Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Lauront]

Only BIG game with a beast race that I can personally say I have exp with is GW2 ... where the Charr are basically played on par with every non human race. And THATS a game that will never add a new race as races actually mean something in their world ... and the Charr are the most beast race I know of seeing as they can run on all 4s. Looking at Wow where it seems they have a crap ton of races because of how they design things ... sure, the top 3 are human and 2 pretty human races that add up to like 40%. But all those other unattractive races make up more than half of players. Orcs are the 4th most played race, right behind the pretty people.

Charr are 13% of total played characters. Orcs something like 7%, which is not bad given its number of races. WoW has pretty high diversity of races, and simply because a race is not "pretty" does not mean it is bestial or monstrous. The actual bestial races come to something like 30% in total. However, that is me being generous, because they also exhibit a significant variety in body types and they have a stronger lore background tying into WC3. So at most Hrothgar will attract a subset of WoW players who want a beast race fitting that specific body type - and also with this being the only real barrier to them taking up the game.

Given how many "Wow refugees" they are getting I'd say the devs were right to want more visual diversity in their last race addition. Not everyone is inlove with this weeb culture that's developed around this game.

We won't really know until we see the active % of players who comprise Hrothgar. Until then the more accurate assessment is that the devs are taking a risk, with uncertain payoffs. I'd say based on existing patterns of what WoW (and other MMO) players play, I don't foresee them being particularly more common than Roegadyn.

I also don't get your comment about "weeb culture". It's a Japanese game but it already offers options for people who don't want to play anything "weeb". It's also not the case that JP games don't add bestial characters.

I pointed it out to you already. Again .. the amount of time and money, man power, resources that they have to put into designing and supporting a new race will not be made up with some people buying a race change potion. There is a reason why they say this is IT for new races and why they wanted to make the Viera fans happy now as they can't say they are gonna do this again. A race is not content that keeps people coming back, it's a painfully expensive cosmetic option to the team.

So they want to make people "happy". Why? What's the end goal here from the business's perspective? It's odd, because when it comes to Hrothgar you seem to claim they're justified in doing it to try capture WoW refugees. Yet when it comes to Viera, it's just to "make people happy". Seems awfully convenient, to me.

In reality, there's two goals they can fulfill with this: 1) attracting new players and 2) provide more options to existing players to ensure they keep playing the game. Both of these things entail an ROI.

A potion cost $10
The newest dances? $7 each.
The massively popular Fat cat mount? Like $28

Which is gonna be profitable when you think about the work that goes into these at face value?

Your claim is that the devs don't add races for the sake of profitability. All the above points to is that some things cost more to purchase than others. That's literally it. Those things don't really build on the base of the game, though. They're accessories. You could strip the game dry of any content on the basis of such logic. No raids, no relics, no PVP. I mean why bother? The fat cat mount is $28.

In reality, those mogstation items and mounts require the base game to be there and adequately developed to keep people playing and coming in, to make their purchase even worthwhile. What new races do is act as a feature of the game, both to recruit new players and retain existing players. That's where the "making them happy" comes into it. Even if they're not as profitable on the margin as some of those features, the point is that their expected ROI is to elevate player spending above where it otherwise would be, contributing to higher overall profitability.

Anyway, the Roebros are the ONLY "burly" thing in this game right now. They are not the be all end all of buff races and are not exactly the most appealing body type given their shape and proportions. And Roebros numbers are not far from male elezens ... ya know, the race a possible Male Viera would be based on according to Yoshi.

Eh? They're built like refrigerators. That doesn't make them the "only" burly race in the game. Highlanders and Au Ra are muscular and burly. Just not to that extreme.

That's because the same ten or so people keep posting on this thread artificially inflating its post count. I can confidentially claim that at least one hundred posts are of meaningless fanart. And at least half of the rest are Senn or MrKimper being trolls.

Ah, so the same ten people pressed the like button 150 times each?

How enlightening.

I'm not against male Viera, but honestly, I wish that they would first update the damn creator with more features and implement better textures within the game. It's 2019, must everything new that's being added still look outdated and fuzzy?

Seconded.

It's almost like this is a forum.

I think very few people play elezen is because of their unappealing proportions. If they were to use the male elezen model as a base and altered it to fix the proportions for male viera, I would be all for that. For hrothgar, it seems like it is using a modified roegadyn base, and perhaps you are correct in saying there are people who would prefer the hrothgar body type. I'm glad people are getting this option.

Definitely. The Elezen model has issues besides its body shape preventing it from being more highly played; namely, the long neck, the stiff animations and more besides. Already we can see for the Viera females, they are much more fluid than their Elezen female counterparts. I imagine the males would be reworked similarly. I would expect Viera men to be nearer to Hyur or Miqo'te men if they fix the animation issues. Even getting to the same figures as Au Ra men, though, would put them at double relative to Roes. That design space - between Elezen/Midlanders (lean, toned) and Au Ra/Highlanders (sturdy bulk but not at Roe levels of size), is a fairly popular one and I think fluid animations will help it.

To be fair, the Hrothgar model will end up being better than the Roegadyn model, so I expect it to be somewhat more played, and also draw down on their figures a bit, probably settling a bit above them.