Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[zeylos]

Yoshi-P outlined the problems with adding viera/hrothgar complete genders in a post right after Shadowbringers dropped, and nothing has changed the situation FFXIV's dev team is in.

If any of you watched the presentation on game production during Liveletter tonight you'd see that they're dealing with 75-85 days per patch to complete each patch cycle, on top of working on the next expansion. His post details the extreme time overhead that adding races adds to the patch cycle. The fact that hrothgar and viera have fewer headgear options and hairstyles is testimony alone to the truth of that.

They simply do not have the time or human resources to add more genders while keeping that tight patch schedule.

It would be great to see new genders, but as of right now the chance is extremely low, and I think it's even lower with covid.

Obviously, he would not open the announcement stream with such disappointing news, or really spend any time on it. Chances are, you'll only find out by its exclusion from the list of features in the 6.0 update.

This team has been able to do some wonderful things in the past, but they just had to push the new Ultimate back to 6.1, and if the reason was that they were working on male viera and female hrothgar, they would have told you tonight.

But the fact they they didn't use that as a reason for pushing back the new Ultimate points to them not being included in 6.0.

They didnt say we arent gwetting them, so I think its soon to say 'NO MALE VIERA FOR 6.0 CONFIRMED'. That being said, Im still keeping my expectations at a bare minimum. I guess we will know at the next fanfest hopefully

[Floortank]

They didnt say we arent gwetting them, so I think its soon to say 'NO MALE VIERA FOR 6.0 CONFIRMED'. That being said, Im still keeping my expectations at a bare minimum. I guess we will know at the next fanfest hopefully

The last thing he said about it was a clear no. Here's Yoshi-P:

"The addition of new playable races will impact more than the development cost of the items added in 5.1 and subsequent updates. Not only will we be transitioning from twelve variations (six races, two genders each) to fourteen, but we will also need to commit more resources to the development of new emotes. While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop. This is a complex problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing more money or people at it, as it impacts both debugging and QA."

This means they literally don't have time to keep up with more than what they had at 5.0 launch and maintain a 3.5 month patch cycle. And you can't just throw money at the problem when the key issue is time.

He goes on to say:

"In summary, these are the circumstances which informed my previous statement that this is likely to be the last time we add new playable races; as at this point in time, it is difficult to see us maintaining our patch update schedule if we have to account for more than seven races and two genders (technically six races with two genders and two races with a single gender, but this is the functional equivalent)."

It would be great to see more genders, but there's been no changes since Yoshi-P made this statement. Point of fact, things got worse with covid and everything got pushed back.

It is not unreasonable to believe they won't be added.

Yoshi-P outlined all of this in May 2019, and then a follow up post on the forums shortly after the launch of Shadowbringers.

[Lumivyory]

He goes on to say:

"In summary, these are the circumstances which informed my previous statement that this is likely to be the last time we add new playable races

Except neither Male Viera nor Female Hrothgar would ever be considered a new race since we already have them in the game.
Yes, Yoshi-P clearly stated that there won't be any more new races coming. He never said there will be no missing genders coming to already existing races.

[wereotter]

Except neither Male Viera nor Female Hrothgar would ever be considered a new race since we already have them in the game.
Yes, Yoshi-P clearly stated that there won't be any more new races coming. He never said there will be no missing genders coming to already existing races.

It's true that they're not technically adding new races, but they would be needing to devote more resources to mesh mapping, bug testing, etc every new piece of armor, every battle animation, every new emote to two new models. They'd be going from testing for 14 character models (possibly 13 since male and female lalafel seem to have pretty similar models and meshes) to 16. And while that seems small, when you consider there are thousands of pieces of armor alone that would have to be fit to the new sexes, that's a massive amount of work. And this isn't just something they could bring temps on to cover since that work would be ongoing with new raid and tomestone gear every patch.

That said... Yoshida in interviews after the announcement of Viera and Hrothgar stated that while they anticipated people would be disappointed, he didn't anticipate just how disappointed they are and how strong the backlash against single sex races would be in the west especially. So if he has been able to convince the bean counters as Square that adding and maintaining the additional sexes would result in greater player satisfaction and additional revenue, be it from subscriptions, the novelty for western players for being the first time to play around male viera, and and fantasia purchases for popularity of the race, and people wanting to change to it... then there's every reason to think he would be open to adding them.

But even back at 5.0 I said that the best expectation of adding them would be 7.0 and that was just reinforced with the pandemic straining development resources. But never know. He did hint in the 6.0 announcement trailer that we'd see Namingway type characters, and that could either just be the second beast tribe, or could be both the tribe and a new playable race. We'll have to wait and see.

[zeylos]

It's true that they're not technically adding new races, but they would be needing to devote more resources to mesh mapping, bug testing, etc every new piece of armor, every battle animation, every new emote to two new models. They'd be going from testing for 14 character models (possibly 13 since male and female lalafel seem to have pretty similar models and meshes) to 16. And while that seems small, when you consider there are thousands of pieces of armor alone that would have to be fit to the new sexes, that's a massive amount of work. And this isn't just something they could bring temps on to cover since that work would be ongoing with new raid and tomestone gear every patch.

That said... Yoshida in interviews after the announcement of Viera and Hrothgar stated that while they anticipated people would be disappointed, he didn't anticipate just how disappointed they are and how strong the backlash against single sex races would be in the west especially. So if he has been able to convince the bean counters as Square that adding and maintaining the additional sexes would result in greater player satisfaction and additional revenue, be it from subscriptions, the novelty for western players for being the first time to play around male viera, and and fantasia purchases for popularity of the race, and people wanting to change to it... then there's every reason to think he would be open to adding them.

But even back at 5.0 I said that the best expectation of adding them would be 7.0 and that was just reinforced with the pandemic straining development resources. But never know. He did hint in the 6.0 announcement trailer that we'd see Namingway type characters, and that could either just be the second beast tribe, or could be both the tribe and a new playable race. We'll have to wait and see.

as for the hint ,I think its really up to interpretation, but it is rabbtis who live on the moon so? Maybe its a hint at male viera maybe its nothing but wel lhave to wait quite a while to see

[Floortank]

Except neither Male Viera nor Female Hrothgar would ever be considered a new race since we already have them in the game.
Yes, Yoshi-P clearly stated that there won't be any more new races coming. He never said there will be no missing genders coming to already existing races.

You're splitting hairs. Yoshi-P is explicitly talking about the additional genders as being the same as adding new races, because as far as work flows, it is the same.

[zeylos]

The last thing he said about it was a clear no. Here's Yoshi-P:

"The addition of new playable races will impact more than the development cost of the items added in 5.1 and subsequent updates. Not only will we be transitioning from twelve variations (six races, two genders each) to fourteen, but we will also need to commit more resources to the development of new emotes. While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop. This is a complex problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing more money or people at it, as it impacts both debugging and QA."

This means they literally don't have time to keep up with more than what they had at 5.0 launch and maintain a 3.5 month patch cycle. And you can't just throw money at the problem when the key issue is time.

He goes on to say:

"In summary, these are the circumstances which informed my previous statement that this is likely to be the last time we add new playable races; as at this point in time, it is difficult to see us maintaining our patch update schedule if we have to account for more than seven races and two genders (technically six races with two genders and two races with a single gender, but this is the functional equivalent)."

It would be great to see more genders, but there's been no changes since Yoshi-P made this statement. Point of fact, things got worse with covid and everything got pushed back.

It is not unreasonable to believe they won't be added.

Yoshi-P outlined all of this in May 2019, and then a follow up post on the forums shortly after the launch of Shadowbringers.

Nope, as far as I'm aware the last thign he said was the interview I linked 1-2 pages ago. Also ofc theyre the last races, but they did say that if they can add the missing genders they will indeed look into it

[Floortank]

Nope, as far as I'm aware the last thign he said was the interview I linked 1-2 pages ago. Also ofc theyre the last races, but they did say that if they can add the missing genders they will indeed look into it

I'd very much like to be wrong and it will be awesome to have them announce it at fan fest. "We're trying" could also mean they show up in 6.x or later though.