Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
Different-shaped flavours of human are going to run differently.
They could, it depends on what exactly is different. Since class animations are shared by all races, it suggests that everyone in Eorzea has a similar range of motion. From a technical standpoint, not every race shares the same skeleton, but a number of them do. It turns out that it is possible to make one race use another's emotes (and even starting gear in some cases), including some of the walking ones, without modifying game code.

But in any case it would primarily a choice for minimising how much data needs to be sent. Other players' computers just need to know your race and that tells it which animations to use as well as which model to display. If you could choose, then it needs to be told that separately.
I don't know exactly how it works in FF14, but I imagine that just making the list of idles/walking animations longer doesn't push us closer to the data limit. There already seems to be multiple choices for walking because it changes with class when a weapon is drawn. It also changes when carrying objects in the MSQ. So if the animation list just contains all the animations, there is no need to pass extra data. We've already also expanded the lists in the past with extra idle animations and new walking animations for parasols.