[Petition] Remove Genderlocked Costumes

[monk-dps]

It's far more complicated than that.

The gear system in this game is essentially Legos. Underneath our gear, there isn't any base model; its an empty void, we don't have a base model the gear is mapped over. When you equip a new set of legs, it's the equivalent of removing a Lego person's legs, then attaching a new set of legs. This means that if skin is showing on an armor piece, it also has to be manually added in by the devs; as if they don't it would only create a see-through/empty void in that area. The only thing static about our character model is that we all have a bald, base head before any facial features, hair, tatoos, etc. Everything else about our character model is 100% modular.

Which means anytime they create a new piece of armor, they must model it to fit every single body skeleton type in the game. For females, that's only two. For males, that can be up to an additional four body skeleton types based on the armor piece.



For the most part since male <-> female lalafell are extremely similar with only minor modifications to their skeletons, but since it'd look super bad to say 'females and male lalafell only', male lalafell just gets ignored too.
And yes, it was pretty eye-opening when I first read how gear operates in a few discords. It explains why they're so happy to do female stuff given getting it working on one gets it working on every single other one besides lalafell, while they're averted to doing males unless necessary. Their model system basically favors female characters tremendously.

That expains why when I put on different pants and shorts my legs look like they get longer or shorter. Also why some shoes make my feet really tiny.

[Gurney]

Can this thread get lock or combined with the one of the other 100 threads on this because it is going nowhere.

[Ayuhra]

I really wish their system for making gear models was less bananas. It would open up so many glamours for people. This is the only game that does gear this way, that I know of.

[Skolopendrokot]

Thank you, but no. Not everything has to be gender neutral. I play a Lalafell and want to see a difference between males and females. Of course, I agree that it would be nice to get the male version of Krile's outfit or female Butler's Attire, but I can't imagine a male character in the Maid dress. I don't want to sound bad, but even though I really understand your arguments, I think there are a lot more important things to work on.

[Bright-Flower]

What bugs me more than the character outfits being genderlocked is the hair. For example Aymeric has a genderlocked outfit, but a gender neutral hair style.

Buuuuut if you want to use that hairstyle on a female character you can't buy it separate. You have to buy the package. And buy a set of armor you cannot equip just to get the hair.

[Bonbori]

This is separate from locking. The devs can make outfits with a target demographic in mind but then just let everyone use them. Absolutely nothing makes those two things mutually exclusive. I understand that there are some practical limitations, SE doesn't want to spend resources on something unpopular, that's fine. However simple stuff like not locking the Little Lady's Day flower crown and changing how it dyes based on the character shouldn't be hard to do. Removing locks entirely might not be realistic, but I think allowing for more choice in outfits should be a focus from now on. I don't see anything to gain from having your options limited arbitrarily.

Oh don't get me wrong, I hate arbitrary restrictions too. If there is no budgetarily prohibitive technical reason why a female character shouldn't be able to wear the existing model of Cid's goggles, then a male-only restriction shouldn't be a thing. Likewise, I wish I could put on Gosetsu's shiny hat, and I think the flower crown debacle was silly too. It could have easily been two separate items.

In fact, I'm even strongly against role/job-locking gear. I see no reason why my character can glamour a nice Shire coat as a caster, but for some reason glamour prisms just... refuse to work as soon as she touches a gunblade. That's arbitrary and I know for a fact that there is nothing preventing SE from lifting that restriction by simply adjusting an item flag in a database. Or better yet, writing a short script that can iterate through every relevant item in an instant.

However, that is not at all what I meant in my post. I was referring to the creative process, how the stipulation that every new piece of gear that gets created must be unisex would affect the design of future gear. And looking at the wealth of existing precedents, I'm very afraid that it would result in SE choosing the path of least resistance and either resorting to producing uninspired, generic fashion designed specifically to be easy for 3D artists to easily adjust for any bodytype (so shapeless and baggy, the better to conform to any bodytype, lacking intricate details that could be glitched out by morphing, etc.) or just using one gender as the base template and doing the absolute minimum vertex-moving to adjust the outfit to a body clearly not supposed to fit into it.

More likely than not, even with a mandatory unisex stipulation, the budget allocation and deadlines around outfit development would remain the same, so an artist, expected to create 2 gender variants of one outfit while still only being given resources and time to create one outfit, would naturally take efficient shortcuts to ensure they can meet the deadline and not overcomplicate things for someone else down the pipeline.

In other words, I'm scared of the prospect that if the artists were forced to always account for 2 genders and never had the freedom to just go ham on one, the quality of assets would worsen to accommodate the increased quantity.

So I am in favour of designing gender-specific outfits and giving them special attention and consideration to make sure that they look perfect on the gender they are made for with no artistic compromises. But I am against arbitrarily restricting genders (and jobs) from wearing any pieces that can physically fit on their skeletons as is.

[Wiccan026]

I'm not in favor of this. Already had to go through this once with people and their playboy bunny sets that THEY DONT EVEN WEAR ANYMORE AFTER ALL THEIR PISSING AND MOANING ABOUT IT. Let them focus on story and gameplay over letting guys wear dresses. Seriously if it bothers you so much roll a female character.

To be fair that outfit was requested because they thought they would get a "redesign" for the outfit instead of the exact thing fitted onto a guy.
That was what the uproar on twitter was, folks were thinking Chippendales and that's not what we got.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

To be fair that outfit was requested because they thought they would get a "redesign" for the outfit instead of the exact thing fitted onto a guy.
That was what the uproar on twitter was, folks were thinking Chippendales and that's not what we got.

They said they wanted a male bunny suit. That's what they got. The male bunny suit. Maybe they should have been more specific in their requests.

[official_coconut]

I don't understand why a game that makes as much money as XIV constantly is cutting corners. New mog station gear moving forward should be gender neutral or at least have a variant for both genders, especially with pieces such as Krile's devout gear which have been worn by males and females in other Final Fantasy games, yet for some reason it's a problem here. There's nothing wrong with wanting the piece to appear differently on males and females, but at the end of the day how I dress my characters is my business. If I want to dress my Roegadyn man-servant in the maid's outfit I'd be within my rights to do so if only it weren't gender locked. (But the gold saucer bunny attire will do fine for him till the male variant of a certain leporine race is released...)

[Alaray]

They aren't. Otherwise very few people who play this game that spend their time here would be able to use it. The better question would be why do you need that coat? Aren't there similar ones in the game that are unisex? You don't need EVERYTHING to be gender neutral. Let the women have some gear and let the men have theirs. Stop acting entitled, especially since you're going to just replace it 3 months later with whatever is FotM.

You don't need anything in this game. You don't even need outfits in general, like BDO where everyone wears the same underwear until you fork over forty bucks.

Either way I don't really care, I'll say I like dressing up my au'ra male/miqo'te male characters in dresses and am not opposed to more options. So I'd prefer the locks removed to give me more options. But I'm not gonna throw a fit over it, one way or the other.