Gender locked race?

[Jaywalker]

Comparing the lionhead rabbits + old artworks from the FATE in tokyo, I can only assume male Viera ears do not look like normal rabbit-ears but of those lionheads.

I start to believe male Viera are dimorphic. The mane could be either face hair (beards) or actually chest hair (artwork). The end result might look like lions (as the leaker assumed the "icons" of this race). Also lets not forget, all Viera appear to have the same build til the age of 13. This also means their ears (the spot they sprout) are probably on the center of the head as well. (Compared to female Viera)

Im sure if someone would actually draw a sketch of a Viera with a mane, ears like a lionhead and made the face shape of a female Viera (small, round and with a button nose) + adding masculine tones, would end up as a "lion-lookalike" race.

Ronsos make 0 sense as we got none mention in FFXIV in the lore nor any mention of them appearing from overseas. We had the Return to Ivalice raid to tease Viera and this happened (just as they teased Au Ra with Yugiri in ARR).

If I dont remember wrong, Yoshida said he doesnt like male Viera because they looked to "cute". And we also learned from last FanFest during the Art Panel, that everything goes right into Yoshida's supervision. And since he does not like throwing away all the other ideas of the team, he told them to make a mix of said features. And thats why I believe male Viera look more like lions, than bunny bois.

I have never seen this art before, thank you for sharing it!

Also, honestly as long as the facial hair is an option versus mandatory (which hopefully means that Yoshida is being very professional with this and leaving room for both his preference and other people's as well, which I suspect is the case) I'm thrilled with this possibility!

Also, chiming in on the lion race with personal two-cents--I do not want it.

Reason being





Hellsguard are easy to make look like big cats, dogs/wolves, bears... anything with a black nose really. Add the werewolf ears from the Halloween costume schtick it's even more noticeable. Having a big cat race, even if the overall features were more animal like Rev or Ronso, feels like it would be creatively redundant.

[Tsumdere]

[Males] also have more opportunities for a range of character ages - though it's arguable whether that's a good thing or not, as few people use the older faces available, and it narrows the options for other designs.

Ugh. I've always wanted an option for an older female face. Matoya is probably one of my favorite female NPCs and I would love to have an old lady mage.

And Tera devs actually credit the Elin for being what saved the game. They have a culture in that game that loves them some Elin toons. It's why they get the most classes ... so they're pretty much riding the back of a gender locked race for profits.

Tera's gender locks were absolutely one of the knives that stabbed the game to death. It wasn't the only reason, but I saw first hand the mass exodus of people after the introduction of Gunner/Brawler/Ninja BECAUSE it was female-only. It alienated a good portion of their players, and the game suffered for it. Big surprise, when all the male toons of a game leave, the game earns less money!! For every class they release as female only, they hemorrhage more players and now it's a pretty pathetic ghost town of a game that is on female-only loot box life support.

It is an extreme example of course, but one we should look at anyways. TERA was much, much more heavily weighted towards female characters than FFXIV. The census has the split at like 55% - 45%, where TERA definitely closer to 85%-15% (my estimate as a long time Tera player). If gender lock hacked Tera at the knees, imagine what it would do to FFXIV.

I would love male Viera to have the chest puff... Big fan.

[Karl0217]

Of course if they went the lionhead rabbit route (which sounds plausible, imo), where it's just a animistic exaggeration of Female Viera it might look like a lion too.

Well, the only reason I did bring them up is because I have seen people mistake lionheads for cats before. For example, there is this one in the Maryland Zoo


that looks more like a cat than a rabbit. I don't think a lot of people realize how much variation there is with rabbit ears:



And the fact that Yoshida cut them off when they were talking about ear options for the Viera makes me a little suspicious in this regard.

CoInCiDeNcE? I THINK NOT!! (lol.. march can't come soon enough)

I hadn't seen that concept art before today but if you changed the ears to something more catlike you would end up with a lion-like race.

[Melichoir]

Just from a pure production standpoint, it is way easier for the dev team to create a demo reel featuring only female viera since Fran's model is pretty much done and all they have to do is swap the head out (which is pretty much what they did). They didnt have to do a whole lot on that end to put together somethign that shows off Viera. So, atleast in the current state of things, its not really a pandering thing but rather just simple pragmatism.

We also have to consider we have 1 more fanfest to go, and theyre not likely to show off ALL the things before then. It is likely that we will see a Male Viera preview in the last fanfest as well as the dancer job class (I think its dancer right?) among a few other bits and things.

People can call this stuff pandering if we get to the xpac to find out its only female viera. That would be an oddity since I think it was YoshiP who was against gender locking races in the first place (He put in Male Miqote I believe with ARR, but I could be wrong so take that with a grain of salt.)

[Kupocoubo]

Just from a pure production standpoint, it is way easier for the dev team to create a demo reel featuring only female viera since Fran's model is pretty much done and all they have to do is swap the head out (which is pretty much what they did). They didnt have to do a whole lot on that end to put together somethign that shows off Viera. So, atleast in the current state of things, its not really a pandering thing but rather just simple pragmatism.

We also have to consider we have 1 more fanfest to go, and theyre not likely to show off ALL the things before then. It is likely that we will see a Male Viera preview in the last fanfest as well as the dancer job class (I think its dancer right?) among a few other bits and things.

People can call this stuff pandering if we get to the xpac to find out its only female viera. That would be an oddity since I think it was YoshiP who was against gender locking races in the first place (He put in Male Miqote I believe with ARR, but I could be wrong so take that with a grain of salt.)

I don't understand why they wanted to announce female first, the two genders for Au ra were announced at the same time during fan fest

[Melichoir]

As I said, from a pure production standpoint, its easier for them to simply just headswap a pre-existing model and run with it. Notice that for the reveal its all basic stuff. Handful of basic emotes, walk/run/sprint cycle, standing poses. Thats it. No weapons, no advanced posing/emotes, none of that. Theyre all wearing the exact same garbs as Fran, so on so forth. It's highly reasonable to assume that this preview was made using existing resources (fran model) for production reasons. They could very well still be working out the kinks wit the male models.

Furthermore, since the lore is more about Female Viera than males, splitting the two and using them as separate reveals makes sense because this thread even illustrates peoples curiosity/interest in the idea of Male Viera or what the male counter part to Viera will be. With AuRa, who were a new addition all-together, it wasnt really a speculation of both male and female, it was assumed. We dont have that assumption right away due to the nature of Viera and their pre-existing lore and expectations.

So currently, there is plenty of plausible reasons why we only saw female Viera in this short clip. Im sitting more in the camp of waiting till atleast the next fan fest before talking about Gender Locked races or what not. Seems more pragmatic

[DevilsDontFly]

I don't understand why they wanted to announce female first, the two genders for Au ra were announced at the same time during fan fest

But they were both announced at the very last fanfest. So tecnically with Viera they are ahead of schedule and probably wanted to show the females to just boost pre-orders. They all have the same face and the only thing showcased was a sprint animation, so at least to me it seems like a very early in-the-works project that they wanted to show, probably to have a higher income of pre-order money and put some of it in the budget for further development.
Pior to the last fanfest the only thing we had when it comes to Au Ra was a silhouette picture, and we didn't even know what they would be called until much later on fanfests.
Not even Dark Knight or Astrologian were announced until the very end because they used male and female Au Ra to showcase the jobs.

So yeah, to me it all seems like a tactic to boost sales a bit before big announcements, on top of wanting to leave the male Viera for the JP fanfest.
If you think about it there is nothing new to female Viera. We all know the lore, we all know how they looked like and we all know how they behave. But when it comes to the males it is a big, new reveal, with a whole new perspective of a race within the franchise that not only is going to affect XIV, but all every single future installment of Final Fantasy that features Viera as a race. If I was eastern and my company was also eastern, and the games we develop were first released to our home audience, I would like to make such huge changes and announcements on my homeland, since it all started there.

[SigmaOZ]

Has anyone thought that Yoshida's joke was not a real one!?...


Anyone whom watched the leaker's info should know that he mentions not only one new race but two, the first being the all-female Viera and the second could easily be the horrible Bangaa!...


Either case is fine by me, I won't be playing male Vieras or unsightly Bangaas so that's no problem, what saddens me is that they didn't show the second clan for the bunny race and I really hope they include the cute but shorter females as part of the same race, the ones from the sketches several posts above!...

[Rokke]

Has anyone thought that Yoshida's joke was not a real one!?...


Anyone whom watched the leaker's info should know that he mentions not only one new race but two, the first being the all-female Viera and the second being the horrible Bangaa!...


Either case is fine by me, I won't be playing male Vieras or unsightly Bangaas so that's no problem for me, what saddens me is that they didn't show the second clan for the bunny race and I really hope they include the cute but shorter females as part of the same race, the one from the sketches several posts above!...

Bangaa aren't even on the table as possibilities. Even if you ignore the leaks their body type is soooo far off of what "works" with XIV armor/hair/makeup that they'd never be more than predesigned NPCs.

[stormygabe]

Bangaa aren't even on the table as possibilities. Even if you ignore the leaks their body type is soooo far off of what "works" with XIV armor/hair/makeup that they'd never be more than predesigned NPCs.

I'm surprised you even responded to that comment. They didn't contribute anything to the conversation besides some low key gloating. (I mean....where tf did they even get that the leaker was suggesting Bangaa...)