Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[JTF-Taru]

I'd be slightly more interested in male viera than female hrothgar I suppose.

[Fukuro]

So you think the cutting back on content and getting additional funding are signs that character customization might get expanded? Well, I'm not sure if that is the case, but if it is, that'd be pretty nice.

Would be awesome if they‘d expand the character customization and also may add the missing genders! I don‘t know, if we can take the following as a hint about ffxvi and ffxiv for something big incoming:

YoshiP: „Our next big information reveal is scheduled for 2021, so in the meantime, I expect everyone to have fun speculating, as we have a lot in store—not only for Final Fantasy XVI, but for Final Fantasy XIV, too. Needless to say, I’ll be working hard on both!“

Source: https://blog.playstation.com/2020/09...unced-for-ps5/

[WhiteArchmage]

I DO believe we'll see the missing genders, EVENTUALLY. It's that "eventually" that's very nebulous at best. It could be 6.0 (though with the delays, I'm not holding my breath); it could be 7.0 in a new tradition I just made up of introducing new CC options on odd-numbered expansions (3.0 with Au Ra, 5.0 with f!Viera/m!Hroth, 7.0 with m!Viera/f!Hroth, and since Yoshi-P has already said these are the last races then for 9.0...idk, butt sliders?). Or it could be so far off when the game is entering maintenance-only mode in order to lure players back in.

Now, of course I'd love them by 6.0, but also want to keep my expectations realistic.

[Melichoir]

We knew well before product release and anytime we think Viera, we think Fran.

We knew.
We all knew.

This is a cop out. Youre essentially saying "Oh you know that game some people played where it had its own world building and lore, yeah thats going to be a copy/paste here so dont even expect male viera at all."

But since you wanted to pull the lore angle as "Well we all knew", then lets work this out. Lore, in game, stated that male miqote are a lot more rare, yet that was changed for 2.0 for more player options. So that immediately set a soft precedent with handling lore and off sexes. Furthermore every race has had an off sex paired with it. Every single one, since 2.0. So again, there is a soft precedent that if you see a race, it will provide you the off sexes. Then the lore itself doesnt actually make a full load of sense overall for the FFXIV universe. In FF12, the set up for viera made sense cause it was a part of the world building, a small subset of the world that you had some interaction with, and was within a closed 1 player perspective.

For ffxiv, you dont have that luxury. Because the game is designed for a male/female character system dynamic, it necessitated that there had to not only now be lore for why only female viera, but also lore for only male Hrothgar. At a glance this works just fine - Males stick to the forests kind of deal, and Hrothgar females are rare so you dont see them to much. However, this only makes sense initially cause then when you get to norvrandt, the whole consistency falls apart.

For people who havent gotten here yet, while the races may appear a bit similar between the two worlds they are not culturally the same. Miqote seem to be more inclined for business and trade, and are less tribal on Norvrandt. The elezen dont give two craps about the woods, Lalafells are dwarves and are a territorial industrious race that keeps to themselves and arent heavily involved in trade. Etc etc. The races have different cultural standards. Even Hrothgar seems to imply that females being the norm isnt unusual on Norvrandt with the quest line in Ahm Arang. However, for whatever reason Viera seem to keep the same exact lore standards as is implied on the source. They keep to the forest, males dont venture out and are rare cause theyre busy behaving as forest protectors or what ever.

This gets worse because of the actual world considerations on Norvrandt. Fanow is more or less the last Viera settlement, slowly being pushed to the brink from sin eaters. Furthermore, Viera females seem to have no problem leaving the woods and living their own lives or entertaining the idea of finding help outside of the forest. The males are still no where to be seen, not anywhere near the last settlement of viera, they dont engage you what-so-ever when you travel deeper into Rak tikka with Yshtola (yet the females from Fanow do). What in hells name are they doing? And then there's the issue of not a single Male viera might have the gumption that their world is on the precipice of literal annihilation to possibly forgo cultural norms like some of their female counter parts and look for aid or life elsewhere? Females have agency but the males are gonna stick to that cultural norm no matter what, even in the face of the apocalypse? You might be able to argue this on the source to some extent, but Norvrandt's situation is a lot more dire. So for some reason Viera specifically has the same cultural norms between both worlds, and when the world is on the brink of annihilation, the males seem to still stick to their cultural norms, despite females doing what ever they want. They dont even act as proper forest protectors as we traverse pretty deeply into the woods and the first encounters with Viera is with the females, not males.

This is the issue with the lore from FFXII. It doesnt fit within FFXIVs universe. At a glance, it can loosely work, but in an MMO environment + the world building involved with FFXIV as well as soft precedent, the Viera Lore doesnt fit. It does plenty fine in a single player game where its nicely incorporated into it, but not here in the MMO environment with the pre-existing lore. The lore is pretty damn flimsy, because you can literally overturn the entirety of the viera lore with simple idea that "Desperate times call for desperate measures." Every player would go "Oh yeah, that makes sense why we start seeing male viera all of a sudden. Things are bad."

Pretty much if you can undo the lore with one line, either your lore isnt very well put together or the lore doesnt fit with the world.

Now we all know the meta reason why we dont see male viera - the devs couldnt develop both. Limited time and resources with certain goals, they couldnt develop 4 model types (Male/Fem Viera, Male/Fem Hrothgar), and because one of their goals was to have a more beast like race, this is the compromise they ran with. Mind you no one really knew what was going. They figured itd work out, but frankly I think people were expecting male viera and were somewhat disappointed when hrothgar was introduced. And for, as I said, reasonable reasons.

[Amnmaat]

I DO believe we'll see the missing genders, EVENTUALLY. It's that "eventually" that's very nebulous at best. It could be 6.0 (though with the delays, I'm not holding my breath); it could be 7.0 in a new tradition I just made up of introducing new CC options on odd-numbered expansions (3.0 with Au Ra, 5.0 with f!Viera/m!Hroth, 7.0 with m!Viera/f!Hroth, and since Yoshi-P has already said these are the last races then for 9.0...idk, butt sliders?). Or it could be so far off when the game is entering maintenance-only mode in order to lure players back in.

Now, of course I'd love them by 6.0, but also want to keep my expectations realistic.

I don't know if realistic is the word you're looking for. When you go into 7.0 that's an additional expansion's worth of equipment and glamour to make for them. The further off the more work they put on themselves. The way I see, based on the additional workload, 6.0 is male Viera's and female hrothgar's last chance.

[DBriggs304]

This is a cop out. Youre essentially saying "Oh you know that game some people played where it had its own world building and lore, yeah thats going to be a copy/paste here so dont even expect male viera at all."

But since you wanted to pull the lore angle as "Well we all knew", then lets work this out. Lore, in game, stated that male miqote are a lot more rare, yet that was changed for 2.0 for more player options. So that immediately set a soft precedent with handling lore and off sexes. Furthermore every race has had an off sex paired with it. Every single one, since 2.0. So again, there is a soft precedent that if you see a race, it will provide you the off sexes. Then the lore itself doesnt actually make a full load of sense overall for the FFXIV universe. In FF12, the set up for viera made sense cause it was a part of the world building, a small subset of the world that you had some interaction with, and was within a closed 1 player perspective.

Has nothing to do with lore as a singular reason. All of that is your own personal interpretation.

We know who the Viera are and how they are mainly represented...and we knew this well before launch.

We aren't victims of disinformation.

[Melichoir]

Has nothing to do with lore as a singular reason. All of that is your own personal interpretation.

We know who the Viera are and how they are mainly represented...and we knew this well before launch.

We aren't victims of disinformation.

Personal interpretation of what? How the FFXII lore was dropped into FFXIV almost verbatim, but that lore doesnt quite fit within the context of FFXIVs world building?

The reasons we dont have Male Viera were loosely explained after the reveals, not before. So up until Hrothgar reveal, there was a decent reason to believe that we might be getting male Viera based on past precedent as well as issues with the lore. You can try and spin this how you see fit, but there was no knowing for sure before the hrothgar reveal. The best you got is you stuck with lore reasons from another title as justification and it panned out.

When we look at the full context of the situation, it seems like the lore reasons provided were more an after thought rather than an actual design decision. Meaning, They wanted a beast like race, but also understood that people have been asking for Viera since forever, and met half way on this to fulfill both with the expectation that it would work out and people wouldnt think about it to much in the context of FFXIV. This particular half way was decided upon because they expressed teh issue with creating new races and how the system works regarding that. There are pragmatic limitations to how the CC works and how FFXIV handles dealing with character models and the like.

Of course this didnt pan out. People want male viera, and female hrothgar for that matter, and the lore reasons dont hold up. If you dont think so, just go rewatch the Hrothgar reveal. The audience can be heard clearly groaning in disappointment. It was the immediate buzz following the reveal. A lot of people werent all that happy.

There was no 'disinformation'. There were expectations and failures on both the parts of the devs and the audience.

[DBriggs304]

Personal interpretation of what? How the FFXII lore was dropped into FFXIV almost verbatim, but that lore doesnt quite fit within the context of FFXIVs world building?

The reasons we dont have Male Viera were loosely explained after the reveals, not before. So up until Hrothgar reveal, there was a decent reason to believe that we might be getting male Viera based on past precedent as well as issues with the lore. You can try and spin this how you see fit, but there was no knowing for sure before the hrothgar reveal. The best you got is you stuck with lore reasons from another title as justification and it panned out.

When we look at the full context of the situation, it seems like the lore reasons provided were more an after thought rather than an actual design decision. Meaning, They wanted a beast like race, but also understood that people have been asking for Viera since forever, and met half way on this to fulfill both with the expectation that it would work out and people wouldnt think about it to much in the context of FFXIV. This particular half way was decided upon because they expressed teh issue with creating new races and how the system works regarding that. There are pragmatic limitations to how the CC works and how FFXIV handles dealing with character models and the like.

Of course this didnt pan out. People want male viera, and female hrothgar for that matter, and the lore reasons dont hold up. If you dont think so, just go rewatch the Hrothgar reveal. The audience can be heard clearly groaning in disappointment. It was the immediate buzz following the reveal. A lot of people werent all that happy.

There was no 'disinformation'. There were expectations and failures on both the parts of the devs and the audience.

Youre arguing the parameters of their lore...against their lore.

We dont have male Viera cause we dont have them. Period. It could be lore related, then again, maybe not.

The expectations is on the players. This isn't a dual fault situation.

[WhiteArchmage]

I don't know if realistic is the word you're looking for. When you go into 7.0 that's an additional expansion's worth of equipment and glamour to make for them. The further off the more work they put on themselves. The way I see, based on the additional workload, 6.0 is male Viera's and female hrothgar's last chance.

I HAVE previously said that the longer they take, the harder the work will be to fit all the gear models, so my asumption for 7.0 is that the dev team finds a way to ease that workload or gets additional design/QA support. Given that SE is working on a new IP, plus FFXVI (plus other games that we may not even know about yet), I'm HOPING that a larger budget and team for XIV can be done.

IF there is no way to speed up QA and gear retrofitting (which I'll be honest, idk if there IS), it's 6.0 or the last big expansion. Which we don't know which it would be.

[Melichoir]

Youre arguing the parameters of their lore...against their lore.

We dont have male Viera cause we dont have them. Period. It could be lore related, then again, maybe not.

The expectations is on the players. This isn't a dual fault situation.

My points are

1) The lore is almost a copy/paste from a previous title in the franchise, and wasnt even tailored to fit within FFXIV effectively.
2) That the lore doesnt fit well within the pre-existing lore and world building we were given
3) Soft precedents were set with ARR in how races would be treated with them having off sexes
4) The devs were up against a wall, design wise. On the one hand, they wanted a more beast like race for marketing reasons, on the other hand people have been requesting viera since HW. To meet both goals the best they figured, they split the two races as a compromise.
5) They have stated that more or less with the current system there would be no more new races due to how much time it takes to get all the armors/glamours/etc fitted on new race models. This factored into their decision they made regarding splitting the races like they did. Unless they correct how their system works, this still pretty much stands.
6) They knew that there was also a demand for Male Viera, thanks to concept art they put out a long ass time ago in HW, yet did not clearly just say there would not be male viera in FFXIV at all except one time 7 years ago. Hell even then it wasnt that cut and dry.
7) They did not clarify the misconception regarding genderlocked races, instead played a bit of footsie with the idea rather than be clear about it.


You take all this into consideration, and what you get is the following:

The devs wanted to create a beast race, but understood there was still a huge demand for Viera. Due to how their system regarding character models works, it is a time consuming process to introduce races and felt that this would likely be the last opportunity to add a new race. They decided on a compromise regarding this - Female Viera, Male hrothgar. Theyd use pre-existing lore as a filler for Viera, and come up with somethign for Hrothgar. This would appease the widest crowd possible, or atleast this is what they assumed would happen.

Meanwhile, before all this was revealed, the player base had a few facts and perceptions on hand. One was the perception there would never be genderlocked races, there was official design work of male viera from years back, hrothgar were almost non existent as a concept, what leaks came out before the reveal did demonstrate a strong potential for male viera being a selectable race/sex combo (remember the screencap from the I think french version where coding showed the potential responses to you based on your race/gender; One of them was for male viera) and male Viera would be a pretty big landmark in the ff franchise.

When female viera was shown, it amped up the hype and it seemed all but certain to even casual players that male viera would be shown as part of the next reveal. This made sense cause of the aforementioned facts and perceptions, and that since Male Viera would be a new FF concept, making it its own reveal made sense. It would be a big deal. The devs did nothing to slow down this hype or consider this angle for that matter.

When Hrothgar got revealed, disappointment was palpable and the devs did get some pushback. They first stated lore reasons but later clarified that it was design reasons for how things rolled out.

Where it becomes the player bases fault is some of hte expectations were a bit misfounded. Where it's the devs fault is how they rolled things out and the idea they couldve clarified things to help. As a point, if they revealed Hrothgar then viera, they probably wouldve actually avoided a lot of the build up hype and mightve faired a bit better reception wise. If they came out and clarified about gender locked races and not play footsies with the idea, that wouldve helped lower expectations. And if they worked the lore over a bit so it worked contextually in FFXIV, youd have less people having issues with it.

Mind you, since youre so keen on using "It's their lore" perspective, you are right. It is their lore, so with as flimsily implemented as it is, it would be easy for them to change the lore to make better sense in regards to FFXIV.

It is, at best, a dual fault situation. Thinking it's nothing but the player base is absolving areas where the devs predictions were either wrong or their handling of things was a bit off. Was there probably to much hype? Probably. Could the devs helped clamp that down? Yes.

But did we know before hand like your suggesting? No. That only works if you throw out FFXIV lore, precedent, and world building in this one case for FFXII's lore and world building.

I HAVE previously said that the longer they take, the harder the work will be to fit all the gear models, so my asumption for 7.0 is that the dev team finds a way to ease that workload or gets additional design/QA support. Given that SE is working on a new IP, plus FFXVI (plus other games that we may not even know about yet), I'm HOPING that a larger budget and team for XIV can be done.

IF there is no way to speed up QA and gear retrofitting (which I'll be honest, idk if there IS), it's 6.0 or the last big expansion. Which we don't know which it would be.

I agree the issue is a huge work load issue, but that issue exists from the system theyre using. FFXIV to the best of my knowledge is the only MMO with this issue, and that comes from how the CC works. If they want to streamline the process, they need to fix CC. Which I think is what theyre aiming to do with the extra time and resources theyve got lately. I could be completely wrong, but I think this is an optimistic yet pragmatic prediction on whats going on. Especially since FXVI will be a single player game and FFXIV needs to last at least long enough till SE has another MMO lined up or some other source of consistent revenue.