Character Creation, Customization, and Gender

[MikkoAkure]

While it would've been a nice option at launch, I think it's too late to go back and fix anything going forward.

They'd need to commission the work to re-record hours worth of dialogue, which would be awkward for the characters whose voices have been replaced in later parts of the game or whose voice actors have since deceased. There's the matter of having to re-code gear and dialogue options away from the binary and which words they'd use for miscellaneous gendered words like lord/lady or master/mistress. And then there would be the question of how to handle this in the 3 other languages because German, French, and to a different extent Japanese lack proper gender neutral pronouns.

For the bodies, the game is barely held together by ARR-era server coding that boils our characters down into specific options that already seem to be at their limit of what the system can handle, which is why if your race has an ear/tail slider, it won't have a muscle slider. We can barely get 2 new full races that can't even wear hats so I don't believe the devs have it in them to add non-binary gender information in for everything else.

Ultimately while it's something important to be aware of for any potential future game and I personally know people who would be interested in it, I think that ship has long since sailed for FFXIV and the amount of resources required to overhaul what exists most likely doesn't outweigh the interest and motivation of the dev team to do so.

[Minali]

They'd need to commission the work to re-record hours worth of dialogue, which would be awkward for the characters whose voices have been replaced in later parts of the game or whose voice actors have since deceased. There's the matter of having to re-code gear and dialogue options away from the binary and which words they'd use for miscellaneous gendered words like lord/lady or master/mistress. And then there would be the question of how to handle this in the 3 other languages because German, French, and to a different extent Japanese lack proper gender neutral pronouns.

Rerecording voice lines of people who are no longer walking this earth would certainly be a difficult question, although I guess it depends a lot on who said what how much. Quite often the character is addressed with "you", nothing would need to change there. The general question of changing or adding to old cutscenes might occur sooner or later for one reason or another anyway, so I guess they can't table this forever. (When they included Duty Support for all duties there were one or two cutscenes that had to be changed for example. Just a small change, of course, but imo it's just a matter of time a change might require a solution for a cutscene with a deceased actor in it.) But yes, it would require some effort, time and money for sure.

Regarding gendered languages though, as a German who knows people working in localization: It is possible. After all, as PercibelTheren just pointed out, nonbinary people are not an American invention created five years ago. The very real and very much not recently born nonbinary Germans are having to face this difficulty daily and there are some ways how you can phrase things to make them genderneutral. There is also a number of neopronouns, although we don't have this huge advantage of "they", a word that was already there and could just be repurposed, so there's no "official" way so far.
The more important question is if the German SE team would finally decide to educate themselves. It was very disheartening to read the fae in Shadowbringers are not nonbinary but were asigned male and female pronouns. Same as with the nonbinary loporrits in the loporrit tribe quests, basically erasing nonbinary representation just because they couldn't be arsed to do their homework. Going by an interview with the localization team leads from a few years back, the French localization head said translating the fae was a challenge but they made it work. (Can't say how well or not, I don't speak French that well.) The German person didn't answer (or the answer wasn't printed, at least there was nothing in the article about it.) Was kind of hoping this might give them the idea they should handle it differently in the future, but then I checked the loporrit quests in German and.. nope.
Whole books are being written genderneutral or with nonbinary people in German and they don't sound "warped" either, maybe a bit unusual because the genered language is simply what many people are used to. It's sad when a rich company like SE doesn't manage to do it just because they don't want to bother with modern language.

So personally I am all for more options and wouldn't mind a more inclusive character creator. I know many nonbinary people who play this game and wouldn't mind having better choices. However, I can see how this would be a lot of work and I am, as rude as it may sound, not entirely sure if all teams are up to the task, based on what they have done so far. But hey, you never know.

[KisaiTenshi]

Rerecording voice lines of people who are no longer walking this earth would certainly be a difficult question, although I guess it depends a lot on who said what how much. Quite often the character is addressed with "you", nothing would need to change there.

This can be handled respectfully with AI just taking the existing line, and having it say the exact same line with the pronoun swapped, and would carry the same cadence. The problem with this is that this only works for specific characters that refer to you in third person. The game will sound more awkward if they changed every she/he to "they" just to not offend a few people who get upset, and it then offends people who don't like seeing it at all. You can't win, so you don't try.

Going forward though there are easier things the game can do. They could normalize the height scaling so that everyone gets the lalafell treatment (eg, male and female models have the same magnet options so that you could reasonably make female models taller and more/less busty, and male models shorter and less "masculine." That may require some gear to be off-limits (Eg gender-coded outfits like maid dresses, 2B's outfit, swimsuits) to those magnets to avoid "missing geometry" that require having a bust because it shows cleavage.

Like one of the reasons you don't see what "pokemon go" did more often, is because male and female animation rigs are different. If you try to normalize to a "one-gender" model, what you instead get is a very poor representation of any gender. You can see this effect in the VRoid software and a few other games that let you reconfigure the animation set. Realistically, a game has to have the gender split primarily because people get that uncanny valley vibe if the model doesn't look solidly male or female. But nobody said the female model couldn't go from AA to DDD, or any model go from 3'0 to 8'0. The only legitimate reason we have ANY restrictions on this at all is so people don't RolePlay as children, and certain gear would break because they aren't textured to stretch that much.

Honestly the adjustments to the bust size isn't even that controversial. If people forget 1.0, the bust size was tied to the face selected. You couldn't adjust it. People were just mildly annoyed that there wasn't options. No people were more annoyed about the miqo'te butt nerf with the release of 2.0 which was a consequence of making hyur and miqo'te models use the same gear, with all the terrible clipping on the tail. It would be nice to have, but it doesn't take from my enjoyment of the game.

To which I say to the OP, I hear you, but I don't see it too much ever changing with the character creator. There is clearly room to make different character body types without making them one-off (Dulia-Chai Mewlah and a few other unnamed characters in Eulmore basically a Miqo'te with lalafell animations.) But I think the most we will ever get in service to NB is seeing more configurable chest sizes at the expense of gear that can be worn if set too small or too big, if that's even a thing they want to consider. There are lore reasons for things being the way they are and outside of cross-overs we never see core changes.

[Iscah]

There is clearly room to make different character body types without making them one-off (Dulia-Chai Mewlah and a few other unnamed characters in Eulmore basically a Miqo'te with lalafell animations.)

Actually, going from some behind-the-scenes screenshots that were shown a while back, it seems that they're handled as oversized Lalafells with Miqo'te faces. The test model in the screenshots was in the Lalafell version of the hempen camise and bloomers.

[KisaiTenshi]

Actually, going from some behind-the-scenes screenshots that were shown a while back, it seems that they're handled as oversized Lalafells with Miqo'te faces. The test model in the screenshots was in the Lalafell version of the hempen camise and bloomers.

That just tells me that the ability to make such a character does actually exist and the lack of interest by the devs to want to make that more of a thing in the creator. Add a "third Miqo'te faction" in addition to Sunseeker and Moonseeker. Call them "Snowseeker" or something. They could probably do it with the hyur too, considering the Padjal are Hyur with horns.

Anyway that was just a to highlight that the game engine does support at least a "larger lalafell" type of base. So it's very much something they likely could do, but they would probably prefer players that want bigger characters pick Roe or Hrothgar and maybe not realize some players want, something closer to a Dulia-Chai variant.

Would I personally want to? Not really. I would want a way to have a somewhat thicker model, but I'm not going to lose sleep over that. The game's always had the drawback that the faces are nice but the body shapes leave a lot to be desired ("giraffe Elezen" have been in the game since 1.0)

[MikkoAkure]

That just tells me that the ability to make such a character does actually exist and the lack of interest by the devs to want to make that more of a thing in the creator. Add a "third Miqo'te faction" in addition to Sunseeker and Moonseeker. Call them "Snowseeker" or something. They could probably do it with the hyur too, considering the Padjal are Hyur with horns.

The problem here is gear. After a race is made, they'll need to make gear proportioned for that specific body shape and make sure the textures and scaling is correct. The gear replaces whole parts of the body, it isn't worn on the body. This is why they said making new races was such a big deal because of the lift and why we'll never get new ones after this. As for height sliders, what we have now already doesn't really work because it scales the entire body up or down together evenly instead of making a naturally looking short/tall person. I don't think I'd be a fan of making those a wider range than what they already are.

For stuff like Garleans and Padjal, those characters have unique unplayable faces in the game that has those features. I'm not sure what the hold-up is for getting more face options, but the devs seemed to have made a big deal about unlocking the midlander beard face so there must be some limitation there.