man, didn't even think of that. good point.
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Final Fantasy XIV Reintroduces "Gender"-locked races, Viera female only, Hrothgar male only.
- Thread starter Zero-ELEC
- Start date
See, I might have believe that (with some obvious Gender norm bias running alongside it) if it weren't for that one piece of interview where Yoshi-P said that'd he'd find it weird if male bunnies were walking around and thinking about adding a male-only class waaaay before the budgetary/time issues would've presented themselves. Certainly his first instinct when making new races wasn't "let's make these two full races!" and then things popped up that caused them to limit their scope and gender-locked them. It seems these were planned as gender-locked from the get go.
I don't doubt that there are budget/manpower/manhour issues, and that making new races is time and resource consuming, but it is not solely an issue of resources. If it were, I would think that the Hrothgar would have probably been the one to received the cut completely, given there was no huge clamoring for the Ronso, unlike both male and female Viera.
And, of course it should go without saying but internet being internet, imbeciles sending death threats can go to heck.
Why even bother doing two races at once then? Why not just push one out so you can properly set a new race, then do another race later on? The logistics issue they have is one their burdening themselves with for no reason. No one is demanding the immediately release of two new races.
Thanks for the laugh at lunch. Creating Fran and 2B that artist is master class at creating pandering designs.
I wouldn't say from the getgo considering they do have concepts of male Viera.
See my post where I said Yoship is an overly ambitous (and transparent) individual. The strain on the team started to show with single dungeons in Heavensward, then the constant missing of dates and delays on the roadmaps. And why not now? Because expansions are when they get the bigger boost in development power/scale. The normal team when it's not working on a major expansion is around 300-350 people. For the big expansion push, it jumps to 500.
Here are some fun numbers and statistics
Posted byReiss
u/tormenteddragon
1 year ago
The FFXIV Dev Team - Changes over time
[Discussion]
Over the years I've often seen a lot of speculation online as to the size of the FFXIV development team, especially in comparison to those of other MMOs. So I've put together a video and some data to hopefully provide a more accurate picture of what the main dev team looks like.
Here's the VIDEO.
Here's the GOOGLE DOC with the full credits lists for 1.0, 1.23, 2.0, 2.55, 3.0, and 3.56.
TL;DR: The FFXIV development team is at about 264 in-house members as of patch 3.56. This is very close to (in fact, in some cases slightly larger than) the typical size of development teams for major MMOs on the market, including WoW. The team is and has been continuously hiring. It seems that the boss design team has grown from 5 to 8 members as of patch 3.56.
Main Development Staff
Update: 5 September 2018Yoshida: At any given time there are about 350 people involved in the development of FFXIV. During busy periods that goes up to about 500 or so. If you include the management team it's probably around 650 people. GameWatch - 24 Aug 2018
(Note: I would venture to guess the above numbers include the localization and sound teams as well as a number of other teams associated with the project.)Yoshida: ...over 200 team members... JeuxOnline - 5 Sep 2018Yoshida: Our team is still on the same scale, but we are now much more secure in what we're able to do. Although we have reduced the number of dungeons from 2 to 1 in odd patches... content such as Heaven-on-High not only requires the resources of a normal dungeon but as much as three times the amount. This shows how much the abilities of our staff have improved over time. Final Fantasy Dojo - 31 Aug 2018
The team was at its largest leading up to the launch of 2.0:
Yoshida: ...we've continued development with a very large team -- 250 people... Engadget - 21 Oct 2011Yoshida: Currently, the in-house team consists of almost 300 members. We also have outsourced a fair amount of work to third-party companies, so all-in-all, the team is fairly large. July 2012 - SourceSeveral key people were borrowed from other projects around Square Enix in order to completely relaunch the game in about 2 years and 8 months. These included Yosihisha Hashimoto from the Luminous team (the engine that FFXV uses), and Akihiko Matsui from the FFXI team, among others Source.
Yoshida: Coming onto a project with hundreds of people seemingly out of nowhere as the new boss, I was expecting there to be resistance, and I had to be ready should that have indeed been the case. There was a lot of tension on the team, but we were motivated, and I think things turned out very well. SourceGondai: In order to get ARR made we had to borrow people from other battle teams from other games within Square Enix.Yoshida: A lot of the people we borrowed are hardcore MMO players. We used their feedback and advice to make revisions. SourceYoichi Wada: We also welcome several new leaders handpicked from other projects to work with the existing talent on FINAL FANTASY XIV. SourceThis borrowing of staff led to delays for many titles on the Japanese side of the company:
The unsuccessful launch of FFXIV caused a negative chain of events in other areas across the businesses. One notable example is the significant delay in development of new HD Games titles in Japan. SourceOnce A Realm Reborn had officially launched, these borrowed developers returned to their original projects, bringing the FFXIV team back down to the 260-270 level it's been at since.
Yoshida: Currently for FFXIV: ARR, including myself and Komoto here, there are over 50 people who are in charge of planning the game out. SourceYoshida: We have this giant task board with all of the tasks and timelines and what people are supposed to do — it's such a large project that we have more than 10 project managers making sure that everything is getting done on time and that everyone knows what to do. If anyone's going to be confused, it's going to be myself. [laughs] SourceSound and Localization Divisions
The Sound and Localization divisions are not included as part of the Main Development Staff in the credits (meaning people like Soken and Koji Fox aren't part of the numbers above). Here's how they've changed over time:
Note: Sound Division does not include orchestra or Uematsu collaborators such as Susan Calloway and Arnie Roth.
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I wouldn't say from the getgo considering they do have concepts of male Viera.
See my post where I said Yoship is an overly ambitous (and transparent) individual. The strain on the team started to show with single dungeons in Heavensward, then the constant missing of dates and delays on the roadmaps. And why not now? Because expansions are when they get the bigger boost in development power/scale. The normal team when it's not working on a major expansion is around 300-350 people. For the big expansion push, it jumps to 500.
Here are some fun numbers and statistics
The answer to "why now" Is because they have increased resources and staff due to the recent expansion...but it's still not enough to do these new races properly...why again, why not just wait?
I mean, we're both saying the same thing, putting out two races right now that are genderlocked is pissing off the community and they don't have the time/resources to make them multigendered, but the only reason they're doing it now is because they want to...
None of that is a satisfactory answer.
But again, what ended up happening was exactly what he described in 2013. They may have drawn up some concept art of Male Viera but there's no indication they were ever in active development or seriously considered. They concepted the Lupin as a playable race well and that went nowhere.I wouldn't say from the getgo considering they do have concepts of male Viera.
The gender-lock was almost certainly by design, from conception.
See my staff stats posting. His ambition is very much the answer. He chose to expand options with the Deep dungeon at the sacrifice of a new 4man dungeon. This man just simply dreams big, which again had led to the success and revival of XIV.
This is just my opinion, but that's a bad fucking answer.
Which, expounding on so it doesn't sound like I'm just trying to dunk on you, because I'm not.
If the reason why he's so eager to quickly put out two new races that don't have the minimum capabilities of the other races from even a gear stand point is because his ambition decrees that he do this quickly opposed to simply pushing a race down the timeline in order to do one of the two correctly by his own standards...
That's a bad fucking call.
That
Ain't
It
Chief
It's less that played threw a fit over the bunny gear, and more that people asked for it, Yoshi-P said it would happen, and then it took the team years to get around to doing it. So people would ask "hey, can we get an update on the bunny gear?"
I'm having a discussion with a friend right now, but frankly the XIV team is still undertaffed for a MMO team. More or less, his team is overworking constantly (as noted earlier too). Conclusion was if they had Yoship head XVI, they would understaff him because he's able to get so much done with so little. It's a pretty sad situation.
I wouldn't say from the getgo considering they do have concepts of male Viera.
See my post where I said Yoship is an overly ambitous (and transparent) individual. The strain on the team started to show with single dungeons in Heavensward, then the constant missing of dates and delays on the roadmaps. And why not now? Because expansions are when they get the bigger boost in development power/scale. The normal team when it's not working on a major expansion is around 300-350 people. For the big expansion push, it jumps to 500.
Here are some fun numbers and statistics
Man, I wish the female Viera even looked like that. Looks much more badass and regal.
There's a lot of reaching going on in this thread from people who quite clearly have never worked in game development. Generally, when companies cite resources as an issue is because it's a genuine issue - and it's not just an issue in development pre-release, but it's also an issue of maintenance going forward.
The idea that Ronso wasn't also highly requested is just nonsense as well, Viera and Ronso were the two most requested races, again as stated by the dev team. When faced with the option of only adding one new race, which again is likely more because of the ongoing resource cost of developing gear for these new races as long as the game exists, the team chose to instead add gender locked versions of two races to get the most requested races in the game. It's an imperfect solution, just as it would have been to leave out the Hrothgar/Ronso and not server players who really want races that are more beast-like in nature or are fan of the Ronso.
It also potentially leaves them open to adding female Hrothgar in the future and male Viera, since I'm sure that's an easier case to make if you want a budget to support them long term.
Yoshida has given entirely reasonable answers that come from the reality of game development and supporting a live game, but people can't get over a quote years old and instead want to believe he and the dev team are sexist.
It's gross and the levels of entitlement are potentially even worse. There are plenty of folks out there that are excited for the Ronso to be added to the game, should they be told to fuck off because people are so put out by the lack of male Viera?
no MMO developer is going to promise features for 2 years down the road when they likely haven't even started on the next expansion yet. Why promise if you don't know you can deliver it? But I wouldn't at all be surprised if that's the intention, and would be a clever way of allocating available resources.
Whos to say they won't look that good? What we've seen so far is just the default adventurer gear/underclothes. With actual armor/gear they probably will look something along those lines based off of XIV's art direction.
You're right, I just get the feeling they won't. I'm still bummed that the default gear is just Fran, I guess.
Well consider this is 3rd expansion. chance is FF14 already entering half way and Square want to move the resource to another thing. This expasion is pretty big thought kinda feel like "foundation" expansion. so they want to get heavy load first out before Square decide to cut the manpower
I never said they didn't have those issues. In fact that you can see in that post I very much believe that they have issues with resources. It is a very well documented fact that their team is generally small.
I've not personally seen as much Ronso clamoring as I did for the Viera but, if there was, I'm sorry for implying that there wasn't. That was coloured by what I've seen and heard from online spaces.
See that's a huge if. Given that the their budget and manpower is going to be diminished going forward until the ramp-up to the next expansion, and they will be maintaining the game, adding new content as they go along, it seems to me unlikely that they'd add whole new races in a 5.X update. Especially when you consider ROG/NIN, which they added in a .x update and said never again because it was to intensive.
Sexism isn't a zero sum game. Being sexist doesn't make you an inherently horrible person. Sexism is attitudes, biases and notions that affect your decision making, consciously or unconsciously. These are borne from the culture we live in. I have sexist attitudes and I'm sure you do as well. A sexist decision can be made without necessarily being on purpose or malicious.
And, dismissing a quote from half a decade ago where he describes the exact situation that happened today with the reasoning that boils down to "bunny men are kinda weird huh?" is absolutely doing disservice to Yoshi-P and his team and their capacity to do great things, which they have done and will still do.
Oh, come off it, when did I disparage anyone excited for the Hrothgar? I said that (from what I saw) there was not such a huge clamoring for them as compared to the Viera, so I suggested that if the issue was solely about manhours/resources the thing that would have been excised would have been that race. It was an observation, not a command, or a want.
Your OP line is literally "No one wanted this", how are folks supposed to interpret this?
No one wanting races to be gender-locked. Which is the point of the thread, not what races were added. The initial title for the thread I was going to post didn't even have the names of the races, but I decided it could serve to be informative.
Y'all reaching really hard to try and make me look like I don't want the buff lion people.
What I've seen of Bless Online, they can't beat Guild Wars 2.
The Charr race, and also the Asuras, are a text book example of doing it right.
If Square gives the Hrothgar a female gender, and I hope they do, this is what I want them to do.
Apologize about the missed optics, I think with recent replies from others it sounded like folks would rather not have the Hrothgar and just do male Viera instead.
I get it. I apologise if I ever came off that way myself. I can only speak for myself, but my issue will never be with the Hrothgar race at all, or the people that wanted Ronso and/or are happy with them, rather with the concept (and execution) of gender-locking races.
Also, the Sylvari. Arenanet took the Elf concept and made something innovative with it.What I've seen of Bless Online, they can't beat Guild Wars 2.
The Charr race, and also the Asuras, are a text book example of doing it right.
Mrhappy Interview w/ Yoshida From Tokyo Fan Festival
Not sure if folks saw this but it looks like Mr Happy had an interview with Yoshida and got a very in depth answer about the big points of contention going on right now.
I'm hopeful people will look at this and have responses more tilted towards understanding instead of anger.
I'm hopeful people will look at this and have responses more tilted towards understanding instead of anger.
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Yoshida interview: relevant transcript
Text of the answer he gave in the video above:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x30qZohmIc-18urZVcePILzOXdbUt_AnUd8GTvPw4uI/mobilebasic
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x30qZohmIc-18urZVcePILzOXdbUt_AnUd8GTvPw4uI/mobilebasic
And there it is. As expected, there's little chance they'll add the other genders, since that would be the equivalent to just making a new race.
And given Squeenix keeps diverting resources away from the game, I don't expect that to ever happen.
Bring on the beasts!
Seriously though, I haven't been with FFXIV long but I am quite looking forward now to more non-human-ish races.
I don't necessarily think it's sexism but if you have the cost to do only X or Y there can be reasons, like sexism, for choosing one over the other. "We can only afford to do X." is largely orthogonal to why you choose to do X.
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You can add beastly races. You can add pretty races. Genderlocking either just plain sucks.
Hopefully they'll add the other genders in the future. The whole way they went about this is honestly disappointing.
They should've just did both genders for viera or hrothgar and then release the other set in the next expansion.
Hopefully they'll add the other genders in the future. The whole way they went about this is honestly disappointing.
They should've just did both genders for viera or hrothgar and then release the other set in the next expansion.
Amen to that. Guild Wars 2 nailed it with the Charr and XIV needs more of this- more bestial races, less cute/pretty ones. Hrothgar are a great start, I think I'm going to fantasia my warrior to one.
Good job on Mr. Happy for asking these questions and getting more thorough answers. Him and his team were in a really hard place. Viera have been top of the list for fan demand and a more bestial like race has always been a big ask from the community. Before Stormblood I really really wanted Bangaa as a new race alongside Viera! Every race is hot and/or cute up to this point. For varieties sake Hrothgar are a great change of pace and to me, it was a good choice seeing as this may be the final time they are adding new races. Im switching to Viera day 1, but I would be disappointed if we never got a beast race. None of it is ideal, but its a far better outcome than just Viera, even if it would have meant both genders.
The reasoning for dancer as ranged DPS and adding a Tank is also fair. His comments about needing to restructure how they do healers is interesting and I like it, the way healers are now isn't great for balancing them. Hopefully they figure out healers this expansion and come out rolling with a 4th in 6.0.
*prays for Geomancer
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It's like you're not actually reading what he said at all. They specifically cited that this might be the last race/set of races they add because of the development cost with updating all the gear in the past and going forward - and "cost" in this case isn't just money, it's human resources as well.
Because of that, they specifically tried to serve two player desires of adding Viera and adding a beast-like race like the Ronso at the same time, in case they can't support more. Saying "just do one and then the other later" tells me you didn't even bother to read the very in-depth answers he provided. There is a chance they simply wouldn't be able to.
Use your head.
Has there been an official response to this yet? I've seen a lot of speculative posts on the reason that they did this, but I'm curious if there was an actual statement on why they chose to gender lock these races.
I highly doubt the reason was "for the lore" and more "for the budget". I can't imagine that this was Yoshi-P's decision, and I feel really bad that he's probably getting a ton of shit in addition to the work he and his team are going to have to go through.
I highly doubt the reason was "for the lore" and more "for the budget". I can't imagine that this was Yoshi-P's decision, and I feel really bad that he's probably getting a ton of shit in addition to the work he and his team are going to have to go through.
Yeah. Each role has hundreds of different armor sets that would need to be uniquely tailored to any new races, and with each expansion this number is just gonna get bigger and bigger. Adding more races just makes that exponentially more time consuming and extra genders take as much work as each gender is basically its own race as far as animations and proportions go.
is this similar to the whole "why isn't there any female space marines in 40k"
the answer to that has always been well the astartes gene-seed is based on their primarchs who are all male, but that hasn't stopped the debate in 40k about if GW should introduce them, regardless of the lore reason
the answer to that has always been well the astartes gene-seed is based on their primarchs who are all male, but that hasn't stopped the debate in 40k about if GW should introduce them, regardless of the lore reason
Well, point 1 is kinda hard to believe they have these much problems when it's one of the most pofitable MMOs right now, with both a montly fee and an additional DLC shop, and their models aren't that advanced, but whatever. Point 2 is irrelevant, and Point 3 is BS because they are basically saying that only male exclusive races can look beastly.
But there are Viera male, and there are Hrothgar female. They're just not letting the players see them.