TWO of Final Fantasy XIV Online’s newest races launched in 2019 alongside the games current expansion, Shadowbringers. However, the Viera and Hrothgar were restricted to only being available as one gender. But all of that is going to change in Final Fantasy XIV Online’s next expansion, Endwalker.
In todays keynote presentation during Day 1 of the 2021 Final Fantasy XIV Digital FanFest, Final Fantasy XIV Online Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida revealed that players will soon be able to create male Viera’s. This was revealed via a surprise video towards the end of the keynote presentation. However, the translator for Yoshi-P may have given it away directly before the video was shown by making the Viera’s bunny ears with his fingers.
Yoshida, aka Yoshi-P, revealed to viewers that they weren’t originally looking at adding anything new in regards to races in the Endwalker expansion. However, there’s been a lot of fans asking for Viera and Hrothgar to not be gender specific.
The development team have both listened and delivered by introducing a male varient of the Viera race. The male Viera presented in the video could almost be mistaken as female as they look almost androgynous. According to Viera lore, male and female Viera look almost identical until they are 13/14 years old. The story of how they’re introduced into the game though will be discussed in the future.
Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing the female Hrothgar anytime soon as having them ready at the same time as Viera was difficult due to time constraints. However, there are plans to make female Hrothgar’s available at some point in the future.