Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Saywihee]

I rather think, from what little I know of the lore, that they made these Viera genderlocked, for lore reasons, and brought in the furry race to even things out, for similar reasons. I doubt they will be bringing male versions anytime soon, if they are confirmed genderlocked. Only way I can see them bringing in male/female variants of either would be if there was enough community uproar for them. For Viera, let's just get this out of the way, it would have been 9/10 female to males anyway.

Lore can't be a valid reason for genderlocks for four reasons.

1. WHM - You're literally supposed to be the ONLY ONE outside of Padjal
2. SMN - You're lliterally supposed to be the only one.
3. BLM - There's only like... 2 of you at best.
4. SCH - You're supposed to be the only one that's not a Tonberry.

All of these classes are far rarer than Male Viera or Female Hrothgar could ever hope to be. But you can have an Alliance with 6 WHM and like.. all BLM/SMN if you want. Why is this race thing the hill to die on? The multitude of people playing these classes alone should kill immersion.

[SturmChurro]

They explained it. They wanted to add Hrothgar because there were requests for a more beastly race, and they would diverse the available races as basically everything other than Lalafell is some variation of Hyur - Hroths' heads and faces in particular are the farthest we've seen so far.
But then came the issue with the females, and them having added Fran to the Ivalice raid questline. They couldn't add her without enormous backlash at the much requested Viera being in the game but not playable, so they decided to shaft the Hroth females in favor of female Viera. (so let's only diversify the males and give females Elezen with bunny ears)

tl;dr Hroths were decided on first, it seems, but then they forced their own hand with the addition of Fran.

So they just chose the quick way out, and made a calculated choice to make the gender that would probably be played most?

[xbahax92]

So they just chose the quick way out, and made a calculated choice to make the gender that would probably be played most?

Or they chose to make female Viera because they are cheaper and not as much costly. Reusing assets, a blessing for SE.

[BillyKaplan]

So they just chose the quick way out

I don't think they did. Viera and Hroths, even if it's "only" one gender per, each provide their own unique issues. look at the headgear lock - chances are modifications made to allow female Viera to wear a helmet would allow the males to wear them, too - whereas male Hroths will need different adjustments, most likely. Hroths also require textures and assets Viera wouldn't use and vice versa - whereas males and females of the same race would likely have the same, say, fur styles if we're talking about Hroths.
I do think they made a very difficult choice and set themselves up for more work within the context of a single race - consisting of one male option and one female option, two clans per gender. I still think it was a dumb decision all things considered.

and made a calculated choice to make the gender that would probably be played most?

No one has the numbers but look at how played male Roes are compared to male Miqo'te, and tell me again they went with the option that will be played more.

[Duskane]

i feel a big reason we have viera is because the ff12 remaster and just could work with frans and some other npc vieras model

[zeylos]

They should have just given us the actual Viera race which was the most requested, but I do see why they wanted to make hrotgar. The only issue with then making hrotgar and not a full Viera race is that they didn't make hrotgar, they only made 1 gender of hrotgar. They should have either removed Fran from the raid and given us hrotgar actual race or given us full Viera race, not the dumb thing we got. Then in the next expansion give us the other race, not have to wait for who knows how long to get something they promised back in 1.0 we would never have to wait for(a.k.a they promised no gender lock, so we wouldn't have to wait for genders to be unlocked)

[zeylos]

How do you figure? I think if it turns out we have a content dropoff because they had to reshuffle resources around to accommodate for Male and female genders to the races I am willing to bet the backlash would surpass what we are seeing now. More people would he impacted by lack of content, then lack of genders.

I don't think there would be any backlash considering that they wouldn't have promised that specific content and nobody would even know it's missing, while they did promise no genderlocked races, EVER, back in1.0

[zeylos]

Guys I got an idea. The biggest reason why they say it's hard to make new model is gear ringing, so why don't they just take another model and change it a bit and change it's head? Similar to what they did with the hrotgar but with eleven model maybe. Add different animations and racial gear and done. The only gear they'd have to ring is headgear and I doubt many ppl would mind not having it visible since it's also not visible on new races. If they took this path they could do male viera fast and without many issues and I think it'd be waaaay better than what we currently have

[zeylos]

Wow
Amazing art by runescratch tumblr

[SoloWingMetatron]

Guys I got an idea. The biggest reason why they say it's hard to make new model is gear ringing, so why don't they just take another model and change it a bit and change it's head? Similar to what they did with the hrotgar but with eleven model maybe. Add different animations and racial gear and done. The only gear they'd have to ring is headgear and I doubt many ppl would mind not having it visible since it's also not visible on new races. If they took this path they could do male viera fast and without many issues and I think it'd be waaaay better than what we currently have

Honestly I think all races bodies are made from the same two base models (male/female). We know the devs use ZBrush as a staple tool in their development. The beauty of ZBrush is that it allows you to alter models you have created on a separate new layer without affecting the base model beneath. A common development trend in modelling high poly assets, is to just use a base model that already has all the integral topology and geometry in place and then simply just alter it on a separate layer to then save off as a new asset. This is why we tend to see very similar details in the races body types.

A new variant of the base male mesh for Viera would of course cause clipping issues with current gear assets...those assets would need to be altered in places where a clipping anomaly has appeared with the new body proportions. However this does not mean creating a whole new asset for the gear. Just like with the body models it would be a case of editing the base gear asset on a new layer to match that of the male Viera. This would most likely just be resizing certain parts of the asset to remove clipping issues and possibly re-skinning certain vertices that may not work correctly with the new racial animations.

Your idea of simply just taking an existing races variant of the base mesh and just replacing the head would indeed work....however that means the male Viera would have bodies identical to what ever races body type they were "cloned" from. Personally I would much rather wait for the devs to develop a new body variant for the male Viera. Even if that means waiting till 6.0