Viera and Hrothgar Megathread

[TW-Luna]

What more is there to say? At this point modders have effectively jury-rigged a solutions to a problem that Square has officially and unofficially refused to even acknowledge for two years now. But modding is bad, right guys?

Say what you will about the quality of the work, but it's pretty jarring when you see that.. eeeh.. I'd say +85% of all helms in the game looks just fine on Viera/Hrothgar after just checking a box in the metadata of the helm. There are some helms, at least for Viera, that are very tight to the head and cause a situation where the ears float above the top of the helm; but I'd say that's about 10% of all helms at most. (Examples off the top of my head are the Judge helms from Bozja) Honestly, it feels like most of the issue was just making Viera hair compatible for helms, which a couple of separate modders have tackled. Creating versions that pad down the hair when a helm is showing.

Now, Square never said to expect helms, but it would be nice to have an explanation as to why it is such an impossibility yet people in their free time are solving the problem. What I WILL hold Square accountable for, though, is absolutely no new hairstyles for either race all expansion and not a freaking peep about it either. We were promised more hairstyles and even the wording during that statement was nebulous enough to wonder if he meant old purchasable hairstyles would be included. But no, nada, nothing. Not one iota of a comment on Viera or Hrothgar.

[MariaArvana]

Now, Square never said to expect helms, but it would be nice to have an explanation as to why it is such an impossibility yet people in their free time are solving the problem.

Because modders aren't restricted by milestones, deadlines or a boss that directly tells you what you can and can't work on, or has to review your work each time you submit something and can tell you to do it again or veto your work entirely to start over.

Square could no doubt easily fix the Viera/hrothgar helm situation, if they wanted to sacrifice an entire patch's worth of content to do so. The issue comes from the fact that every patch, there's literally hundreds to thousands of brand new models being made with each major patch, and in some cases, entirely brand new zones filled to the brim with assets. A modder can easily make a helmet fit a Viera or make one of the old hairstyles work for Hroth/viera. Ask them to do that along with making a 50 other models in a 3-month window (all of which -have- to be done as a priority over the Viera hair) and they have to submit their work to a master 3D modeler who has very particular standards or they get rejected. it'd be a much different story then.

The only point I'd agree is that they could have made the new hairstyles & helmets working on Viera & Hroth since it wasn't a case of old stuff having to be updated, but new stuff that was being created from scratch anyway. It's never been an issue of money, it's been an issue of workload & time they don't have in their short patch windows. Viera and Hrothgar only got glasses/light headpieces in time for SHB because the 3D modders spent countless man hours of their own free time to do so. That alone should be telling of how tight their workload is. From the very onset of SHB, I called they wouldn't get any updates until 6.0 at the earliest. past history has shown countless times how tight their dev windows are, so its easy to know when to expect something is on the backburner or not if its not mandatory to a major patch release.

My only guess on why they haven't even done new stuff is because they just want to do a blanket all at once release, lest they get even more complaints from people going "but why that helmet and not this one? Why that hair and not this one?".

[TW-Luna]

Square could no doubt easily fix the Viera/hrothgar helm situation, if they wanted to sacrifice an entire patch's worth of content to do so.

There is no correlation here. Giving Viera and Hrothgar hats will not cost a patch worth of content; or to use the meme, "Cost a Raid Tier". (Besides, Square is already doing that themselves with the lack of Beast Tribe capstone among others, but that's a different thread)

And to make clear, the big Viera hats mod out there currently, the person who made that simply went into the metadata of each existing hat and simple clicked a checkbox to turn the hat on, that's it. They didn't do any adjusting of any existing assets. Yes, not every helm and hat looks good like that, but the lion's share certainly does.