Playable kids in FFXIV

[Gihwezi]

If you can play as a LaLa you should be able to play as a teen

There's straight up no correlation between the two at all.......

[ChocoFeru]

If you can play as a LaLa you should be able to play as a teen

Therefore, if you play as a Lala you don't need to play as a teen. PROBLEM SOLVED THANK YOU.

Now let's just stop trying to get playable kids as an excuse to sexualize them.

[Jojoya]

If you can play as a LaLa you should be able to play as a teen

I'm trying to understand your leap in logic.

A Lalafell playable character is an adult, not a child. If you think they're children, that's a you problem.

[Kieren-Dohla]

I'd think all the fetch this or that for npcs , move those boxes over there, and run here and there only to be told to go back to the person you started with for quests, and do the entire tree of HW moogle quests would add up to more than 6 months. ;P

But really think about the far away places you have to travel to the slow way before aetheryte access -- especially The East on a ship that should at least take a month lol

[Azelas]

Are teens/kids not getting enough validation in other games?

Absolutely not. I know that the roster of playable characters across all existing JRPGs is literally 90% teenagers, but gods dammit I will not be satisfied until we have 99% teenagers across every genre!!

[Gihwezi]

Absolutely not. I know that the roster of playable characters across all existing JRPGs is literally 90% teenagers, but gods dammit I will not be satisfied until we have 99% teenagers across every genre!!

It's 5 AM and I can't tell if this is serious or not but I'm squinting real hard at this regardless.

[Kieren-Dohla]

I'm trying to understand your leap in logic.

A Lalafell playable character is an adult, not a child. If you think they're children, that's a you problem.

I just think of Lala's as either disturbing looking adult/children hybrids or potatoes. Mostly potatoes. ;p

[Iscah]

Re. the issue of portraying children in violent situations, the entire plot of Stormblood (especially the early stages) revolves around us taking part in a war - one we've been forced into, but we're still told we have to do it.

That would take on quite a different tone with a child character.


The story is generally written with a young adult character in mind.

Pretty sure Elezen age slower than the rest of the races. I don't have my lorebook handy but I do think that was part of their blurb. Though I might be mixing that up with them living /slightly/ longer.

The lorebook says that "with lifespans one- or two-tenths again as long as their fellow races, their physical maturity is somewhat delayed" and they'll overtake adult Hyuran height around age 20.

I take that to mean their entire aging process plays out at that slower speed. So Alphinaud is physically somewhere around 13-14.

Up the other end of the scale, I would have estimated Edmont to be around 50, but he's 59 - which is consistent with aging "20% slower" than the average person.

(But to throw a spanner into the works, if you do the maths then 34-year-old Carvallain was 19 in the "ten years ago" sections of 1.0's plot, and already an adult at that point. I'm inclined to think they forgot to recalculate ages with the five-year timeskip, and he should have been 24 then / 39 now, but still that's the official timeline.)

It seems that Miqo'te are very adept at looking younger than they are... I only just found out that Khloe is 13 years old...

They mentioned that at the lore panel in the first recent Fanfest - I can't remember where the 13 comes from (possibly the second lorebook?), but previous text for the Khloe doll/minion indicated that she's 10, and they've stealth-rewritten it to match the other less-editable reference.

Why are people trying to justify playing as a child? With all the glam options in this game, it reeks of pedo. Disgusting lol.

While I entirely agree that there shouldn't be playable child characters in this game, not everyone who would like to play as a child character is doing it with "dishonourable intentions", so you shouldn't instantly assume that's their motivation. It will also appeal to people who just like cute characters (and maybe haven't thought through all the implications of a child being the main character of this particular story).

I've said before, I do really like the childlike Viera concept art. I think it's an appealing character design, in an entirely innocent way.

It can't really work for an FFXIV playable character concept because of all the issues discussed in this topic so far, but if they did somehow exist, I'd certainly be making one as an alt - primarily for playing around with glamours. He'd be dressing up in the sort of outfits that are too 'cute' for my Elezen (but he gets stuck wearing them anyway because someone has to, and they look even worse on my Au Ra). This isn't the depths of depravity, is it? But it would work better on a younger-looking character than is currently available besides Lalafell, whose proportions are a bit more "squashed up" than I'd like.

(If I was shown the costume and told to design a character to wear it, I'd probably come up with something in the realm of that Viera concept art.)

The 'time bubble' refers to player progression, in which various story lines can be (and often are) completed out of sync from one another. Canonically, time on Hydaelyn is 1:1 with the real world (with accelerated in-game day/night transitions for obvious design reasons). This was established a very long time ago. Years ago, even.

Established when? And how?

We have an official statement that time does not behave normally, so where is the information that overrides that?

Again, it's not about proving that characters have said X amount of time has passed within the game, because the "time bubble" concept is about saying that the game takes place in a very small amount of time with regards to character ages and dates, even if it provably should and does take much longer for those events to play out.

It's not saying the whole story has to squeeze into that small space of time. It's excusing the fact that it really does take longer, and yet the characters haven't gotten any older.

[WaterShield]

i though japan rule of age in games and anime is like this lol

- age below 12 = kids
- age 13-17 = teen
- age 18-20's = mister, adult
- anything above 30 = old man/hag

Oi! I take offense to that last one ;-;

[Kalise]

We already have gear that is supposed to be sexy and not something you should put a child in, so unless they'd just lock things like the bunny-outfit or the thavnair-stuff for child-like characters you wouldnt need a nude-mod to sexualize the kids - you could put the child-model designed by SE into clothes designed by SE, lay them down on a bed designed by SE and so on.

That depends on if they add a "Child-like" (Or more appropriately, Teenaged) race/body option and how they choose to implement it.

If its a separate race, they could easily design unique non-sexy appearances for the sexy clothing.

If its an existing race, they could alter the design for the younger models.

Though this would be a lot of work...

It also depends on again, how young they make things. Since, as I've mentioned, you can already glamour Zhloe whom looks a lot younger than she actually is. So apparently that age can get away with sexy clothing just fine. While Alphinaud/Alisaie show that that age can get away with violence just fine.

without thinking to much about this I can see why there is a difference between mods adding a lot to the game to make child-characters happen and SE outright offering them. You wouldnt need a nude-mod to put them into lewd-situations.

But how lewd is lewd? How lewd is a problem?

Is lying on a bed and typing into chat dirty things too lewd, even though the game only shows a character lying in bed and all the lewdness is from mental imagery and player inputted text?

Oh, trust me, I've seen people ask to play actual kids like Khloe (who really does look more like 10 than 13).

But it needs specifying what requests are being made and denied though.

If people are asking for actual kids, then yeah, no. That doesn't make sense for the game.

If it's simply teenagers a la Twins/Zhloe then... I could see them being fine and an alternate option for characters alongside maybe older characters.

And there simply is a difference between you protecting a child in a 30-minute-duty and your character being a child whos constantly involved in combat.

There isn't.

The kind of people who have issues with these sort of things don't care about context.

They care about depictions of violence/sexuality and nothing more.

If someone has a problem with violence involving children, they don't care if the goal of the game is to protect them, if the game shows violence towards them or allows a player to show violence towards them, BANNED. No questions, just bans.

That is why most games involving children have them be completely immortal and incapable of being attacked by enemies and unphased by player attacks (Until you mod the game such as in Fallout 3 or Skyrim or use console commands to disable their immortality flag) because allowing them to be shown being hurt is an instant ban in certain countries.

In such a regard, we have several "Child" characters (Whom are more like teenagers given their actual teen ages) whom are actually depicted being attacked. Which seems to be fine. With more notably actual teenagers (The Twins) being involved in combat repeatedly.

This suggests that the thing about "Violence involving Children" seems to be more subject to pre-teens rather than teenagers. So we'd be talking Khloe ages and younger (Which is appropriate for the children that appear in FO3 and Skyrim. Where teenager violence was okay, such as the opening for FO3 when you're like 16 and you get into a fight with the Tunnel Rats and you can literally beat the other guy to death, steal his knife and stab his friends to death... What? I don't like bullies okay!?)

Meaning that, theoretically, 16 year old characters should be fine. If Zhloe, whom looks about 16, is fine with the potential to be dressed sexy and if the Twins, whom are 16 (Or at least, started out the story aged 16), are fine being in combat throughout the MSQ alongside you and can be interpreted to flirting with you.

So yeah...

While, personally, I don't care for having younger playable characters, I am however here to play devil's advocate when it comes to analysing what is already in the game.

Also, I think it would be neat if there were more varied ages of NPC's. Rather than 99% of them all being young adults in peak physical health... Like it seems really strange when there's like a Roe who's supposed to be a "Frail and feeble old man" but he's just another roided out slab of muscle... But with grey hair.

If playable characters of other ages is a desired thing from players then it could lead to the dev's spending time developing these more varied NPC types first - Just like the new Fatqo'te might be a beginning of having overweight NPC's be a thing from now on.