Gender locked race?

[Fland]

If they didn't think male viera fit their vision of the game, they wouldn't have included them in the lore at all. They went out of their way to give us information about male viera from the dramaturge. We actually learned more about male viera there than we ever did in FF XII itself. They could have just as easily left the situation completely ambiguous and they didn't. If they were able to go all of XII without a single mention of them, I don't see why they even bothered to tell us about them in XIV if they knew we weren't ever going to be able to play as one.

Agree. We have concept arts and actual lore in-game on male viera. They definitely have vision about it.
While the concept arts might be early, they did show it again recently on Paris fanfest.

I think you're skipping over the whole "a Viera living outside her homeland was unheard of." There is little reason to specify female viera if it applies to both of them.

I'm wondering if the JP version also specify the feminine pronouns. It happened before when the gender neutral term in JP got translated into gendered pronoun in EN.

[Iscah]

I honestly can't think of any reason we won't be meeting [male Viera] if we will go to the woods in 5.0 without it being sound forced or ridiculous, like there's fire that's somehow eradicated the entire male even though they survived a Garlean attack before, which surely involved some fire.

From the lore we've been given so far, I can't think of any reason we would encounter male Viera in the woods. They're isolated and they either actively avoid other people, or shoot them on sight. They know the woods better than we do, and would slip away unseen.

The only way we'd see male Viera is if they have abandoned that lifestyle entirely.

Usually eleven would fit but they are kinda weird visually in this game. They are more the nerdy /accountant race of ffxiv. Most of their faces are too angular to be beautiful and kinda look mean. And the cute face is uhhhh odd. I normally play elf races but viera seem to be ffxiv beautiful race... so it’s sad we won’t get males... but we will probably get a 3rd masculine macho buff guy option

Hyur makes come pretty close and I played one for a while. But being hyurr is frankly boring and again the faces are just not it. I play miqote now because I’ve settled with cute.

But none of these give you beautiful male model style vibes.

This is what I see.

[...]
Eleven- tall nerdy to rude looking men with very sharp jaws

There simply isn’t a race that is designed to be beautiful modelesque creatures for any races.

Now the viera come and the women have beautiful runway model looks.
I want men to have that high fashion male model look. And that simply isn’t available in game

Have you had a thorough play-around with Elezen settings in the character creator? Or are you just going from the other characters we see in the game? They do tend to be a bit odd-looking - I think particularly since they've had to come up with so many unique combinations for NPCs, so not always using features that go together nicely. And the default characters in the creator don't do much to 'sell' either clan as good-looking.

I have an Elezen alt, and it's definitely a bit hit-and-miss whether he looks nice in cutscenes - lighting angles can do awful things to their features - but overall I think I got him within that "beautiful male" aesthetic. ( 1 2 3 4 )

For what it's worth, he's a Duskwight - despite their 'typical' grey colouring you can also give them normal human skintones, and (someone pointed out to me a while ago) they don't have the permanent dark edge around their eyes that Wildwood characters have. (For comparison, this screenshot I had on hand of a Wildwood character with the same basic face setting - a mockup of that hooded guy from the end of 4.3 that people kept trying to compare to existing characters.)



Also, to nitpick re. spelling - despite the connection to "elves", it's "Elezen" not Eleven.

[Bonbori]

I'm wondering if the JP version also specify the feminine pronouns. It happened before when the gender neutral term in JP got translated into gendered pronoun in EN.

I've not seen the JP version of that conversation, but I'm 95% sure it doesn't use feminine pronouns just because Japanese wouldn't use pronouns at all in this context. And I'm almost sure it wouldn't be singular - when talking about the tendencies of a race, I think context would demand the neutral plural "they" (彼ら)... but that's an unnecessarily roundabout way of saying "Viera".
Still, even assuming the sentence was the same (and that's not guaranteed either, playing with JP VO and EN subtitles I notice a lot of lines being worded very differently, in different order and with different terminology) it would most likely say something to the effect of "Until recently, Viera were not seen outside (implied Viera's) homeland" or "Until recently, (implied Viera) were not seen outside Viera's homeland". Pronouns do exist in Japanese, but context often makes them redundant. You're very unlikely to see a sentence that explicitly addresses the same thing twice unless it's for emphasis or clarification.

[Tanama]

Would you mind if the Hrothgar looked like this?

[Gwenorai]

Would you mind if the Hrothgar looked like this?

Good lord, why D:

If that's what they're going for I might as well be playing ESO - looks like a buff Cathay-Raht. Which to me is so just, why? ESO is releasing an expansion on this race's homeland very soon which is going to overlap with ShadowBringers. If people wanted to enjoy a big cat race then obviously the better of the two is going to be the one with the huge lore and isn't gender locked. While I'm sure folks will love the idea of playing a literal Khajiit in FF14, I'm just ???

[Duskane]

Would you mind if the Hrothgar looked like this?

I mean if it was more detailed sure

I hope they are a muscle tone down from roe gear just vary so much on male roe to wear your kinda limited with what to wear
Much more than other races atleast

[Theodric]

If anything, I expect them to look like Byakko. He could easily be described as having a 'majestic mane' so perhaps Hrothgar will be heavily inspired by his design.

[username1234]

lol @ people thinking we'll get another bara race
male roe are less than 3% of active players
SE knows cute bunboys are where the real fantasiabux are at

[Seraphor]

lol @ people thinking we'll get another bara race
male roe are less than 3% of active players
SE knows cute bunboys are where the real fantasiabux are at

That's because (male) Roe are ugly as sin. We don't all want to cosplay Wreckit Ralph.
Highlanders are dull and have a poor selection of faces.
Au Ra are probably the closest to a decent, interesting masculine fantasy race, but the horns are divisive.

Many people have requested more options for male characters over the years. It's a broad spectrum ranging from classically handsome to ruggedly handsome, lean to outright bulky. It just so happens that whenever there's a push for such things, it gets silenced by a very vocal portion of the community.

This. There's always people asking for more male and masculine options. Mainly in the context of glamour, but also for races too based on what I've just said.

It's clear that most of the demand for Viera is for female Viera, and while there's certainly significant demand for male Viera too, I can see why they'd be torn on what to implement, based on the different demands, and the lore, which they seem to be trying to protect for once.

[Lauront]

lol @ people thinking we'll get another bara race
male roe are less than 3% of active players
SE knows cute bunboys are where the real fantasiabux are at

There's awful a lot of ground to cover between roegadyn and "cute bunboys", which is exactly what Yoshi has been resistant to considering in the past.

Thankfully I can fall back on midlanders or au ra if I don't like the male variants of the new race(s) added.

Hyur makes come pretty close and I played one for a while. But being hyurr is frankly boring and again the faces are just not it. I play miqote now because I’ve settled with cute.

But none of these give you beautiful male model style vibes.

This is what I see.

Midlander- average to very handsome young male with a average body type
Highlander -hot muscle dudes who will keep your butt
Roe- big burly bear men.
Aura- beastly dragon men
Miqo- mostly cute but also possible to be very masculine looking .
Eleven- tall nerdy to rude looking men with very sharp jaws

There simply isn’t a race that is designed to be beautiful modelesque creatures for any races.

Now the viera come and the women have beautiful runway model looks.
I want men to have that high fashion male model look. And that simply isn’t available in game

Strictly speaking, there's a number of races which actually do fit that aesthetic. Elezen probably come closest. If the issue is the facial selection, would it not make more sense to simply ask for more facial options?

In many fantasy games elves are beautiful and stunning not only in physical looks but in prowess on the battlefield. This is how I imagine the viera. Gorgeous and wise and also dangerous. Beautiful men is very common in Japanese anime and ffxiv. Omega m is stunning but he will kill you. He is also very androgynous but leans toward male.

Yes, except he's not talking about beauty, per se.

Omega M is also a robotic construct. I don't even consider him particularly attractive, nor do I consider Seiryu beautiful.

They just lack what is required to captivate me. Ironically, most prominent examples of elves have far more masculine facial features, be it any Warcraft elven race, TES elves, the WH elves, the Aen elle from Witcher, and even a lot of the D&D elf art.

My guess is that our standards of what is beautiful differ by quite a bit. I already consider many of the auri and midlander male faces to be quite beautiful.