Better sense of taste and smell, sure. Sight and hearing, not so much.
Most four-legged mammals have better senses of smell than us humans do. In some cases, several hundreds of times better than our own. Cats and dogs, in particular, basically live in a world defined by scents, with sight and sound being supplementary senses. (Fun fact: cats have scent glands along the tail, on each side of their head, on their lips, base of their tail, chin, near their sex organs, and between their front paws, so their affectionate cuddling is actually a way of marking you as their family. Your furniture, on the other hand, is less fortunate.) I wouldn't be against Miqo'te having a sense of smell a few times better than humans (but not much more than that, because there are only so many sensory nerves to go around).
Sight, on the other hand... believe it or not, we humans have some of the best eyesight in the animal world. We can observe the full range of colors and our visual acuity is obviously very high. There are animals that can observe a more specialized range of the electromagnetic spectrum (like animals that have infrared vision) as well as animals with higher visual acuity (like most birds of prey), but never both at the same time. We have the "best of both worlds", you could say. If anything, it is likely that most Miqo'te would be partly colorblind (having blue and yellow cones, for example, but not red ones), at least if their feline heritage is anything to go by.
Hearing is complicated. Our hearing is omnidirectional, which means we may have a little bit more trouble picking out sounds from the rest of the background noise, but unlike creatures like cats, we can pick them out no matter what direction we're facing. Miqo'te, on the other hand, have focused hearing by default, and so while they have better hearing in the directions their ears are facing, they will naturally have worse hearing for anything that isn't in those particular directions. This is simply due to the physical design of their ears.
It should also be noted that you do NOT want an exceptionally sensitive sense of hearing, because that would just result in hyperacousis, and as anyone who's had that condition can tell you, it is NOT a boon to your everyday life.
And that is my exceptionally long-winded post about inconsequential fictional sapient fauna. I hope someone enjoyed it!
Edit:
Most four-legged mammals have better senses of smell than us humans do. In some cases, several hundreds of times better than our own. Cats and dogs, in particular, basically live in a world defined by scents, with sight and sound being supplementary senses. (Fun fact: cats have scent glands along the tail, on each side of their head, on their lips, base of their tail, chin, near their sex organs, and between their front paws, so their affectionate cuddling is actually a way of marking you as their family. Your furniture, on the other hand, is less fortunate.) I wouldn't be against Miqo'te having a sense of smell a few times better than humans (but not much more than that, because there are only so many sensory nerves to go around).
Sight, on the other hand... believe it or not, we humans have some of the best eyesight in the animal world. We can observe the full range of colors and our visual acuity is obviously very high. There are animals that can observe a more specialized range of the electromagnetic spectrum (like animals that have infrared vision) as well as animals with higher visual acuity (like most birds of prey), but never both at the same time. We have the "best of both worlds", you could say. If anything, it is likely that most Miqo'te would be partly colorblind (having blue and yellow cones, for example, but not red ones), at least if their feline heritage is anything to go by.
Hearing is complicated. Our hearing is omnidirectional, which means we may have a little bit more trouble picking out sounds from the rest of the background noise, but unlike creatures like cats, we can pick them out no matter what direction we're facing. Miqo'te, on the other hand, have focused hearing by default, and so while they have better hearing in the directions their ears are facing, they will naturally have worse hearing for anything that isn't in those particular directions. This is simply due to the physical design of their ears.
It should also be noted that you do NOT want an exceptionally sensitive sense of hearing, because that would just result in hyperacousis, and as anyone who's had that condition can tell you, it is NOT a boon to your everyday life.
And that is my exceptionally long-winded post about inconsequential fictional sapient fauna. I hope someone enjoyed it!
Edit:
(08-05-2014, 04:45 PM)Aerghwab Wrote: For Miqo'te eyesight, I'd think it would depend on subrace, with Keepers seeing far better at night (hence the rounded pupils) and Seekers during the day (slitted). Both seem to naturally be quite agile and dextrous, though, just going by their starting attributes.And just for completeness' sake, I should note here that real cats have both. Like any animal with complex eyes, their pupils will dilate based on the amount of light hitting their cornea at any one point in time, hence they will tend towards slitted (closed) pupils during the day and round (open) pupils during the night. If Squeenix wanted to be accurate, both Keepers and Seekers would have this feature, but programming functional eye muscles is probably more work than they're willing to put in for a single race.
