So they used people's fanart as inspiration? I'm surprised that they did not ask Matsuno for any input considering they are working together

Q: : Viera male was announced, is it an FFXIV original design?

Yoshi: Yes, we have decided we aren’t going to introduce any more races when we introduced the 2 new races in ShB. Of course I would love to have more races in-game but this is pushing the system and forces it to calculate and deal with more assets. With that said, players from all over the world have been asking for more beast-like races similar to that of Miqo'te .

I cannot stress how hard it is to put 2 races in one expansion, when I consulted with the graphic design team they said “I will give it a try if Yoshida san really wants to do this but it is not realistic to do 2 races at the same time. As we begin to look at what races to create, we noticed there is an overwhelming amount of FFXII lovers asking the question “can this really not be done?”. A huge amount of players had made fan art based on the female version of Vieira and we kind of draw inspiration from their works.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...about_new_job/