"Both Viera and Hrothgar are unable to wear helmet." -> People reaction : "Only Hrothgar is rushed out the door."
Also some comment I found :
<ITT: People that have no idea how the models function in this game.
A new beastly race, with both male and female variants, would require doubling the current size of the gear model library. Literally doubling it. Just to add one race with unique shape assets in both a male and female variant. Dead fucking serious. And if you just made the Hrothgar's male-only design, giving it completely unique PC shape assets that have to accounted for would still entail recreating 50% of the gear model library. People thinking that it's a simple undertaking have no fucking clue how anything works.
People already piss and moan about the devs spending motes of time on shit like Mahjong. When something like Mahjong can easily be a side project and has zero impact on the bucket of resources going towards "real content" development. But a new "beastly" race? Let's think for a second (I know, that's a hard thing to do but bear with me) about what that means. They have to dedicate a not-insignificant portion of their skilled PC gear modeling and texturing team to implement this. A side project like Mahjong draws from a general development bucket and doesn't require the skilled input from your modelers, texture artists, etc. Rebuilding your entire library of gear? Yeah, you're going to need.... Your inventory systems experts so that you can figure out how to stuff the game with +100% more gear models than it had a year ago.... Your modelers and texture artists to figure out how to create approximations for tons of existing gear to work for this new PC shape that never existed before this point.... Your animators to dedicate a shitload of time to making the gear move and figure out how to handle the boatload of clipping issues that are going to happen.... And a shitload of testing by everybody in general to figure out the sheer amount of clipping and other bullshit that's going to go into this.
Crying about a new "beastly" race is literally the dumbest fucking thing in terms of wasted development resources. It would actually require its own division of art, modeling, and systems programming to accomplish.>
And if we look at how helmet look on Worgen, Tauren or something like Charr...no thank you.
Last edited by MrTharne; 2019-03-24 at 01:17 AM.
^
A lot of people don't seem to grasp the herculean task that is creating new animations for a new race in a MMORPG.
A playable character has to have hundreds of animations. Just open up WoWhead's character viewer, click on "animation", and just look at the sheer number of different animations there are. Furthermore, in WoW, warriors, paladins, and death knights use the same two handed animations, but FFXIV goes a step further by making unique animations for each job as well. That's several hundred animations. Now, multiply them by the number of race and gender there are (since they effectively have to make two skeletons with their own set of animations for one race)...
Also bear in mind, that the animation department also has to go back and create new animations for each and every race and gender every time a new job releases, ON TOP OF creating hundreds of new animations for a new race/gender altogether...
It is quite apparent that the team appears to have reached the point where it simply isn't feasible to animate more races, but since they are making two skeletons anyway, they mind as well try to appeal to the broadest range of players with those sets: waifu-ish female Viera, and brawny male Hrothgar. Once Shadowbringers releases, the FFXIV team will have to be adding new job animations for fourteen unique skeletons.
While it seems like new skeletons are out of the question, I am curious as to whether or not they will make more models utilizing the skeletons we already have. Perhaps they will add more customization options for existing races (though I heard there were technical difficulties preventing that), or third clans (Othardian Roegadyn like Gosetsu?), or perhaps they could go the allied races route by creating "new races" that reuse pre-existing skeletons, such as Dwarves.
Hrothgar! FUCKING YES, Time to finally use my Fantasia to change my character into one. As a current DRAGOON main and a major love of Kimahri from FFX. This is a dream come true.
Couldn't give a shit about helmets or headwear either as I always have them turned off on my other characters anyway.
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Meh, I don't give a fuck, I'd rather have Hrothgar with no helmets on release vs waiting for them to get items I don't use. You cry way too much.
And from my comment on that thread.
Helmets were improved quite a bit with 8.1.5 finally for a lot of the beast races. Not so much for the worgen still but they're due for a model update this Summer anyway.
I know why they are choosing the easy way out for Hrothgar as beast races (though Hrothgar are barely that to me) are more effort. Like my tauren here has a helmet that is modified for the snout and pushes outwards when for other non beast races it's more enclosed. FF14 rarely even modifies helmets for Miqo'te these days and, as far as I can tell, has never modified a helmet for Au Ra horns (that helmet on my tauren had its horns removed to show my tauren horns instead) or either races tails while new geosets in BFA actually will put armor pieces on draenei and tauren tails and modify geosets for them and in general won't clip through the tail like the 'capes' Square is so insistent on adding. In the end it comes off as lazy from a company like Square who is far from some indie dev and there is no excuse for laziness of this level from a multi billion dollar company. If Blizzard were to have released a race and said they couldn't wear helmets the forums and reddit would be burned to the ground.
You're exaggerating things a bit here. Races in FF14 are in way as varied as races in WoW and don't vary far from the base human model (unlike WoW's 28 unique race models which doesn't include allied races except the KT) and thus use the same base skeleton (WoW does this as well now with their new tech which is why they do more animations) put into different poses hence the Hrothgar being a modified Roe and Viera a modified Elezen. With this any new race animations are just copied over to each races skeleton and so no there's no 'making hundreds of new animations' just because they added Viera as it's just using the animation rig they had from the Elezen. Now this is assuming Square uses modern animation and modeling techniques but given how they develop other things I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they use an archaic system for modeling as well.
Last edited by leviathonlx; 2019-03-24 at 02:06 AM.
Live letter so far is pretty good.
Seems Au Ra now rub horns to show their affection according to the lore team and Yoshi.
I really hope the Hrothgar have references to this song. Not an exact copy, but some sampling would be fucking amazing.
Spent 8 minutes hyping up a Dad of Light movie.
It doesn't mean much to anyone but a periphery audience in English-speaking countries, but Dad of Light is ridiculously popular in Japan, so the hype was warranted for the target audience, it just wasn't us.
Only because you completely ignored what I was actually asking you. I wasn't pointing to hrothgar not having lore as a negative against them, I was pointing to the abundance of lore for viera leading to more people expecting male viera over anything else and that leading to disappointment when it is something that they had no reason to expect. I literally asked you a question specifically about that and you ignored it.
Plus, to answer your question since I actually do that, Yugiri was featured in the game long before au'ra were unveiled so they certainly have a leg up on hrothgar.
Which is a good excuse for why we might not see any when we visit them but still doesn't really explain why the Warrior of Light can't be one.But they said at Paris FanFest during a Q&A to read carefully what that dude said because they gave hints in there about the state of Male Viera. (And that's what Yoshida repeated in the Keynote yesterday : "They stay hidden.")
That does not support the idea that they were short on development time. It's just ad hoc justification. Imagine how much more surprised people would have been to get two completed new races instead of two half-assed ones.Because as I said they wanted (as stated at the end of the keynote yesterday) to give player a race with more beastial attributes, and probably had to decide to gender lock them because not enough time to make two full races.
By the way, what is their excuse for there not being playable female hrothgar anyway? We saw plenty of female ronso in FFX.
I ask three question and you only answer one... I guess congratulations on successfully making your non-point.I bring this up because no matter what people would have been bitching, so nothing matters in the end.
they could just...you know add the male and female stuff later? We get to play freaking viera and ronso now in their most popular most well known forms. The main things people have been asking for quite awhile. Like when HW came out people weren't going "cmon I want that male viera that is barely ever shown in anything" no it was "I would love to play Fran" so we got Fran quite litterally in the story and get to play Viera also. Then now we can play Ronso and dress up as Khimari again the most noted ronso in FF.
There is lore about Female Viera, and little to none about the Male, they added some lore to explain to people why you won't see any, or why you can't be one : i.e. They need a strict adherence to the Word of the Wood before seeking solitude, and since the WotW implies not leaving the Woods where they live well if it's a strict adherence they can't leave so you can't play one and they will remain alone for most of their lives except when they will go to a village to breed and take the young ones for training to a strict adherence and the circle repeat itself. Adding lore doesn't mean that something will be made accessible, lore is also a mean to show that something is out of reach, like Male Viera.
No female Hrothgar ? Well if they don't make Male Viera, it's for balancing purpose. One race without Male then you gonna get one race without Female. And Hrothgar are not Ronso, their First shard name are an easter egg, an homage that's why they decided (contrary to Viera) to call them by a different name in our Shard, they are inspired by but not the same : Hrothgar = Ronso FF14 =/= Ronso FF10.
Edit : And of course they are short on time, that's video game development for you. If Hrothgar seems rushed to some people then what would happen if they decided to make two full races ? "See you in December 2019 or later for your Shadowbringers release bois!"
Also what Dugna said, nothing is stopping them to add the other gender later.
People already have lot of option for slender/normal body types adding a Male Viera would only give more of that, let some people have some choice instead of just Roe for big muscle.
Last edited by MrTharne; 2019-03-24 at 08:25 AM.
Last edited by Super Kami Dende; 2019-03-24 at 09:00 AM.
Their game, their call. If it was something I didn't agree on, I'd stop playing, like I decided to do with WoW when I saw their new Toy that let's you transform into Blackhand and what not (I had decided to return and when I saw that I said, "Well I'm done.")
Also equating the lore we got (which is more than one sentence, I just used this one but every bit of info about Male Viera was about trying to make you understand that it's not gonna happen if you keep a cool head when reading it) to "Women belong in the kitchen" is disingenuous.
It's kind of astounding that there are apologists for lazy game design but I can't say I'm too surprised.
SE can do whatever they want with their game, but people also can feel whatever they want about it.
Also part about one sentence was about whole "there's no male Viera lore, so they added lore that says there's basically no male Viera" part, which probably made a lot of sense when you wrote it, but I fail to see how that means they couldn't have added male Viera in the first place. Because male rabbits are stranger than male cats? Consistency issues? SE keeps redesigning moogles in every game, but they still keep their name.
To be honest going by the storm of criticism this is getting they probably will add the opposites in 6.0. Says a lot when even the Japanese playerbase aren't too happy about this.
I'd rather them not do it during the expansion as I'd rather them focus on the bigger SHB content personally.
The main issue I have is that Hrothgar looked really rushed for the event. That Kimahri screenshot they showed looked like a Sega Mega Drive vomited it out. So they seriously need some work at least.