Gender locked race?

[SturmChurro]

How can there be thousands? SE's poor servers wouldn't be able to handle it. D':
(also, good.)

I'm just thinking about the lore here! Bunny boys and cat boys will be fighting for who has (way) more than the lore states they do, apparently!

I'm interested to see if buttgirls will actually put up a good fight against cat girls for mantle of most played?

[Skos]

The lore states that nobody has ever actually seen an adult male Viera...

Except for, you know.
The females they breed with every now and then.

[SturmChurro]

Except for, you know.
The females they breed with every now and then.

Nah! They are like Asari!

[Lusavari]

The lore states that nobody has ever actually seen an adult male Viera...

And LIVED.

That's something that means a bit there. But Viera leave the wood. A few males are bound to do so here and there. Especially those who don't want to get weeded out by their strict way of life.

[Jaywalker]

Seen some people talking back and forth on this, basically I'm with folks who are impatient about whether there are male viera/what they'll look like but honestly I think this'll work out based on track record. While it's not perfect, SE does pretty well about paying attention to fan demand and making stuff that a significant number of people are hyped for. After all, that benefits them and can get more players. It sounds like both in Japan and abroad people really do want male Viera, and what's more I think they know that between FFXII and the foreshadowing of FFXIV people are in heavy suspense about it. I think revealing female Viera alone first is most likely a tactical move to ramp suspense up so that when they do reveal males people are even more ecstatic and spread the word a lot.

The reason I'm so confident males will end up in the game is frankly because female Roegadyn and male Miqo'te are in the game when they initially weren't. When they weren't there it bugged people, and when they were allowed it got a very positive reaction. Male Miqo'te have been featured with reasonable prominence in the game too, there have been a solid number of male Miqo'te NPCs. Same with female Roegadyn. And what's more, player base I've seen way more female than male Roes with a roughly even number of male/female Miqo'tes.

If male Viera weren't in the initial release of Shadowbringers, honestly that's an obvious thing that would dampen enjoyment/excitement for a lot of fans. Not the reaction SE wants. If they did a belated release of male Viera it would stagger the interest and possibly make less impact for being spread out since not as many people would be paying attention after an initial disappointment of no male Viera upon initial release.

They have confirmed been planning out male Viera from concept art too. It has definitely crossed their minds that this would be useful to include in FFXIV. It's just a question of when we get confirmation and what that confirmation looks like imo.

Also. If they do go just as fanservice-y for males as they do females, that's gonna be a bit of a gamble on their end. While SE is pretty awesome about allowing male fanservice in games, having a whole race (and possible trailer) where that is showcased would be newish ground by comparison to races where it's just female fanservice. It'll be interesting to see if they go full speed ahead with it or play things more cautious.

(And I could be wrong on all of this of course, just me speculating.)

[New_Game_Plus]

The disappointment will be real if it's female only.

[Beckett]

-

Some cynical marketing math

Reveal female Viera: Big points!
Later reveal male Viera: a few points

VS

Reveal female Viera: Big points!
Later reveal an entirely new playable race: Big points!
(but both races are gender locked): some lost points
6.0 announced, reveal male Viera and female of the other race: Big points again!

They can get more hype out of two gender locked races than they could from just unlocked Viera. Plus down the road they can say they "listened to the fans" and add the missing genders for even more hype.

[Jaywalker]

Some cynical marketing math

Reveal female Viera: Big points!
Later reveal male Viera: a few points

VS

Reveal female Viera: Big points!
Later reveal an entirely new playable race: Big points!
(but both races are gender locked): some lost points
6.0 announced, reveal male Viera and female of the other race: Big points again!

They can get more hype out of two gender locked races than they could from just unlocked Viera. Plus down the road they can say they "listened to the fans" and add the missing genders for even more hype.

Catch is though, they said that at least presently they plan for Viera to be the last race. I do think it's possible they could change their minds, since people won't be expecting/demanding another race so anything they do there would be a nice surprise. But making new races takes a lot of work in part because they need to make sure everything is smoothly customizable and all past armors etc. fit. So I think it's reasonable to figure that if this does happen, it won't be for a good while. So if that's a thing then that means there would be no gender locked male race for a long time and a higher risk of backlash or lost points.

Additionally, I actually think what it comes out to is more like this.

Reveal female Viera: Points, but not as big. People were aware for a long time that they were going to be the addition, it was just a question of how that would be done. People know what Viera are like more or less. There aren't any huge surprises but there's a stable number of points since it was expected at a certain point. That expectation was built up deliberately by SE with things like the bugs bunny shirt and concept art and whatnot.

From there you've got two possibilities imo.


Later reveal male Viera: Something totally new, somewhat surprising since gender locking does happen, and distinct to FFXIV. Hype that could have been small points is instead made big points because of novelty factor.

Never reveal male Viera: A portion of the fanbase gets super pissed, feels cheated, the crowd who complains about Viera being just humans with ears and such attached gets louder and Viera get further diminished because they're also gender locked so it's not even entirely humans with ears. It's less. Some people will still be happy of course, but it is more likely to be a controversial thing where they didn't need the controversy and could have just had a resounding success. Why take points off yourself?

[Beckett]

Catch is though, they said that at least presently they plan for Viera to be the last race.

Normally I would take them at face value on that, but with no male Viera in sight, and the leaks being right about literally everything up to this point, it seems likely that they'll do something like, "I know we said Viera was the last new race... but we've gotta give the guys something! Check out [Lion race]!"

[Jaywalker]

Normally I would take them at face value on that, but with no male Viera in sight, and the leaks being right about literally everything up to this point, it seems likely that they'll do something like, "I know we said Viera was the last new race... but we've gotta give the guys something! Check out [Lion race]!"

Haha it would be really cool if they did that! I'm still a bit skeptical, but if you end up being right about that would still be pretty awesome. Gotta see how it goes! Either way, they have a lot of time and can always build according to reactions they receive as the game progresses. My question is mainly whether they'll take the previous reactions to Roegadyn and Miqo'te as their test sample or if they're still wary, and what they plan to do with that info.