Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Theodric]

Bunny ears and a suitably handsome face with a defined jaw line!

Tall, well-built, classically handsome male viera!

[Senn]

In doing so, they could in theory use that exact template to do the male Viera ears, using tricks in modeling to keep the ears same spacing and location as the female, thus less working being done.

It seems like going from female to male headpieces for viera would work fine, but I'm not so sure about hrothgar. I suppose female hrothgar's ears would be in the same general area as male hrothgar ears, but I think the head shape for female hrothgar would be a little bit more different than the males. How would this work?

[Komarimono]

It seems like going from female to male headpieces for viera would work fine, but I'm not so sure about hrothgar. I suppose female hrothgar's ears would be in the same general area as male hrothgar ears, but I think the head shape for female hrothgar would be a little bit more different than the males. How would this work?

Hrothgar is a whole new mess honestly. Their ears aren't an issue but their "Manes" aka hair. But a possible simple fix to that would be partial culling of the mesh in certain areas or fully of the head to let certain helmets and hats work. If you could zoom into your characters head with say, the dragoon helm on. You'd notice that the majority of the head is gone, hair, scalp, back of skull, etc all culled and hidden to let the piece fit.

Hrothgar I feel wouldn't be a simple as culling the mesh invisible though, they I feel would be the most complicated to build around and try and adapt helms/hats for due to how their hair is. I suppose you could cull the hair fully for helmets, that would be simple. But for some of the awesomely designed hats for armor we have? That is where it may get complicated, especially since their hair is linked to face, if remember right for many things.

[Mikhaill]

"We did expect strong feedback on the gender lock. It was a tough decision, but we decided to do our best to meet both the player feedback and our development team’s vision. It will be very costly to add a new race or genders. So I won’t say no, but I would not like to set expectations high."

There it is!
I knew I wasn't pulling out info from my behind. Thanks Senn.
It was this one. So it's not completely off the table like you said but it's a "wait and see" thing.
If you continue reading, they mentioned race working is too taxing. I think it suffice to say
the Viera and Ronso, if they were to come, would be like a budget Miqote and Elezen or Viera.
Think they just about had it with this race stuff lmao.

As for the changes to the races you posted later.
We can have mix-breed races. So you can have someone like Hilda (I think thats her name? The half Hyur/Elezen)
Type race. You can add the Auri scales maybe to like Lalalfell? Will it creepy? Yes! Give them horns? Fitting for our Lala's!
We just want more things to play with really. Hair only goes a long way, especially when you can't really customize
the length and stuff with it. I think a lot of us has just about accepted the clipping issue lol.

[Arngrim_Greyashe]

And thus the cycle begins anew. Someone should take their own advice about twisting words.

Anyways, I wonder when they plan to update us on the addition of new/old hairstyles for the current new races? I saw a few people asking about it on the live letter thread. Hopefully we hear about that soon!

[Gwenorai]

See the issue I have is simply the wait. I really hate answers which leave us in limbo. I know I should be grateful that it's not off the table. But if the issue is how taxing and costly they are and how unlikely it is to add them. Then why not just say no and draw a line? I'd be massively bummed out but I'd slowly get over it I suppose.

Ah well, at least we have Matsuno who is happy to discuss the male bunboys. Hopefully, if they're added he can talk about their lore.

Anyway, I did notice that the Viera 'information' during character creation does have them down as 'tall and slim' while also mentioning the males - no mention of any differences in their appearances. Unlike Hrothgar that goes out of their way to mention that the females look different from the males in some way - or it is hinted. Find it unlikely that they would rewrite the information blurb on this if they were added - did they do this with any of the other previous genderlocked races?

Also, what's up with voice 12 on the female Viera? o.O Is that bugged? Most if not all of the sounds are male. Like they weren't a female trying to sound like a male. They were straight-up male; - not saying this is a red herring or some tin foil hat type of thing. I'm just weirded out by the voice a little.

[Lauront]

We can have mix-breed races.

You ought to have seen his reaction to that question during one of the Fanfests, think it was the NA one. They were not keen on the idea.

That said, they have only themselves to blame for even adding hybrids to begin with. There's a slightly greater basis for it in this game than most fantasy worlds which allow it (WoW being one of the worst cases of it), but it does seem to be something they want to restrict to NPCs and even then, only a sliver of them. I wouldn't even have gone that far barring some Allagan experiments.

Personally, I don't care for the feature. I prefer the races to be distinctive, as they are. If they want to focus on improving the existing races, the textures are an excellent starting point.

[Nynuwe]

I'm more worried about them talking about updates to the current races (M/F Hrothgar and Viera). I'd rather see updates to these finished before male viera, and not slowed because of male viera. It is not selfish (maybe a little), but it's better if they finished what we have objectively before doubling their workload.

I don't even want to hear about male viera officially being worked on until these are done, to be honest. If they ever do get worked on.

I totally get where you are coming from. I like to think that more headpieces will be added after getting some work on male viera and female hrothgar started in their workflow because that may be more streamlined. If they add all headgear to the existing genders first, they will have to repeat that whole process again for the other gender after creating the other genders. But if they do the missing genders first, depending on how they design those two, then they can add the rest of the headgear pieces to both full races by adjusting certain values. More streamlined work, I think. It's likely that if they do choose to add the other two genders, they will come along with additional headgear designs available to both full races.

This is just me brainstorming though. I might be wrong about it being more streamlined that way. Perhaps it won't really make a difference. But they will most definitively work on the missing headgear for what already exists in game.

[Duskane]

head gear shouldn't be a issue with viera its more a time thing probably
and probably had to focus on hrothgar to get them into acceptable condition

i know they said "viera might get some legacy hair styles" but i expect them to work it out and get all hair styles and just said it not to get peoples hopes up
or legacy is just a fancy term he used for all older hair styles
Jp to Eng sometimes a mess

[SturmChurro]

They actually have done ear holes and even tail holes for miqo'te with a lot of the old outfit pieces I think, the sun hat I wore on my miqo'te had ear holes. They could do it, but it looks like they stopped at some point. At this point there are probably so many they don't see the value in properly editing the headgear to account for the viera ears. They have humanoid heads so the actual shape shouldn't be an issue. Hrothgar helmets probably have to be modeled specifically for the head dimensions.

If we (viera players) are only going to see limited headgear I think they should add hats and stuff and edit them properly, so we at least get some nice looking headgear that isn't just circlets, masks, etc. Males if ever added would probably have the same issues, unless they, yes, somehow figure out how to streamline the process, or can manage to put more devs on the task.

As for hairstyles, I think they should focus on the stuff you have to pay for, or earn first, rather than the general hairstyles. Optimally both, but if we are only getting some those are the ones I'd want more.