The Women FFXIV Needs

[aveyond-dreams]

I have already read it. And for me, the problem is really not only the "colour" of the main cast. It's a concern that actually seems quite secondary to me, in the sense that it can be justified by the lore (and by the cultural tendency, in Japan, to distinguish a main character by his or her hair colour).

Ok so why are all the women in this game blond and nearly all with short or tied up hair? Fire Emblem 3 Houses is also a japanese game and they do not suffer from these sort of issues with visual design in terms of its women. There is sufficient variety in their cast. Naturally, as I have said before, the majority of players want to play attractive or idealized body types rather than some of the alternative options that have been suggested in this thread. Changing things up on the hair and color side of things would be an excellent starting point, along with a pivot back towards more fantastical and feminine clothes for them.

[Silverbane]

One thing SWTOR had that FFXIV does not is substantially different body types within each species.
The sexy-ist of which was, in the opinion of all the players I knew, the female body type 4 "zaftig" twi'lic.

[Cach]

Improve the muscle slider, specially for girl abs.

Fit tomboy is very "in" right now it's what I'm sayin'

[ronibosch]

Improve the muscle slider, specially for girl abs.

Fit tomboy is very "in" right now it's what I'm sayin'

I agree. I wish I could give my Viera more muscle tone, especially as a Warrior main.

[SturmChurro]

I agree. I wish I could give my Viera more muscle tone, especially as a Warrior main.

I think viera have about the perfect amount of tone myself. Viera look fit.

[ronibosch]

I think viera have about the perfect amount of tone myself. Viera look fit.

I know, but I wish there was a muscle tone slider so that I define her abs juuust a little bit more. Then again, my character's muscles might look the way they do because I'm a console peasant.

[Avidria]

Our entire cast right now is pretty pale light haired people and the proposed examples are all... pretty (mostly) pale dark haired people.
Like I'm all for visual variety but the examples presented just... aren't terribly visually interesting, quirky green hair and outfit aside, or even all that different from what we have now barring maybe a little more color.

Granted, I've never played another FF game and don't plan to, so idk zip about those characters outside the looks, but saying we need more "conventionally attractive" people with... longer and darker hair as the only real change I'm seeing seems like kind of an odd take to me. Heck, my biggest beef with the current character creator is that it's hard to get a character who looks beautiful and mature vs capital p Pretty on the races I like the most. Viera is the best I can get and I still have to tweak them a lot to get something I really like and can stick with for a long time before I get bored of the look. Like, I actually would love to see more variety in both looks and personality, but... not framed like this.

[MikkoAkure]

Ok so why are all the women in this game blond and nearly all with short or tied up hair? Fire Emblem 3 Houses is also a japanese game and they do not suffer from these sort of issues with visual design in terms of its women. There is sufficient variety in their cast. Naturally, as I have said before, the majority of players want to play attractive or idealized body types rather than some of the alternative options that have been suggested in this thread. Changing things up on the hair and color side of things would be an excellent starting point, along with a pivot back towards more fantastical and feminine clothes for them.

Most of Fire Emblem’s hair colors are still on the lighter side, especially if you remove the blues and purples that don’t exist in real life because Fire Emblem trends more on the anime side than Final Fantasy when it comes to hair colors.

There’s a variety in the cast because there’s always like 50 characters in each game. That doesn’t mean they’re really explored as much beyond a small handful though.

Yoshi-P has already commented on the whole white hair thing as a thing he noticed before and it just happened to be how things ended up. He even considered changing the hair color of some of the Scions for that reason. Urianger and Estinien were never originally meant to be involved with the Scions when they were first written.

But again, most JRPGs tend toward lighter hair colors. This isn’t new.

[aveyond-dreams]

Numerous characters have sported unique hair colors throughout the series. Vanille, Rydia, Lenna, Faris, Terra, Lightning, Serah, Eiko, Maria, Porom, and so on. Given that there are a large amount of characters in the Fire Emblem cast that still are able to retain unique visual characteristics, it is concerning that FFXIV was not able to accomplish this despite having an easier, smaller amount of characters to work with. More care and attention should have been paid to the visual design and changing the hair colors of the scions would have been an adequate solution, especially with the visual changes they underwent at the start of Shadowbringers.