Female Hrothgar as a playable race. Show your support!

[Nestama]

Appealing to a niche or appealing to a wider audience, which will SE choose? I've got my money on the latter. Plus, refrigerator isn't a natural body shape.

I don't see why they wouldn't go for niche, since they already did it with Hrothguys (anthropomorphic races in fantasy games are apparently not popular, from what I've been told by the FFXIV community on these forums and on reddit) when they could have skipped them completely and just gone with the more (hate to admit, but it's true) popular Viera male/female option.

[reivaxe]

I don't see why they wouldn't go for niche, since they already did it with Hrothguys (anthropomorphic races in fantasy games are apparently not popular, from what I've been told by the FFXIV community on these forums and on reddit) when they could have skipped them completely and just gone with the more (hate to admit, but it's true) popular Viera male/female option.

There's "not popular" and then there's "niche inside a niche". Like ... say Hrothgals looked like Dulia-Chai with an animal head. Sure, some niche group would play that, but how many people who like playing a Khajiit or like furry characters would want to play Dulia-Chai with an animal head? You gotta try to appeal to some reasonable amount with in that group.

And don't take random things people say here at face value. When people talk about furry races not being popular in MMOs my guess is that they're looking at the only MMO people look at for examples, WoW (the definitive example of MMOs). It's true, no furry race in WoW holds a candle to the humans and pretty races ... but that's the thing, WoW has an amazingly silly high amount of races. They have at least 5 races I would consider furry as well as tons of things that would be seen as "ugly humans" like dwarves, zombies, orcs and last I checked ... Mecha-Gnomes? I'd say that the main takeaway from WoW would be that lots of people are willing to play unconventional things.

Someone here said that Khajiit are actually pretty popular in ESO, so I looked up the numbers and ... all the races in that game are fairly evenly played. Khajiit and Argonian are at 10% each, only races above them are high and wood elf (11% each) and Breton (14%) meaning 20% of the people who play ESO want play a walking cat or lizard person. Giving people from WoW and ESO something is the reason they made Hrothgar, to make this game more appealing to people in the west who don't currently play it.

Hrothgar males, with all their limitations, still have a respectable population. Their numbers are between male and female Highlanders. Still, not popular ... but they're doing their job in bringing in new western players and are def on the upper tier of not-popular-races in FF14.

[SturmChurro]

There's "not popular" and then there's "niche inside a niche". Like ... say Hrothgals looked like Dulia-Chai with an animal head. Sure, some niche group would play that, but how many people who like playing a Khajiit or like furry characters would want to play Dulia-Chai with an animal head? You gotta try to appeal to some reasonable amount with in that group.

And don't take random things people say here at face value. When people talk about furry races not being popular in MMOs my guess is that they're looking at the only MMO people look at for examples, WoW (the definitive example of MMOs). It's true, no furry race in WoW holds a candle to the humans and pretty races ... but that's the thing, WoW has an amazingly silly high amount of races. They have at least 5 races I would consider furry as well as tons of things that would be seen as "ugly humans" like dwarves, zombies, orcs and last I checked ... Mecha-Gnomes? I'd say that the main takeaway from WoW would be that lots of people are willing to play unconventional things.

Someone here said that Khajiit are actually pretty popular in ESO, so I looked up the numbers and ... all the races in that game are fairly evenly played. Khajiit and Argonian are at 10% each, only races above them are high and wood elf (11% each) and Breton (14%) meaning 20% of the people who play ESO want play a walking cat or lizard person. Giving people from WoW and ESO something is the reason they made Hrothgar, to make this game more appealing to people in the west who don't currently play it.

Hrothgar males, with all their limitations, still have a respectable population. Their numbers are between male and female Highlanders. Still, not popular ... but they're doing their job in bringing in new western players and are def on the upper tier of not-popular-races in FF14.

With ESO, it's a bit different. At least, unless they have changed things since the year and a half I last played. Races in ESO actually have their own racial passives, and there is a certain level of meta when making player races. There were/are objectively better races at their respective roles (stamina or magicka based). I'm not up to date with the meta there, so I don't know what is best currently for each class/role.

Here, there wouldn't really be any other reason to play a female hrothgar other than the desire to play a female furry race, and if that female furry race was incredibly niche.. their addition would be questionable at best, in regards to resources down the line, in my opinion. It's not surprising that male viera was chosen first, and female viera was chosen over them originally, with this in mind.

[reivaxe]

With ESO, it's a bit different. At least, unless they have changed things since the year and a half I last played. Races in ESO actually have their own racial passives, and there is a certain level of meta when making player races. There were/are objectively better races at their respective roles (stamina or magicka based). I'm not up to date with the meta there, so I don't know what is best currently for each class/role.

Here, there wouldn't really be any other reason to play a female hrothgar other than the desire to play a female furry race, and if that female furry race was incredibly niche.. their addition would be questionable at best, in regards to resources down the line, in my opinion. It's not surprising that male viera was chosen first, and female viera was chosen over them originally, with this in mind.

WoW also has racials and passives, I don't think most of the playerbase for either of those games lets that dictate which race they want to play, seeing as casuals can't really be expected to min-max at the cost of aesthetics.
I actually think most MMOs normally have some racial locks or traits. Hell, the reason I stopped posting art in here was cause I stopped playing FF14 to start playing PSO2 ... didn't know because of the lore that my Cyborg woman was better at shooting guns than magic. Wasn't game breaking, but there were def times when my tech was too low to use a close to end game weapon by a few points

Im curious to know the sub split between female argonian/khajit and males, say is it close to 50/50 or something more like 20/80 female/male

I'm guessing it's a decent split based on search results. I remember the poster here had a female Khajiit and said there were pretty popular/ common and anytime I search Khajiit I see tons of females so ehh.

It's also worth noting that when it comes to 'weirder' playable races a lot of the appeal resides within the story behind them. I'm not one to beat around the bush, so I won't - I think MMO's such as ESO and WoW do a much better job at making their selection playable races feel as though they're an actual part of the game world.

I agree. Western high fantasy has a long history of world building with focus on cultures and RP and such. GW2 to this day still blows me away with how every race has its own zone and starter story that you play through that walks you through their culture and your role in it.

[SturmChurro]

WoW also has racials and passives, I don't think most of the playerbase for either of those games lets that dictate which race they want to play, seeing as casuals can't really be expected to min-max at the cost of aesthetics.
I actually think most MMOs normally have some racial locks or traits. Hell, the reason I stopped posting art in here was cause I stopped playing FF14 to start playing PSO2 ... didn't know because of the lore that my Cyborg woman was better at shooting guns than magic. Wasn't game breaking, but there were def times when my tech was too low to use a close to end game weapon by a few points

When I played ESO, people choosing races for their racials being taken into account was actually very prevalent. I'd read and hear it being talked about constantly in chat, forums, etc. much more than many other games. For example, I like altmer in general, but it's my main primarily because of it's magicka based racials. I should add, it makes sense Breton are so popular, as they are good for magicka builds, and they are humans. So they would be picked for both aesthetics and passives.

As for PSO2, I made a Deuman, for their ATK (pure DPS). I downloaded and started playing PSO2 New Genesis recently, and it looks like that isn't a thing anymore for that version. I've gotta admit, I actually don't like that, I quite like races being made more unique when it comes to the gameplay aspect and stats as well. It's too bad. Gives me a reason to play something other than my main character, or main character race.

Sure, even FFXIV sort of has different racials, but it's so minute it really doesn't matter. So races are chosen for aesthetics here primarily.