Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Lauront]

Anyway, on the topic of the dev interviews:

We wanted to give players options and freedom to choose more races. We envisioned adding a new race, but people really wanted the Viera to play in-game. So if we add another new race that isn’t Viera, people might wonder why we didn’t do Viera, so we had to add them for sure.

We had a big discussion back when we added Au ra in Heavensward about whether to add Au ra or Viera. We knew we only had Female Viera for reference, so we had no idea what to do for the Male variant. We would have to use our own imagination for that. There was fear about how we would approach that. Perhaps an elezen body with a miqo’te face and bunny ears. Would this be the right way to add this race to the game?

It's basically spitballing ideas... in fact, going over past thought processes.

This one is a bit firmer:

With FF12, there are only female Viera appearing in the game. Due to that, we have no design references for the male versions. If we did create a male design for the Viera, he would be quite elegant, handsome, and slim. He would look more like the Elezen race, but with bunny ears.

Note, however, what follows this, which gives further context to the "more like" bit of the above:

What we were missing from the lineup of playable races was someone who looked more powerful and laser-focused on battle, while looking quite fierce. Implementing that kind of race, the dev team could bring more kinds of enrichment to this type of fantasy game. To fulfill player feedback as well as the dev team, we put the two races together.

So whilst I don't disagree that they are probably going to aim for something quite near to the concept art, with an elegant aesthetic, to me the "more like Elezen" comment is just stating a frame of reference rather than fixing on an exact replica albeit with improved proportions.