Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Lauront]

Let's please refrain from the personal attacks on both sides of the argument, it no doubt does not present a very positive image to anyone here reading on SE's behalf.

[xbahax92]

You come into a thread with a rude passive aggressive attitude and then complain because ppl tell u their opinion... Interesting

I dont want to be the person and I do understand you very well. But by far in this very thread, you are coming off as a very naive and ignorant person. People are trying to tell you not to set high hopes and also try to explain you to be realistic. Its good to be positive and also good to be supporting and requesting for the things you would like to have and see in the game, but you are just keep going with your own attitude and push away everyone's opinion by telling them "passive aggressive attitude". Dont get me wrong, yes - some have been seriously insulting. Many dont share the same opinion as you, that is normal. But sometimes your ideas get into spacious wishful thinking. And while that might be ":S" for some people, you keep going with that.

I am pretty convinced I'll turn out to be the "boo" guy after posting this, but fine by me. I will risk it.
(speaking in general now) These exeggerations will not help you or anyone on your support campaign, you are rather scaring away your supporters by being fanatics. (Im gonna leave this thread from now on as well. Male Viera to be, or not to be)

[BillyKaplan]

The difference is less players are female and less players play male characters . This is why we see so much favor towards glamour with female characters, something I would imagine the group of people complaining about a lack of male Viera would be aware of.

Then here's the question - why invest so much in male Hroth? Why introduce them at all? Cut costs by reusing the Viera assets on the males instead of making two different races. And then you likely gain a better profit because as has been speculated often enough in this thread, male Hroths would likely not be as popular as male Viera.

You're equating the results of devs pandering to men with the results of pandering to women. These aren't the same.

They are not, nor do they need to be, nor was that even my point. My point is that pandering to people who want male Viera would be more beneficial and profitable than pandering to those who wanted male Hroths.

[Lauront]

Even if there is demand for a beast race, in the abstract, it does not mean that Hrothgar will be able to absorb the full extent of it, precisely because of their variety (which is why I say the 30% or so they comprise in WoW, depending on how you set about defining one, is meaningless as an aggregate.)

It is intriguing how popular lizard men were in the older polls, though I wonder if that in turn was fueled by Bangaa, which do have their adherents much like Viera do. Then you get the crowd wanting an Avian race, and much more besides. Just adding any beast race isn't necessarily going to sate these people.

I understand and appreciate that they may simply have wanted to offer more variety to the players, which could well be true if this isn't the brainchild of some analyst extrapolating from their numbers in other MMOs (which, by and large, are not that impressive barring WoW.)

It's more the idea that adding male Hrothgar is bound to be more profitable than adding male Viera which I contest as a notion. Now one could put forward the counter that Viera males have a diffuse set of options in terms of how they could be designed, but the devs have already narrowed what range they're looking at (i.e. Yoshi's interview comments re Elezen and Matsuno's tweet in favour of a Highlander type body.) They also know which male body types are most popular and should, I hope, have an awareness of what went wrong with Elezen, and how to design something closer to the popularity levels of male Hyur or Miqo'te, or even Au Ra, any of which represents a substantial advance over Roes.

My only hope is that they were simply pressed for time given project constraints and that we'll see the missing gender for each race added in due course, maybe by 6.0.

[Veis_Alveare]

Then here's the question - why invest so much in male Hroth? Why introduce them at all? Cut costs by reusing the Viera assets on the males instead of making two different races. And then you likely gain a better profit because as has been speculated often enough in this thread, male Hroths would likely not be as popular as male Viera.



They are not, nor do they need to be, nor was that even my point. My point is that pandering to people who want male Viera would be more beneficial and profitable than pandering to those who wanted male Hroths.

I follow you, I get it, but somehow people still aren't looking at this from the perspective of SE as expressed by Yoshida.

They wanted to do a beast race for the group of people requesting that.

They wanted to do Viera for the group of people requesting that.

They only had the resources to create two new character models.

If you look at this from that perspective there is no way to create male and female models of two races - that's four models, they've said they had money for two. Of course there would be some reused assets between a race but it certainly isn't that much, between Viera genders I could see ears, skin tones and some hairstyles? The costly part of starting a new race is remodeling all the existing gear and none of that would carry over between genders given that Viera females are very clearly female with female proportions.

[wereotter]

Then here's the question - why invest so much in male Hroth? Why introduce them at all? Cut costs by reusing the Viera assets on the males instead of making two different races. And then you likely gain a better profit because as has been speculated often enough in this thread, male Hroths would likely not be as popular as male Viera.

To be fair, people have been asking for a more beastial race for a long time, and they were disappointed that the Au Ra didn't go far enough in this direction. As Yoshi stated, the hrothgar were in development before the Return to Ivalice raids were confirmed in order to satisfy that demand. Then once they got that, they decided to stop work on female hrothgar to make viera instead since that had also been requested. I can't fault them for not wanting to throw away all the work they already had done on hrothgar to just make male and female viera instead, but I do think they underestimated how big of an issue has been for so many players.

Would male viera be more popular than hrothgar? Probably, and to that end if they can get their other systems for efficient, I can see them adding in the male counterpart for the race in the future. We'll see if they can make that happen, but (slightly off topic) this might be best achieved by trimming down all the armor sets in the game. There's currently no reason apart from modeling for dragoons to have seperate left side armor from monks and samurai. If people are thinking having three melee share the same gear, it's worth pointing out that this is how it already is for tanks, casters, and healers. Or they could make samurai share maiming gear and move ninja and monk to the same gear again. Eliminating one full set of armor to do modeling for frees up at least some resources so that modeling on more race options can exist.

[Lauront]

To be fair, people have been asking for a more beastial race for a long time, and they were disappointed that the Au Ra didn't go far enough in this direction. As Yoshi stated, the hrothgar were in development before the Return to Ivalice raids were confirmed in order to satisfy that demand. Then once they got that, they decided to stop work on female hrothgar to make viera instead since that had also been requested. I can't fault them for not wanting to throw away all the work they already had done on hrothgar to just make male and female viera instead, but I do think they underestimated how big of an issue has been for so many players.

Would male viera be more popular than hrothgar? Probably, and to that end if they can get their other systems for efficient, I can see them adding in the male counterpart for the race in the future. We'll see if they can make that happen, but (slightly off topic) this might be best achieved by trimming down all the armor sets in the game. There's currently no reason apart from modeling for dragoons to have seperate left side armor from monks and samurai. If people are thinking having three melee share the same gear, it's worth pointing out that this is how it already is for tanks, casters, and healers. Or they could make samurai share maiming gear and move ninja and monk to the same gear again. Eliminating one full set of armor to do modeling for frees up at least some resources so that modeling on more race options can exist.

I'm sure we'll find out on 24th May what they're planning to do with that, because there's already been hints at some manner of melee re-categorisation, albeit nothing committal just yet. That would have implications for how the gear sets are shared, if they're re-aligned. I'm kinda hoping for SAM and DRG to be paired up.

[BillyKaplan]

people still aren't looking at this from the perspective of SE as expressed by Yoshida.

You're confusing not understanding their point of view, with vehemently disagreeing with it. I fully admit this was done with the best of intentions, but that's the selfsame thing that paves the road to hell, as the proverb goes.
They reintroduced genderlocks after being the ones to remove that moving from 1.0 to 2.0. Mind you, the removal of genderlocks is one of the things the game is known and praised for, which is part of why this stings as bad as it does.
They've earned every accusation of sexism thrown their way, by virtue of introducing each gender for different reasons. And that's regardless of whether or not you agree they reinforce problematic gender stereotypes (coudl've been negated by introducing aesthetically similar gender matches, which they chose not to do), or how Hroth males were designed for the sake of "diversity" and "artistic integrity" or what not but the Viera females are sexy waifu bait introduced to please the masses (not that Hroth weren't requested, but not in such capacity, nor was it stated as the lone reason for their introduction). There's even criticism floating around about how what we saw already for Viera is in contrast to how they were portrayed in XII as far as mannerism goes (giggly, dainty waifus in the reveal trailer), so that feeds back into that all the more.

Now, mind you, they supposedly went on record saying they knew there would be backlash. This goes beyond "we can't please everyone", this is them knowing that they're doing something wrong on some level, they simply thought the good would outweigh the bad.
And then they proved once again how out of touch they are with the playerbase by failing to predict how badly this would blow up in their faces, both because female Hroths and male Viera were also requested by anyone who wanted those races, as well as the very basic act of going back to genderlocks. You have people who don't care for either race in particular but are reconsidering their support of the game because genderlocks are just that big a dealbreaker for them.

[Madiera]

snip

Here's something. First and foremost, all they had to do (if they haven't already) was to 'borrow' the models from the other races and mildly tweak them, saving them from having to make completely new models from scratch and thus saving themselves time/money. That being said, everything, I wouldn't say was completely planned out, I mean for goodness's sake, they told us, out the gate, that most of the headgear (at least at the time of them reporting it) wouldn't even be wearable for the veira/hrothgar, due to their unique heads, but we're talking about TWO races that effectively cannot wear something everyone else has taken for granted. If that isn't some kind of flub or a sign of some rushed decision making, I don't know what else is.

Not to mention Yoshi and his team have gone on record, shooting down the option to go back and 'improve' the older races (I'm looking at you Male Roes/Hyur's with no eyebrows) by stating at a FF QnA, and I quote "If we changed them, then the people who liked them wouldn't like them anymore." Which.. to me, is so flimsy.. and just a little smug sounding. Especially if you see the numbers of people across the board who play those 'unpopular' races. It's so baffling to me.

[Lauront]

Not to mention Yoshi and his team have gone on record, shooting down the option to go back and 'improve' the older races (I'm looking at you Male Roes/Hyur's with no eyebrows) by stating at a FF QnA, and I quote "If we changed them, then the people who liked them wouldn't like them anymore." Which.. is so flimsy.. and just a little smug sounding. Especially if you see the numbers of people across the board who play those 'unpopular' races. It's so baffling to me.

I wonder if their stance on that has changed, what with comments at the recent Fanfest in one of the guest sessions with Yoshi to the effect that they'd like to challenge themselves regarding character customisation. Certainly hope so.