already in the pipeline for development.

Then why do the devs not want to commit to adding them? It implies they have other things they want to do more.

[MrKimper]

Then why do the devs not want to commit to adding them? It implies they have other things they want to do more.

According to Yoshida? because of the way they handle modeling gear, they are by Yoshida's own admission not optimized in this faculty. My personal assumption? who cares what I personally think, at the end of the day they made the call as they saw fit. My statement stands that if they reversed said call, it will not deeply effect the core content that the playerbase wants as that content is already in pre-production for SHB, and in "POSSIBLE" content in development for 6.0 should not be factored into this argument as whatever content we get for that is already in conceptualization, there could be hundreds of thousands of content concepts we will never see that are not added for this or that reason.

Pointing a finger and saying the racial genders are the primary suspect is speculation as we have no way of knowing.

A) What that content would be (therefore we would not know if it is being worked on by the same division that handles modeling)

B) If the races were the primary reason for cancellation of any content for 6.0.

Similarly again a comparison, many people assumed DNC was the reason we didn't get a healer, when in fact the dev team simply wishes to re-balance the healers and re-define/prune shield healing before adding in a new healer. You could make the argument that DNC took up resources for healer but that at the end of the day is an assumption not substantiated by what information we have.

[LaylaTsarra]

Yes it is a waste of resources in my opinion (which I am not going to attempt to get you to agree to). I don't think Blu can be compared to races being added as they come at an astronomically higher cost. Blu was a mini game afforded little resources in its current iteration.

So I see adding male viera and female hrothgar as having a larger drain on resources and therefore a larger impact on the pipeline.

Edit: Also Square did say the reason we got female only Viera and male only Hrothgar is because they felt adding male Viera and female Hrothgar as well would be too much. They did what they did in order to please as many people as they felt they could while still keeping the same amount of content coming.

I agree.

It's pretty reasonable to believe that the funding for races was allocated along with the resources for a male and female race. It's hard to say how long they've been working on these additions but the team has pretty clearly indicated that 1) these are the last races we would be getting, and 2) that it's a tremendous amount of work to adjust all the gear for them which will only be compounded when having to adjust all the gear added in 5.0. I think the fact that the headgear won't be ready for launch supports how difficult it is to do.

I think it is also reasonable to believe that adding two additional genders (equivalent to one race) would require quite a bit of additional resources and the time and work needed to produce them would require additional funds that would need to come from somewhere. The question is will SE give the FFIV team additional funds to produce them or will they be required to make due with their current funding and resources available. We obviously don't know that but in lieu of additional monies other content that could have been produced will have to suffer.