Quote Originally Posted by Lumivyory View Post
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.