A few weeks ago, Digital Fan Fest announced a lot of upcoming Final Fantasy 14 content, including the hotly-anticipated Endwalker expansion. But it also revealed bunny boys and kitty girls as playable races, which perhaps even more exciting than the Endwalker expansion itself.
And as it turns out, male Viera and female Hrothgar would never have been created at all if it weren’t for a dedicated graphics team that sacrificed their own free time to make them.
In a traditional post-Fan Fest interview, Final Fantasy 14 games director and producer Naoki Yoshida talked with PlayStation Blog about everything that was announced at Fan Fest. Besides showcasing the new Reaper Job and the 24-man raid Myths of the Realm, Yoshida also talked about the difficulties in adding a new playable race to his ongoing MMO.
When female Viera and male Hrothgar were added in Shadowbringer, Yoshida said that he fully intended for them to be the last races added to the game–mostly because of the extra work involved with each new race. “The tasks required with each patch update will multiply,” explained Yoshida. “For example, when we implemented the Viera, because their ears are very long, we needed to add a new review flow to check how Viera characters would appear on screen in all cutscenes.”
This ultimately led to the decision to limit the Veria and Hrothgar to just female and male, respectively, back when Shadowbringer first arrived. “However, there was a significant amount of people around the world asking for male Viera and female Hrothgar,” added Yoshida. “At the same time, our graphics staff on the development team wanted to explore all options to see what they could do to figure out a way to somehow realize this request from the players.
“They spent over half a year using what free time they had in between their normal work on the patches to consider ways to add another playable race.”
That said, Yoshida’s development team determined that they’d only be able to bring one new race in time for Endwalker, so female Hrothgar will have to wait until afterward for their addition to Final Fantasy 14.
We’re not expecting FF14 news at E3, but we are expecting Square Enix to provide an update on Babylon’s Fall. Square’s E3 presentation starts Sunday at 12:15 PM PST.
