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(12-21-2014, 08:34 PM)Tiergan Wrote: From what I can see, there are two clans just like there are with all the other races. Â I'm really hoping SE decides to make one of the Au Ra clan females more mature and refined with more obvious horns/scales while the other can be more cutesy and child-like to appeal to a wider sense of taste. Â It'll kind of suck if it's just a color swap.
Howwww did I not notice this?! What a ridiculous oversight that was, hahaha. That makes a lot more sense. The dual-clan thing just went completely over my head.
As far as males go at least, I like the "Sunseekers", but whether I make a male(or an Au Ra at all for that matter) is still an uncertainty for me. I'd like to have made one with my friend but she'll have an unrelated RP story with another group of people and I don't feel partial to RP'ing out in the wild with strangers, so that demotivates me a little, haha.
Quote:Flickering Ember
I prefer the aesthetics of Western games but I find both Western and Eastern games are problematic. I like how Western games design their races and their female characters, but they also have very little fan service for female fans and very few prominent female characters. On the other hand, I don't like how pretty and fanservicey the female characters are in Eastern games, but female characters get to play more prominent roles.
I am definitely the type who appreciates the GW2 races. However, the problem is that I have played GW2 and I just didn't like it. I didn't like the game. I don't really like the races of this game, but I love the actual gameplay of it. Just giving you some insight on why someone who is not really a fan of the Eastern aesthetic is playing a game with it. I had more fun in the first few months of playing this game than I did the entire year+ I was in GW2. (And I am still having a lot of fun)
Fortunately, I was at least able to get into roegadyns. But I had been holding onto a hope that they would introduce a race that I could really, genuinely like.
The problem I have with their large male, small female design is that I have seen it in so many of other fantasy games and animation. Roegadyns have some pretty unfortunate sexual dimorphism too, but at least the women have some musculature and stature to them. I would never fault another woman for preferring to be represented by prettier avatars. The problem I face is that as a woman who prefers female avatars to be more unconventional is that I am often felt left out.
It's not even that I want to always have a badass, muscular female to play. It's that I would like for the males and females of fantasy races to look like they are from the same species. It always feels like the male characters have all the identifying features of the fantasy race while the female is more of an offshoot. She doesn't get to have the same features that the males do. The problem with that is that these features the male characters get are what make that particular fantasy race iconic.
At the end of the day, pretty much every fantasy race that can be can played across all games resemble humans. However, the more a race is defined by typically masculine attributes, the less identity the female has of that race. I am speaking in a broad sense here because as you pointed out, the races in this game don't have that degree of sexual dimorphism. And even Au Ra are not as bad as some other fantasy races out there. What I am saying though, is that the reason why I don't want to see it in this game, is that I am already tired of this trope that I have seen from the majority of other games.
TL;DR large males and small females is a tired trope.
And I would like to have more female options than "pretty girl, hooker girl, cute girl, petite girl, fragile-wallflower girl, elf girl" etc. in my games. I wasn't expecting for SE to make anything ground breaking, but I was at least hoping for the females to look just as iconic as the males.
I have not played a LOT of online games but I can imagine how disappointing it must be. While I like the females of this new race I would definitely like to have seen a more feral type as well. The only way to really address this issue is to, of course, have a better character customization system so it can cater to a lot more preferences than just a particular type of person. FFXIV has some really beautiful models and I am very happy with my own characters as well as my friends' characters, but I will never say that the character creator is anything more than something "that gets the job done".
![[Image: ecec20e41f.png]](https://puu.sh/xvMxb/ecec20e41f.png)
Characters: Andre Winter (Hy'ur) / K'nahli Yohko (Miqo'te)