Who doesnt want gear restrictions removed?

[Absurdity]

That's legit why YP said these are prob the last new races for the game, they can't keep up the pace with which they make gear if they have to QA anymore models with their current pipeline.

Then sorry, but his reason is just outright incorrect. Since 2.0 99% of female gear is entirely based on female midlanders, the different shapes are done through bone scaling. There are no different models for female characters besides lalafell (where male and female have basically the exact same body). Adding a new race that is also based on female midlander does not create more work for their gear, you already had to make gear for that body in the first place. The only extra workload they gain from adding new races are the race's original assets when they first make them, like head models, horns, other customization options and maybe racial gear.

The male characters have slightly more variation in models, you can't really achieve the Roegadyn body with bone scaling. Male Au Ra, Elezen and Midlander are all based on the derplander body, Roegadyn and Hrothgar share a model as well. The only outliers are Highlander, which sometimes uses the derplander model and sometimes has it's own model with thicker arms, and Lalafell which share a model between genders.

Adding Hrothgar and Viera didn't add any extra workload to their outfits since the model they use is already present on other races and the only extra workload they could've had, the headgear, has just been ignored.



You are however correct that converting female outfits to work on male bodies and vice versa would be twice the amount of work.

And if that costs extra resources, then they have messed up somewhere in how they add things to the game.

No, they didn't mess up, that is simply how creating outfits works unless you make male and female characters have the exact same body. There isn't some magical "make this work" button you can press to make gear fit a specific body shape, you have to make the gear fit the shape of the gender by hand and obviously if you have several different models for a character's body then you have to invest extra time/resources into making the gear fit those models.



Thinking that converting gear from one gender to another can be done with the press of a button is just willfully ignorant. If you make a dress for women in real life it will not automatically fit the body of a guy.

[reivaxe]

Then sorry, but his reason is just outright incorrect. Since 2.0 99% of female gear is entirely based on female midlanders, the different shapes are done through bone scaling. There are no different models for female characters besides lalafell (where male and female have basically the exact same body). Adding a new race that is also based on female midlander does not create more work for their gear, you already had to make gear for that body in the first place. The only extra workload they gain from adding new races are the race's original assets when they first make them, like head models, horns, other customization options and maybe racial gear.

The male characters have slightly more variation in models, you can't really achieve the Roegadyn body with bone scaling. Male Au Ra, Elezen and Midlander are all based on the derplander body, Roegadyn and Hrothgar share a model as well. The only outliers are Highlander, which sometimes uses the derplander model and sometimes has it's own model with thicker arms, and Lalafell which share a model between genders.

Adding Hrothgar and Viera didn't add any extra workload to their outfits since the model they use is already present on other races and the only extra workload they could've had, the headgear, has just been ignored.

No, you don't seem to get it.

Your character doesn't have a "Body", your character is made out of Legos. To put it simply, once you equip a top that top is now "your torso", there isn't anything underneath it. So yeah, there are 1000s of different "models" for females cause each thing that replaces a body part is a model that makes up your character. What you're likely thinking of is rigs, all females other than lala's use the same base rig. But what makes up their body is legos of gear that the devs have to make sure fit well and act right.

Here is what YP had to say ..
"In a Fan Festival keynote speech, I stated that this will likely be the last time we add new playable races to FFXIV. To put it simply, a tremendous amount of time and resources are required to develop one. I’m sure you all understand that a new race will require new faces, hairstyles, bodies, and other assets. In addition to this, they need to be capable of equipping all existing items—this alone requires a massive commitment of resources. Each race has a unique frame and body type, and so every piece of visible equipment needs to be carefully adjusted to display properly on Hrothgar and Viera models. A cursory search will show that FFXIV has around ten thousand equippable items already implemented, all of which must be manually modified by our designers. This is an immediate and unavoidable development cost incurred when adding a new race.

The addition of new playable races will impact more than the development cost of the items added in 5.1 and subsequent updates. Not only will we be transitioning from twelve variations (six races, two genders each) to fourteen, but we will also need to commit more resources to the development of new emotes. While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop. This is a complex problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing more money or people at it, as it impacts both debugging and QA.

In summary, these are the circumstances which informed my previous statement that this is likely to be the last time we add new playable races; as at this point in time, it is difficult to see us maintaining our patch update schedule if we have to account for more than seven races and two genders (technically six races with two genders and two races with a single gender, but this is the functional equivalent)."

[ItMe]

[snip]

Dang... I can see why they're adding the Viera and Hrothgar one gender at a time. Adding four new character models (Male and female of each) is a significantly more intensive and immense undertaking than I realized.

And I'm glad they did it this way. If they had added both genders for hrothgar and Viera were MIA (or the other way around) the big wigs could look at the other race and say "that's such a big undertaking. Do we really need the other race too?" But now Yoshi P has put his foot in the door for both races~

[Absurdity]

No, you don't seem to get it.

No, you don't seem to get it. THEY ARE ALL BASED ON MIDLANDER FEMALES.

This means that they need to create ONE model for female armor. Yes, it replaces your actual character's body with the armor and yes, they do need to create said armor from scratch. BUUUUUT they would have to do so anyway for the already existing races we have, ONCE. Regardless of whether you're a Viera, a Miqo'te, an Au Ra, a Highlander, a Femroe or a midlander, it is the exact same armor model for ALL OF THEM. There are outliers as I have already stated but even those share a model between each other and since those races already exist they have to make said armor for them anyway. Male Roegadyn already existed from the start and Hrothgar use the exact same model for their armor, there was no additional work besides creating the male Roegadyn armor.

So if they were to add new races it would have no influence on their workload in that regard.


What is true is that they need additional resource to develope their unique assets, animations, emotes, voices, the general character design and it's customization options. These are all things that need to be created from scratch but armor is not one of those. Unless they add a race that is so different from all the existing ones that they need a unique model. For example if they added a race that has digitigrade legs, then they would need to create unique models for every leg armor and every pair of shoes in the game, this would certainly be a massive amount of extra work.

Which is, I believe, one of the reasons that Viera have normal human feet and not the feet from FF12, because it would've required too much extra work to make a unique model for every shoe in the game.