Possible Ideas to Address Hrothgar/Viera Hat Disparity?

[reivaxe]

Yes, but the freedom to customize your ears at the cost of everything else is pretty worthless with only 4 options, they could've done something really unique with the ears instead since they never intended to account for hats anyway.

For example: More ears with distinct silhouettes like asymmetry with 1 lop ear and 1 straight (and then a mirrored option for taste), ears with longer fur, Fran's more rounded and speckled ears, ears going out more horizontally from the base rather than straight up or back, a very short type for people that want to RP as a Feol, maybe even some of that iconic black ornamental Viera plating you could add, remove and dye to dress up the ears a bit to match your armor.

There really didn't need to be only 4 options, with 3 of them being pretty samey, of the racial feature you really wanted to highlight and remain unhidden by hats. And lastly of course more than 8 hairstyles.

Any of these options wouldn't have completely stopped people asking for more headgear but it would have gone a long way to show they made an effort and it was at least slightly worth it, because right now it just isn't.

Like I said, I disagree with how they implemented these races. But to me there's no real point living in the land of Shoulda-Coulda, it is what it is ... it's a core design decision they're not going to change and we can only hope that if they make the counterparts they do something different that's less limiting and learns from the backlash.

Like ... the Viera as is are atrociously bad from a character design PoV in a MMO setting. They suffer from twining because they have human skin colors + Gray and the only thing that makes them different from what's in the game already is their ears. So they effectively put in a race of humans that have only a FRACTION of the hair styles as any other race before it (and of these 8 hair styles most land on using the same popular 3 "best looking ones"), gave them 4 ears (only 2 of which are commonly used, 1 is objectively ugly cause of lack of animation) and took away the option to use hats and helms to change the shape of their head. They're basically the least visually diverse option in this game and once they thought about the limits they would have the Devs/ YP should have pulled the plug on them, either going back to making full Hrothgar or just made up a bunny like race that uses the Miqote head and told people "Yeah, we decided to make these new FF14 races inspired by the Viera and Ronso". (Seems clear to me that many people would have been happy af at just getting an updated Miqote with longer, Spiggan like ears and a fat fluffy Happy Bunny tail they can customize).

But that doesn't make a difference anymore so ehh, it's a fuck up that may only be changed in some kinda "FF14: Part 2" sequel, or maybe they will find some way to make a system they're ok with to allow for hats and helms (I'm sure most hrothgar wouldn't mind their manes going away when they wear a hat and maybe Viera players wouldn't whine about getting stock ears that poke downward from underneath the brim of a hat).

[Yencat]

Like I said, I disagree with how they implemented these races. But to me there's no real point living in the land of Shoulda-Coulda, it is what it is ...

Maybe not, but that was basically the point of the thread so that's what I responded to.

If they can't give them headgear there are still other things they can do to alleviate the feeling that you're playing totally busted races, there's no reason they can't still do this and they've said as much themselves.

Now whether that statement was just to placate players or they actually want/intend to do something about it remains to be seen.

[reivaxe]

Maybe not, but that was basically the point of the thread so that's what I responded to.

I thought the point of this thread was " Possible Ideas to Address Hrothgar/Viera Hat Disparity" and not to live in the shoulda-coulda lands. Like I said, I think they were poorly implemented with everything set up against them adding head stuff later ... but nothing can really come from being stuck on that and I didn't think of this thread as a "What could they do besides adding hats to help this half baked race?". The devs did what they did, leaving a fat hurdle to jump over if they decide to do it.

This was and has always been my answer to how they could get hats to work ...
"But that doesn't make a difference anymore so ehh, it's a fuck up that may only be changed in some kinda "FF14: Part 2" sequel, or maybe they will find some way to make a system they're ok with to allow for hats and helms (I'm sure most hrothgar wouldn't mind their manes going away when they wear a hat and maybe Viera players wouldn't whine about getting stock ears that poke downward from underneath the brim of a hat)."

As in this.
(shit 3:30am drawing but w/e, visuals work better)


Make a pair of stock ears and have them be a part of the "hat hair model" or hat model. Boom, no having to alter models for holes in 100s or 1000s of hats that were never made to have holes in them, no comically large "ear socks/ mittens". Just turn off the ears, plop a large hat on and make the "culled hair model" have 2 ears sticking outta the bottom like this or have them attached to the hat like that. They have shown that they make custom head gear for other races often ... they just don't make more than 1.

So yeah, either they disregard the 4 types of ears to make this idea work OR they make ... 4 different types of hat hair models or hats to make this idea work. Tis the problem. But it's by all means a viable idea that could work with how things currently are as far as I know.
(Hrothgar are easy, just turn off mane.)

But who knows if even that could work. Even when they give Viera hoods things go bonkers outside of it looking like trash (like the Bozja Aiming hood. Last I checked for w/e reason the goggles float through the ears when you visor on Viera ... IDK what kinda spaghetti code they're dealing with but this is my best crack at it)

[Yencat]

<snip>

This thread has been full of suggestions ranging from just letting things clip, to not bothering with hats at all and just giving more hair, to even outright deleting the races (lol), so I'm not sure what it is about my posts that stands out so much for being off-topic?

I definitely wouldn't be opposed to having a pair of stock ears hanging down under a hat, but as was discussed earlier in the thread certain Viera hairstyles (like the one with the black helmet baked into it and it's 2 clones) would be very difficult to partially cull or squish to make the hat sit properly without stretching the texture unless they make one universal "hat-hair" with the stock hanging ears.

That's when some of the posts veered off into what other things they could do if they couldn't work with the hairstyles.

It all hinges on how stubborn they are about their no-hats stance. If they're open to making hats work then by all means I'm all for your suggestion, if not then giving other customization options such as more ears/hair/manes/whatever to make up for it is another option.

At the end of the day it's not like they come here looking here for suggestions anyway so it's all speculating and theorizing either way.

[Raikai]

I thought the point of this thread was " Possible Ideas to Address Hrothgar/Viera Hat Disparity" and not to live in the shoulda-coulda lands. Like I said, I think they were poorly implemented with everything set up against them adding head stuff later ... but nothing can really come from being stuck on that and I didn't think of this thread as a "What could they do besides adding hats to help this half baked race?". The devs did what they did, leaving a fat hurdle to jump over if they decide to do it.

This was and has always been my answer to how they could get hats to work ...
"But that doesn't make a difference anymore so ehh, it's a fuck up that may only be changed in some kinda "FF14: Part 2" sequel, or maybe they will find some way to make a system they're ok with to allow for hats and helms (I'm sure most hrothgar wouldn't mind their manes going away when they wear a hat and maybe Viera players wouldn't whine about getting stock ears that poke downward from underneath the brim of a hat)."

As in this.
(shit 3:30am drawing but w/e, visuals work better)


Make a pair of stock ears and have them be a part of the "hat hair model" or hat model. Boom, no having to alter models for holes in 100s or 1000s of hats that were never made to have holes in them, no comically large "ear socks/ mittens". Just turn off the ears, plop a large hat on and make the "culled hair model" have 2 ears sticking outta the bottom like this or have them attached to the hat like that. They have shown that they make custom head gear for other races often ... they just don't make more than 1.

So yeah, either they disregard the 4 types of ears to make this idea work OR they make ... 4 different types of hat hair models or hats to make this idea work. Tis the problem. But it's by all means a viable idea that could work with how things currently are as far as I know.
(Hrothgar are easy, just turn off mane.)

But who knows if even that could work. Even when they give Viera hoods things go bonkers outside of it looking like trash (like the Bozja Aiming hood. Last I checked for w/e reason the goggles float through the ears when you visor on Viera ... IDK what kinda spaghetti code they're dealing with but this is my best crack at it)

I like the idea of the ears down to avoid clipping issues through the ear length x tall helms, but in both examples you drew (esp. the cap, that is as flat as it can get), it would be perfectly fine to have the holes on top of the hats though!

[reivaxe]

I like the idea of the ears down to avoid clipping issues through the ear length x tall helms, but in both examples you drew (esp. the cap, that is as flat as it can get), it would be perfectly fine to have the holes on top of the hats though!

Top hat would look tragic with the "Bent ears" and the point is that these hats/ helms were never designed to have "holes on top". It's not an easy task to do, would require making custom versions of hats with custom textures and such which is 1 of the problems.

Tis why I say just have them fit this way. Now, would they disregard the fact that there's 4 types of ears or would they make 4 different versions? No idea, leaning towards it being a no to them cause they would not disregard the player's choice in ear shape and they will not make 4 custom versions of every hat hair model just for Viera.

This thread has been full of suggestions ranging from just letting things clip, to not bothering with hats at all and just giving more hair, to even outright deleting the races (lol), so I'm not sure what it is about my posts that stands out so much for being off-topic?

Never said anything was off-topic, just that it's pointless to focus on how things coulda or shoulda been different over thinking of ways to fix what the devs gave us.

Adding 4 more ears isn't going to do much about the core problem with the race having the least amount of visual diversity, their ears are basically knives that stick out of their skull with lil to zero animation and people already ignore 2 of the 4 options cause they're not "cute". Adding twice the amount of hair for a whooping 16 unique styles would only really be a ban-aid at best that wears off once people notice that they all settled on the same ones again (assuming they even do twice the amount. They could easily just do 4, they are strangely frugal with making hair styles).

Another idea I had, sparked by Fox's wording the last time they spoke about it (that they were looking into ways to make some helms (Not HATS, helms) that are unique to Viera) made me think that they may simply pull a "Fran hair". As in, take some other hair styles and make a "Viera Helm" version like this with Mjrn. So basically they just bake a few helms into some Viera hairstyles so that for 2k gil you can either rock the reg hair version or the helm version of that style. Would be inline with how you have the bangs or no bangs version and it's already a thing in game with Fran hair. Could actually do something about the diversity in appearance as even if they can't wear reg hats or helms they have the option for Viera ONLY helms with their hair that can be mixed and matched with head gear they already can wear.

Might be the best option TBH. Though I think my hat idea works it would only really work in a world where they're ok with just ignoring player choice OR in a world where they're willing to put that much effort and memory into a single race just to allow them to have something they told people they wouldn't have. Actually running with the Fran hair idea to give people some helms that are unique to Viera's unique hair styles could be the best bet for "head gear" for this race.

[Raikai]

Top hat would look tragic with the "Bent ears" and the point is that these hats/ helms were never designed to have "holes on top". It's not an easy task to do, would require making custom versions of hats with custom textures and such which is 1 of the problems.

Tis why I say just have them fit this way. Now, would they disregard the fact that there's 4 types of ears or would they make 4 different versions? No idea, leaning towards it being a no to them cause they would not disregard the player's choice in ear shape and they will not make 4 custom versions of every hat hair model just for Viera.

Oh, I totally get it, and I really like your solution, top hat included on that, but just not the examples you drew... Especially the cap. It actually would look quite hard to keep the stifeness of the ears not pulling them back because a cap is just... a cap lol.