Gender locked race?

[myahele]

Assuming we'll have gender-locked races for the upcoming expansion, I wonder how likely it will be if they can release the opposite sexes of the new races in 6.0 if enough people complain.

[Lacan]

Assuming we'll have gender-locked races for the upcoming expansion, I wonder how likely it will be if they can release the opposite sexes of the new races in 6.0 if enough people complain.

I could see it happening, but announcing them as even temporarily gender-locked is still going to sour the new races for a lot of people. I don't get the logic behind it. Why spring a brand new race (with 0 ingame buildup for it) on people with 5.0 when they could just release male/female viera as a set and be done with them before starting on the next. They're making it complicated for the benefit of no one. They already know people want male viera. Why are they making a new male only race just for the sake of it?

I guess we'll just have to wait to Japan fanfest to find out more, the leaks have just made everything messy! lol

[redcurrant18]

Assuming we'll have gender-locked races for the upcoming expansion, I wonder how likely it will be if they can release the opposite sexes of the new races in 6.0 if enough people complain.

If I have to wait until 6.0 to play male Viera I may as well hold off on buying Shadowbringers and only come back when I see them adding the aspects of the game I'm interested in. 6.0 would be a wait of 2 more years, which is a lot to pay sub money for. I would be better off doing something else during that time. Now, adding them as an unlockable race in an early patch would not be too much of a long wait, so I would only have to pause my sub for a few months. I still shouldn't have to do this because of broken promises or homophobic designers being too grossed out by male bunnies.

My character's appearance and glamour is crucially important to how I enjoy playing games like this where customization is such a major component. If I don't like how I look in the game, it creates a jarring experience that makes me feel disconnected from the story. That being said, things get old, my current equipment/hair/race gets old, and then I feel like changing it to something new. There are countless options for equipment and hair, so I have no fear that ever getting stale. However, if all I have are the same racial options for my gender, with a brand new race being teased but turning out to be female only, I will be very upset.

My method of protest is simply not spending money on Shadowbringers and being as vocal as I can about advocating for male Vieras on the forums. $40 is a lot to pay for an expansion that doesn't meet my expectations, and I refuse to hand over money for a product I deem incomplete.

[Lacan]

People forget they've already shown art for the male viera too. It makes absolutely 0 sense not to include them. They've had them designed since Heavensward. The only reason why we're getting viera at all is because people saw that art and never stopped asking for viera. The genderlock thing is completely out of left field. No clue why anyone would support that, especially for something silly like "they couldn't design them to please everyone!" as if that is possible with any of the races in the game. Deleting the males entirely is a really stupid answer to that.

[Tharne]

They said Viera was the last race they'll be doing for FFXIV, what if it's true because they've been working on Hrothgar for longer.

In the French files Hrothgar was listed before Viera so maybe it was added first for testing in-house and then they added Viera when they decided to make them after popular demand. When someone made a copy-paste into the live game code they made a mistake.
^Me trying to find a way to justify this theory.

Still it could be true (not the part about the files, the one about them working on Hrothgar for longer than Viera) and if that's the case, is it right to say that they should just toss the work they wanted to add in their game and just do what some players want ?

After that we still have multiple possibilities based on this theory :
-They were working on Hrothgar when they decided to add Viera but only the male H was usable, they decided to make Female Viera only because they didn't have enough time to finish Female H and Male V.
-They were finished with Hrothgar, decided to add Viera but didn't have time to make Male V.
-They were working on Hrothgar but couldn't find a good way to make the female work, they decided to make Female Viera to give a female option to players.
-They were working on both at the same time but only Male H and Female V were near completion.

In case 1,2 and 4 that's kinda good, because they could just finish them and add Female H and Male V during 5.X patches. Or they could just not add them (which is doubtful).
In case 3 though if they really don't know how to make Female H work but did a lot of work on Male H they just won't toss it aside, imo, so we're stuck with Male H and Female V only. (until they find a way to make it work or not)

Or what I wrote is just horseshit and they just didn't want to make Male V and made a Male lock race.
Or this is just them messing with us and there are no Hrothgar.

[Lucan_Astral]

I was really looking forward to playing a male Viera. If they decide to gender lock the classes I'm gonna have to take time off to cool down. I've not played a single game where they have a male rabbit eared demi-human type race (despite it being my favorite type of race), so was immensely looking forward to this.

Male Viera exist in Lore, albeit currently rare. So any attempt to gender lock this race can only be seen as greedy. Like with what TERA did with Elin, by releasing Elin exclusive/female exclusive classes because the majority of users who spend money on costumes are female character players. Also, this will be the first gender locked class for this game and I'm worried this is going to start FFXIV down a bad path since NOBODY wants a gender locked class at all. There's no reason for it to exist in Lore and so there must be an ulterior reason as to why they want to add a gender locked class.

So SE please don't go down this path. I don't want this game to be ruined like TERA.

[Mikki]

I was really looking forward to playing a male Viera. If they decide to gender lock the classes I'm gonna have to take time off to cool down. I've not played a single game where they have a male rabbit eared demi-human type race (despite it being my favorite type of race), so was immensely looking forward to this.

Male Viera exist in Lore, albeit currently rare. So any attempt to gender lock this race can only be seen as greedy. Like with what TERA did with Elin, by releasing Elin exclusive/female exclusive classes because the majority of users who spend money on costumes are female character players. Also, this will be the first gender locked class for this game and I'm worried this is going to start FFXIV down a bad path since NOBODY wants a gender locked class at all. There's no reason for it to exist in Lore and so there must be an ulterior reason as to why they want to add a gender locked class.

So SE please don't go down this path. I don't want this game to be ruined like TERA.

In the 1.0 version of FFXIV, miqote were female only and roegadyns as well as highlanders were male only.
Many people demanded for the missing genders to be added and Yoshi P was surprised by the demand and decided to add them in for 2.0. However, I'm more of the suspicion that it was a way to add more in the "race" department (new playable types at any rate) without having to commit to new races entirely which would require a lot more design and would require some world changing to include the new race as well (adding them with expansions is easier than with the base game). And at the time, they wanted to make good with the customers too.

I'm wondering if they might start with female only and introduce the missing gender later on. I can't believe that Yoshi P would overlook this, honestly. Surely he knows the demand is there - this race has been begged for since the game re-launched. But old interviews where he said male bunnies would be "weird" are a bit distressing. Still, after that interview they had shown concept art of male viera. Who knows. It's really a toss up at this point. But I'm sure he isn't blind to the fact that the large majority of people hate gender locking.

[cicatriz313]

Wasn't the concept art for Viera shown simply as a "we considered this, but instead we went with au'ra" rather than a "this is viera, it is coming, hold us accountable to it"?

[Penthea]

Wasn't the concept art for Viera shown simply as a "we considered this, but instead we went with au'ra" rather than a "this is viera, it is coming, hold us accountable to it"?

If that's the case then that was an incredibly stupid move by SE because by doing this they set themselves up to have a huge amount of players disappointed in them. If they were already sure that they weren't going to have viera, then they should have said nothing about them.

[Shippuu]

Your views of the matter are so twisted. some blame for why people are angry about it? What?

So I should have used majority instead of some.

If the concept art was really such a taboo for Yoshida then he should never have shown the concept art in the first place. It's almost as though being transparent with your playerbase implies you're committing yourself to what you're showing them, alternatively be transparent all the way and say, out right, it will never be used

Yoshida often makes it a point to never commit strong language towards NOT doing something, because things can always change. He has been incredibly transparent when it comes to male Viera, such as flat out saying he would probably do a male only race equivalent as a counterpart to viera, or after showing concept art of viera he still claimed the males looked too cute. People just don't like that he held those beliefs and so refuse to give those comments any merit or consideration.

If he showed it to us then he needs to grow up as a person and as a professional and deal with it.

That's hilarious. No one is saying he shouldn't "deal with it" if it comes to backlash against the race. But as a professional, and the director of the game, if he chooses to do one thing, that's his choice. He doesn't need to kowtow to the playerbase just because he decided to go a different direction over something as trivial as a player race.

Being held hostage? That's a massive overstatement. It's not like people are unsubbing in protest, or intentionally creating problems in the game to get SE's attention.

You clearly haven't read through a lot of this thread (I don't blame you). Plenty of people have threatened to unsub if they don't get what they want. One individual even demanded Yoshida should resign if they don't get bunny men.
But then I never said SE WAS being held hostage, I was stating it because plenty of individuals here have acted like they SHOULD be. That they should be absolutely required to do something just because of some concept art, that if they don't deliver on that it'd be such a huge negative to the game (it wouldn't be).

What you're labelling as extreme behaviour is actually very tame.

I'm labelling it as an extreme over-reaction to something that absolutely won't be as big of an issue as many here seem to imply. If Viera don't get males, people will be upset and stamp their feet and that's it. Yoshida will probably be pestered about it during some Q&A maybe, and that's it. He may add them later, who knows.

The forums exist for feedback and players saying they want male viera is feedback. And it's not baseless feedback either. Genderlocking has been frowned upon by the playerbase for a very long time to the point that any that was present in 1.0 was removed in 2.0, and SE have already shown us male viera.

[Citation Needed] on where I said players couldn't, or even shouldn't give their feedback on this? And sure most people don't agree with genderlocking, but it does exist in this game in many cosmetic forms, and just because past racial genderlocking was undone doesn't exclude future ones from happening, especially when the director himself said he might do it for Viera specifically. There was also additional motivation to undo 1.0's genderlocking that is currently not present right now.

Showing concept art =/= it will be added to the game.