Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Alleo]

He was ambiguous, he didn't say yes or no. It was a badly worded and extremely vague response. Being Vague is not saying yes. Either he could have just not answered or he could/should just say outright no. People agree to this. But people seem to hate to admit they were the ones that came to the conclusion Male Viera was happening. Also, be fair, why blame Square Enix when the response was from YoshiP?
Just saying.

He was ambigous on purpose. If I remember it correctly they even said that they knew that they would get backlash for the decision of including only half of the genders. And of course being vague does not mean yes but under the circumstances the chance that male vieras would happen was just so big. Why should people assume that SE decided to suddenly go back to horrible gender restrictions? And some of us did point it out and we did get told down. Its the same like alot of topics here. Anyone daring to say something negative and a few people will always come and say that we should just trust SE, that they wont do it. And if they do something which we see as bad we are told that we should wait...

Just like we got told that SE said that we will get new hairstyles for the new races and that we should wait...a whole expansion with the new genders is over soon and we did not get a single one. Of course now the goal post was moved again and we are told that SE never said any specific time so its on us again for being disappointed..

Are people sometimes jumping to conclusions too early? Of course! But a lot of time its also thanks to the hype that the devs like to create.

First of all, Yoshida was not responsible for increasing any hype for any potential male Viera after the Viera reveal fanfest. When asked about it, he told the interviewer to "reread/look at the game's lore." And players quickly checked out the Ivalice raid's dramaturge and discovered that he says something along the lines of "they simply don't exist to us" about the subject. For all people want to get upset over Yoshida for not telling them "no;" the way I still see it, that was his way of letting people down gently and letting them discover the answer to that on their own without subsequently spoiling a major reveal for the upcoming Tokyo Fanfest.

I searched it up.

Ricedigital wrote this after the first fanfest:

In a press conference, Yoshida was asked whether this was going to continue to be the case or whether male Viera would be coming with the 5.0 update to the popular MMO. However, he refused to comment on this matter, teasing that this would be revealed at the Tokyo Fan Fest on March 23rd-24th 2019 (he even did a motion zipping his mouth).

Another site wrote this:

Update: Speaking with Stevivor at a press conference, Producer Naoki Yoshida said that fans will have to wait until Shadowbreakers‘ Tokyo reveal event for more information about male Viera.


Yet another site:
During a Q&A conference with press, game director Naoki Yoshida was asked about the absence of male Viera and the possibility of the race being gender locked to women only. Yoshida refused to commit to an answer, instead remarking that more would be revealed at the Japan Fan Fest, which took place last week. Stirring the pot further, Yoshida also remarked that the Viera would likely be the final race to be added to Final Fantasy XIV, leading many to believe that a reveal of the male Viera options would be coming.


The part you mean is the following which was said after the second fanfest after the backlash started!

In an interview with Gamespot, conducted at the Tokyo Fan Fest, producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida responded to the fan outcry. The key exchange is this section:

"We have to identify what they're coming from, so we can respond correctly," Yoshida said about concerned fans. "We want to review all the feedback that players gave. The bottom line is that the addition of a race takes quite a lot of cost; it's really quite an undertaking."

Yoshida added that in Final Fantasy XII, which is where Viera is from, the male Viera do not show themselves in public, so Final Fantasy XIV Online is staying loyal to the lore with only offering a female option. Yoshida explained that the male-only Hrothgar is Square Enix's effort to offer a new male-only race in response to Viera being female-only.

They also went back on the lore statement later and again flip flopped between reasons afterwards quite a bit...from stating that Hrothgar were created first, to them saying that they choose Viera but saw the want for a more bestial race thus introduced the male Hrothgars too. See just one statement being changed from one interview to the other.

The lore reason is also bad because the NPC mentions the males existing, just that he never saw one.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

--Why should people assume that SE decided to suddenly go back to horrible gender restrictions? And some of us did point it out and we did get told down. Its the same like alot of topics here. Anyone daring to say something negative and a few people will always come and say that we should just trust SE, that they wont do it. And if they do something which we see as bad we are told that we should wait...

--The lore reason is also bad because the NPC mentions the males existing, just that he never saw one.

--Im not one of those people that tell ANYBODY, to "Trust SE" I say that... "I trust SE"
Also....Viera....every game they've been in....you only saw the Females..... Like thats just simp0le math, not matter how you wanna think about it. And if it only happened to the Viera, it would make sense, never seeing the males has been consistent. They COULD break the mold...but will they? If they don't, then they remained consistent with the Viera.
Unlike the Roes and the Miqote

--There is no valid argument that says Male Viera don't exist.
There is however the Valid argument, that every game that featured Viera, we have never seen a male. The point isn't if they exist or not...the point is we have never seen them. And (so far) to this day that is just consistent.
They are NOT an Incomplete Race. They are (so far) as designed since their very creation back in Tactics.

[Cidel]

I searched it up.

Ricedigital...Another site wrote...Yet another site:...

Those are all well and good, but basically all just essentially parrot the same fact that we already established: that Yoshida mostly held back saying anything about their plans and to just wait for the next upcoming fanfest. I've already explained that it is PR on their part to keep them from spoiling their reveals saved for the Tokyo fanfest (in midst of the widely-known leak of Viera and "Ronso" up until that point). Were people expecting them to make all the big announcements at the Paris fanfest and leave the Tokyo fanfest with nothing? To me it just looks and sounds like people didn't hear the answer they wanted right then and there so therefore SE saving reveals for later makes them responsible for incorrect speculation?

And even still- I guess since we're sharing sources about it, here's the question and response from an actual interview he had with Game Watch where he said that hints (about male vieras' likliness) could be found in the Return to Ivalice's lore:

Q: The question everyone got the most excited for at yesterday's press Q&A was the male vieras. Since it's you, Yoshida, we think there'll be male vieras. But in FFXII, male vieras are extremely rare and never appear. How are you going to introduce them into FFXIV?

A: Who knows? I'm a contrarian, so when you say "Yoshida would definitely do this", it makes me not want to answer *laughs* Actually, in the Return to Ivalice story that concluded the other day, there's a ton of lore about vieras in FFXIV. We coordinated with Matsuno-san to include most of the hints there, so please check that. Matsuno-san wrote wonderful texts for us.

https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/doc...w/1167942.html

And people subsequently did read the lore provided up until that point on Vieras from the Ivalice lore NPC. And they found that the males were thus far written to be so reclusive and avoidant of contact that even going searching for one would end in disappointment. The NPC adds at the end that he's never seen let alone heard of one living in the city (Desert Sapphire). "They simply don't exist to us." There was much implying that there would be no male Viera from that lore alone. Push back on lore all you want. I'm not even here to convince anybody that it's why they can never do it (they've already talked about it once the reveals were done). That was Yoshida's "hint" (and hence why I said letting people down gently) to people who could not simply wait til the next fanfest to see what was the male answer to Vieras. It doesn't matter how little lore matters; in this context, that was their excuse as to why you wouldn't see one on 5.0's release. But people didn't care. They continued to grasp at straws and personal theories and it took the actual reveal of Hrothgar to drive that home.

I managed to find the interview. It was from 2013.

Q38: In terms of new races, what kind of races are you looking into and will mixed races be introduced?

A38: I don’t think we’ll have mixed races for a while. Since it seems like Viera is popular around the world we have been proactively looking into this, but since having a rabbit male might be kind of weird, maybe we’ll look into having a separate race for the male counterpart.

Source: https://www.siliconera.com/square-ta...baby-behemoth/

Kinda glad to see this dug up as well. It sort of set-up the precedent for Viera and Hrothgar all the way back when, so the claim that their decision to do what they did wasn't completely out of nowhere nor was it not foreshadowed.