Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
At the end of the day, one of the reasons that 1.0 was considered to be a flop was due to the presence of gender locked playable races. Yoshi-P acknowledged that and added the gender locked playable races in full when 2.0 was launched.

It didn't take him long to backtrack, though - I've posted it a few times already across this thread, but in an old interview he stated that if viera were to be added to the game, they'd be gender locked and some other single gender race would be added to compensate for the lack of viera men.

Surprise, surprise...that's exactly what ended up happening years later...almost as if it wasn't an authentic attempt to 'compromise' at all and something that was planned for a while.

My guess is that he didn't expect the demand for male viera to be quite so strong, or the backlash to be as fierce. Though either way it's worrying because it's not the only element of character customisation where things have been lost in translation. For example, despite being a very common and popular request he claimed to be 'unaware' that there was a demand for facial hair for male characters.

Which is strange...because he's in charge of FFXVI and designed the protagonist to have facial hair after the time-skip and all the promotional footage involving FFXIV's Warrior of Light/Darkness has had custom made stubble lately...
I was in 1.0 and there were a million and a half reasons why it was a disaster but the genderlocked races/clans were never really mentioned. I remember a topic on the forums mentioning wanting roegadyn women because of a quest item in the game that was a coin with a roe gal on it but that was pretty much it. There was no long page demanding male miqo'te or anything else like there is with male viera. Yoshi P announcing that they're actually coming and then opening them up was a very welcome surprise for ARR, but it wasn't something that was being really clamored for.

Whenever I see the whole 1.0 situation brought up it feels like either they weren't there and are misattributing current feelings for male viera onto the situation 10 years ago, or I somehow missed the forum discussion and was in circles of people who just didn't care as much. But still, saying that genderlocked races were a part of why 1.0 was a failure is like saying that your floor lamp doesn't match the rest of your living room set when your house only has 3 walls and half a roof.