Gender locked race?

[Roda]

Considering that only male lions grow manes, I'm pretty certain Hrothgar is going to be male-only, leaving Viera to be female-only.

time to be a fun-fact police and say "Well actually lionesses can grow manes." It's just kind of a thing that happens.

[wereotter]

More to the point, there's only 1 white mage that isn't padjal - an unplayable NPC race.

Padjal aren't exactly a race, though. As you do the level 60-70 white mage quests, you learn more about this, but basically people are chosen to be padjal by the elementals. We follow one person going through that kind of call during those quests.

To quote wonderful GoldenTot :

*drives my car past Rathalos to get into the new NieR raid*

mAlE vIeRa JuSt AiN't LoRe FrIeNdLy

Besides. Male Miqo'te, Raen, and Duskwight are rare too. Pitiful excuse.

Don't forget to put on your Garo glamor while your drive there. And maybe your Yo-Kai watch?

[Metsonm]

It's just baffling, though. Why give us two half-races and deal with years of asking when we're getting the counterparts instead of doing the same amount of work, giving us a full race, and leaving the playerbase satisfied?

[Tsumdere]

-snip-

The first thing that popped into my head was the Asmodians from Aion. Both genders had "manes". They don't exactly follow the text book definition, but were called them. Second thing I thought was that horses have manes as well. Regardless, manes + blufever saying lion race all along does seem pretty nail in the coffin for lion-esque over horse lol.

---

I had a couple of thoughts regarding these Hrothgar, and I thought I would throw them out there.

1. Could it be possible that these Hrothgar are male Vieras? Perhaps it is possible that because they live separately, the males have coined their own names for themselves. After all, we can assume that historians and the wandering dramaturge have only talked to the females with males being elusive and aggressive.

2. I hope this makes sense because I'm not sure which words to use - Why would Hrothgar and Viera be listed with both male and female pronouns and descriptors? Some are saying it's for consistency in the code, but Au Ra are written in as just l'Ao Ra while everyone else is la Viera/le Viera. They've established a precedent for reducing the race code to just one instance of it, so why couldn't they just write one la/le for Hrothgar and Viera? Not to mention, there was flat out shown to be an instance of an NPC describing a Viera as "beau" when they could have used "belle". Strange to call a woman "handsome". Then again, I don't speak French.

tl;dr I'm cautiously optimistic. If they do two full races, I will be absolutely blown out of the water and ecstatic. If they do Viera female/male Hrothgar, I will only be slightly disappointed as long as the males aren't beastly. However, they'll set themselves up for an absolute endless storm of "Give Male Viera!!!!/Give Female Hrothgar!!!!" If they do the sexy female and ugly male trope, I will be very, very disappointed. Give us both hot males and females AND beastly males and females.

[stopatfiveorsixstores]

Regardless, surely they'd know that adding supposedly genderlocked races means they'd get requests for the opposite sex. They'll cave eventually, I think. The silver lining: If we don't get male viera/lionesses in 5.0, we'll get them eventually, as long as we keep asking for them. Just offering some positivity in the worst case scenario that both Viera and Hrothgar are genderlocked.

[Hunky]

time to be a fun-fact police and say "Well actually lionesses can grow manes." It's just kind of a thing that happens.

That's true. There have been lionesses that grow manes.

If there were to be female Hrothgar, then of course they'd probably have access to all the current female hairstyles (including the long ones). Perhaps then that line of "majestic mane" would apply as well.

[Serenno]

snip

The Au Ra thing isn't any sort of sign, it's just because in French if you're going to say Le/La and the following noun starts with a vowel, it becomes L' . It's actually a language thing. And Beau appeared because the person who talked to the npc was male but you're right! It'd say "belle" instead for female.

[Yasminou]

I hope this makes sense because I'm not sure which words to use - Why would Hrothgar and Viera be listed with both male and female pronouns and descriptors? Some are saying it's for consistency in the code, but Au Ra are written in as just l'Ao Ra while everyone else is la Viera/le Viera. They've established a precedent for reducing the race code to just one instance of it, so why couldn't they just write one la/le for Hrothgar and Viera? Not to mention, there was flat out shown to be an instance of an NPC describing a Viera as "beau" when they could have used "belle". Strange to call a woman "handsome". Then again, I don't speak French.

For au ra, in this example, whether the player character is male or female, the output will always be l'Ao ra so there is no need to check the gender. But if the output were pretty/handsome au ra, it would have been distinguished into le bel ao ra / la belle ao ra.

However, even if Viera and the other race are genderlocked, we could imagine that in the future, they will not. Therefore, putting the code to distinguish the output now is a good way to prevent any bug later after the implementation of their other gender.

[HadesNight]

SE is allowed to make their FFXIV races genderlocked no matter what type of lions are in other games. They get to create their lore from the ground up if they call this race by any other name than Ronso.

Calling them Ronso would come with the expectation that it follows the standards from FFX and there are female Ronso. But saying "hey we created a new race unique to FFXIV". Lore wouldn't dictate that there needs to be females unless they wanted that.

To clarify, I personally rather not hear the whining, so I want male Viera just to sate the "I deserve to be a male bunny even though more than 50% of irl males in this game play girl characters. "

But overall if we got a masculine male lion race with decent facial hair/beard options (I'd assume that's the trade off to the fact women Viera are getting optional bangs) that would be ridiculously cool!

[HadesNight]

For au ra, in this example, whether the player character is male or female, the output will always be l'Ao ra so there is no need to check the gender. But if the output were pretty/handsome au ra, it would have been distinguished into le bel ao ra / la belle ao ra.

However, even if Viera and the other race are genderlocked, we could imagine that in the future, they will not. Therefore, putting the code to distinguish the output now is a good way to prevent any bug later after the implementation of their other gender.

Or... It's a copy paste of existing code that has male/female identifiers and it's ok to leave that in because even if there is only female Viera and Male lions, the if/then statement would only ever use the one.

Considering the numerous amount of instances that code is probably in the French Localizations version of the game I wouldn't be surprised if they copied and pasted the new Viera/Lion code in just to save time so it's uniform and didn't require a difference.