Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[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.