Two new races have now been confirmed for the Shadowbringers expansion of Final Fantasy XIV: the Viera and the Hrothgar. And they are both gender-locked, which has really angered part of the community.
What was announced? When the first new race of the Viera was revealed a few months ago in Paris, fans immediately noticed that only female Viera were seen in the announcement video.
This led to speculation that the race would have no playable males. However, many wanted to wait for the last Fan Festival in Japan to see if perhaps the male representatives of the race would be shown there.
Instead, a completely new race of Hrothgar was announced, which had previously been leaked through a glitch. And they will be exclusively male.
You can watch the announcement video for the Hrothgar here:
This is what happened in the community: The announcement led to a wave of outrage on Reddit and social media. Players accuse the development team of repeating the mistakes of 1.0, where the two races Miqo’te and Roegadyn were gender-locked.
This was changed with patch 2.0 and the return to gender-lock in Shadowbringers has been received extremely negatively. One user wrote on Reddit: “This is just dumb. You are just like every other crappy Asian MMORPG with gender-lock.”
Many players are currently venting in the official forums. The player Hashalt wrote in the thread “Gender-locked Race?”: “Extremely disappointed and angry. This is the worst Fan Fest of all time.”
This part of the community demands that the missing genders be patched in during Shadowbringers.
Is this the only opinion? However, there is also some pushback. In another thread, the user satoppa wrote: “Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s a disaster.” And there were also several other players who supported his opinion.
On social media, many players have come forward who liked the Hrothgar and are looking forward to playing the new race.
What will happen next? At this point, it is inconceivable that the development team will lift the gender-lock before the release of the expansion, regardless of how negative the community’s reactions are.
Whether it will ever happen in the future is also hard to say. However, there is a precedent for it.
What is gender-lock and what is behind it? With “gender-lock”, it means that a class or race is only allowed to have one gender:
- In Asia, gender-lock is common because they want to see differences between male and female characters in gameplay
- In the West, gender-lock is frowned upon because players want control over their character and its customization
Here we have extensively dealt with the topic of gender-lock.
