6.2 Hrothgar Update

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

What coulda been means nothing, and "Long patches" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there given we have no reason to think that they would do anything more than 1 an expac, if that. Fact of the matter is that the Graphics team came to YP with their proposal on what they can do/ how they could find the resources to make Male Viera and Female Hrothgar just 6mts after the release of ShB.
So from that moment on, everything was up in the air and subject to change. To me, it's clear that "spend resources making Viera only hair and more Hrothgar $10 heads/ manes, FOREVER" was one of the things chopped off because of that and in no small part because of the constant request for shared hair and not having to pay $10 to change your hair change.

Every hairstyle that the Male Viera were released with was time and money and resources that coulda went towards making unique female Viera hair ... I find it acceptable, personally. Every race would want more unique new hair, ultimately, but quantity is more important and no one wants to be left out of new content rewards. No problem with people feeling the other way, but I do warn against pie-in-the-sky outlooks. "Would I be willing to wait an entire expac to get just ONE hairstyle?" is the way I think it should be addressed, seeing as they were willing to make Viera/ Hrothgar wait over an entire expac to get ANY new hair options.

As someone whose wanted to play female Hrothgar since the reveal of Hrothgar, and is 100% gonna play them provided SE gives them an appealing design, I'd 100% prefer shared hair and I can only hope that they were designed with shared hair in mind.

No duh, we all agree on that.
We live here and now, and I think they should put more effort into making hairs that work for the Hrothgar, as suppose to just lazily fitting old hair.
If you read the post, I said about 2-3 patches, we get more then that in a single Expansion, so over time, assuming they are actively working on it, would could have had several new Hairs for the Hrothgar in ShB. Not just One Hairstyle.
The other races have PLENTY of options, it wouldnt be unfair to give some time to the other 2 races so they could have even close to a quarter of the hairs the others do.
And unlike the other 2 races, they will still also have Plenty of Hat options, some that probly still wont fit Hrothgar and Viera both.
They arnt missing much, but the other 2 races are.

I got curious and checked how many hairstyles for normal races have we gotten since Shadowbringers. The answer is eleven. 11. Four of them are just NPC hairstyles, btw. I'm sorry but expecting five Hroth specific hairstyles in the same time period is kinda rich and your reaction only reinforces the point reivaxe is making. You'd really be looking at 1-2 unique hairstyles per expansion.

I said 2-3 patches....are you discounting or just forgetting we have .5 .8 patches? Those would be part of the patch cycles
But this is of course assuming they are actively working on making hairstyles. Its not an expectation to get 5 hairstyles, its a rough estimation, on the assumption, they are actually being made and worked on.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

And I really wish people would stop asking for unique stuff.

Im not gonna stop asking for Unique stuff. Its a want that may not happen, but hey, we got Bluemage, and we got Viera from asking. So its possible, if we dont stop.
If they are gonna live and die on the excuse "hrothgar hard unique headshape ubuuuu" then I advocate they put in the effort to make some Hair for the Hrothgar.
Cant use the old hair, then make some new hair. Hrothgar barely got anything for how long, take some time to actually give us something.

[reivaxe]

Even if they made them not look like hulking monstrosities, they'd still be pretty niche, let's be honest. I seriously doubt that race counterpart will be worth the consequences towards customization options, gear, etc. for everyone else. Male hrothgar will probably end up being the ones who suffer the most for female hrothgar inclusion, for that matter. Again, I don't think they should have released male viera either, yet. The only way it would be worthwhile is them miraculously making it easier to fit gear, add customization options, hair, etc.. by then.

I don't think au ra are comparable to female hrothgar either. Unless you think they are going to literally just do miqo'te 2.0 where femhroth are more human than bestial.

People don't GAF about Female Hrothgar because they assume they know what they will look like and don't want "that", even though we have a number of cases of sexual dimorphism in this game's races. As someone who loves character design and art, I can personally see a lot of ways for them to be appealing. Even the Finalized art for the queen as well as the Bozja Mural show a more kemono styled face and I'm sure more people would want to play that than the dudes. It doesn't have to be a matter of "Humanized vs animal", it can be a matter of style. Lopp-Moon buns def don't look "human", but they also clearly don't look like realistic rabbits. The simple fact that they decided to make shared hair work on the dudes leads me to believe that they went in a direction of "Design the females with shared hair in mind".

But like I said, the time for worrying about the drawbacks is long gone. Blame the MV stans, they're legit the only reason we're getting both.

[SturmChurro]

...

Yeah, and I'm saying people won't really care about female hrothgar regardless. They might be semi-popular if they were miqo'te 2.0, but even then the whole "human with animal features" niche is really overdone, with miqo'te, au ra, and viera. I just don't think female hrothgar would tear into the other racial numbers much, ESPECIALLY if they weren't small and cute like miqo'te and au ra. If female viera could be smaller, they would be a MUCH more popular race than now. Heck, male viera too would probably be more popular, if we are being real.

A full on furry femhroth just won't pull in the numbers something like a Khajiit in ESO would. For one, a lot of people just like the general Khajitti ES lore, the race in general, in-game metas, AND they actually look relatively decent in ESO - they even get nice little custom hoods and stuff. A full on furry femhroth won't be popular regardless of them being hulking beasts or not. I'm pretty sure SE even knows this since they are delaying them so much. They might be more popular if they weren't made to be hulking beasts, but that's just a drop in the pond. The compromises we have seen for the inclusion of, frankly, all of the limited races has been bad, and the missing sexes even more so. Like I said, anyway, male hrothgar will be the ones who bare the brunt of the inclusion of female hrothgar. The resources that could have gone into just male hroths will then have to be split for the hrothgar race as a whole - granted, they seemingly aren't putting much into male hroth to begin with.

But like I said, the time for worrying about the drawbacks is long gone. Blame the MV stans, they're legit the only reason we're getting both.

I do blame male viera. Female viera should have got the custom hairs!

[Baxcel]

So this will be the 2nd live letter since the community rep commented over on the hrothgar hair megapost and I'm doubting that YoshiP will make any comment about the thread, the responses or give us any feedback on a patch or fix for the ear or the bad choices in hair styles.

Literally a small acknowledgement from him would go a long way to calm us down, but a please look forward to it with no date or insight on that he's been listening or reading our comments will just inflame the cat dads even more.

[reivaxe]

...

Ehh, There's a gradient to how popular something can be expected to be. Highlander tall, updated, full on Miqote (Anime girl face and all) with fur patterns and full head support? Would legit be one of the top played things in the game. On the other end ... these buff af beefed out "Dudes with boobs" I see in the fan art? SE might as well set that money on fire.

I guess I should establish what I consider "Popular", right? Looking at the numbers, any female as popular as Middie Females. So about 52k players. Using that as a base, there's only 3 unpopular female types in the game (Highlander/ Elezen/ Femroe in that order, with Femroe waaaay down there. You can add all 3 up together, and they're still not as popular as Middie females).

The secret to female characters is that, beyond all the concepts and such, people really just want fun dress-up dolls. People aren't getting tired of any niche (I'm sure a race that looks like our lil blue bird child would be hella popular, just like a doggy Miqote race or Mouse ear Lalas) nor is making everything smoll the only way to make something popular. Viera Females are nothing if not a full-blown hit popularity wise, and literally every female from Femroe to Miqote took a numbers drop from converts when they came out for this reason. Could they be MORE popular if they were shorter? Sure, I guess. They could also be more popular if they could wear headgear, 60k+ are great numbers regardless.

Anyway, never been one for the thought of "If it's not first, it's last". Sure, realistically the chances of them making them in a way that would make them one off the top played females are not high ... but I still know there are many ways to make them decently more popular than those 3 female races or Male Hrothgar or even Middies, so I'd never wave the white flag on em, gotta wait to see wtf they look like first. Hell, I know Male Hrothgar would be more popular if they weren't wide af and stood up straight.

A full on furry femhroth just won't pull in the numbers something like a Khajiit in ESO would.

The thing about Khajiit is that ES basically suffers from the ol Western curse of having no/ a boring af artstyle, which FF14 doesn't suffer from. When I look at this, all I see is a realistic cat head on a reg human body. No style, no expressive features, just a reg real looking cat head. The bare basics of "furry race with a not jank body". I know too much about furry artstyles to think that if that can get a strong fandom then more interesting styles can't. Like, after seeing that banging job they did with loporrit, I'm 100% sure that they can make a hella cute and appealing anime cat face if they wish.

[Avidria]

Personally any interest I had in fem Hrothgar was killed deader than dead by the design decisions behind male Hrothgar so
The bizarre limitations and lack of significant changes over the last three years has removed any desire I might have had to play one regardless of what they look like.
Can only speak for myself obviously but I doubt I'm alone in this. I can't even stick to Viera for too long before I get irritated, and it's hands down my favorite looking race in the game.

[SturmChurro]

...

Full on anime miqo'te 2.0 femhroth? Like, I kind of doubt they would do that, but honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I do think it'd be a little weird though. Funny thing about Khajiit in ESO, compared to hrothgar here, I'm pretty sure they actually do do custom hairstyles (or wigs) for them and even their other beast race the argonians.. PLUS headgear works.

[akasha_arts]

Just wanted to show my support as a beyond EXHAUSTED/TIRED Hrothgar player. I think we should all make sure to tune in to the PLL on July 1st and make some noise on Twitch & YouTube. So much to the point that Yoshi-P cannot ignore it

[XiRon]

Just wanted to show my support as a beyond EXHAUSTED/TIRED Hrothgar player. I think we should all make sure to tune in to the PLL on July 1st and make some noise on Twitch & YouTube. So much to the point that Yoshi-P cannot ignore it

It would sure be nice but tbh Im sure the pll on july 1st is just gonna be 20 minutes of "Hey, this is the drop date, this is whats coming" with no print outs or any real info.
I assume ACTUAL pll will be end of July and 6.2 will be mid-August.
Well I hope theres so little to do in Endwalker rn besides Arkasodora dailies Im hoping they don't drag this out any to September. 6.1 dropped in April and I ain't touched lv90 roulette since. I was hoping the Tataru quest would have a dungeon as a preview of the new Trial series but nope.
Anyway I will be pleading in chat for any hrothgar news I hope to god they give us something in 6.2, even just all our base racial hairs would be great. Thats all I expected in 6.1 and oh boy was I wrong to have expectations.