Female Hrothgar as a playable race. Show your support!

[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.