Over the weekend, Final Fantasy XIV Tokyo Fan Fest dropped a wealth of new announcements for fans to get excited about. We know the next expansion, Dawntrail is coming this summer and with it, there will be three new jobs, the introduction of female Hrothgar, a new continent, and of course a new story to unravel starring the Warrior of Light and the Scions.
But with all of these announcements, especially the introduction of female Hrothgar, I can’t help but beat the drum of every Viera and Hrothgar player: Where is a fix for headgear?
The Viera and Hrothgar were new races introduced to Final Fantasy XIV in 2019’s Shadowbringers expansion. The bunny girls and burly cat boys (respectively) were a great addition to the game and made lots of players happy, many of whom changed their characters to one of these two new races. I am one of those players, having started after Shadowbringers. I have always played as a Viera. But upon release, there was one major flaw with the new races, their big bunny ears and lion-like faces messed with the game’s headgear — to avoid this visual problem, the development team made it so a large amount of Final Fantasy XIV’s headgear was unusable by Viera or Hrothgar.
Since 2019, this issue has never been fixed. To this day, if you play as Viera or Hrothgar, you will not have access to the entirety of the game’s wardrobe. This is a massive loss for players in a game whose endgame often emphasizes the fun of dressing up your character in the most fashionable clothes. I want to see my beautiful bunny girl in the cutest hats!
This feature has been constantly demanded by fans since the introduction of both races, leading to the creation of many mods that have found solutions to the problem (though Final Fantasy XIV has a strong anti-mod stance). However, these solutions have arisen due to the lack of updates from the development team.
In 2021, the Endwalker expansion was released. One of the new features was the introduction of male Viera to the game. Yet the issue of headgear for Viera and Hrothgar remained unresolved, meaning that all the new bunny boys created in Endwalker would suffer as all other Viera and Hrothgar before them had.
The latest Fan Fest only continued this problem with the announcement of female Hrothgar. I already love the buff cat girls, but I can’t help but question why male Viera and female Hrothgar were introduced before fixing a base issue of the two races. We know this will be the last update to the game’s races so hopefully that means the team will finally have the bandwidth to address this problem, but at this point, it really will be a better late than never situation.
Days before Tokyo Fan Fest, producer and director Naoki Yoshida held an impromptu Q&A (translated from Japanese via Google Translate) while logged in on Final Fantasy XIV’s Chocobo server. One player commented, “I would be happy if there were more hats that Viera can wear!” To which Yoshida responded, “We are working hard to change the specifications of Viera and Hrothgar’s head equipment, so please wait!”
Speaking of waiting, Viera and Hrothgar players have been waiting patiently for four years. We keep waiting. It’s good to hear Yoshida address this issue and say that the team is indeed working on it, but I still feel hesitant to celebrate. We don’t know when this fix will come. We don’t even know if it will fix the issue entirely, finally making all headgear wearable by all races. It’s just a small hint that Viera and Hrotghar players should be hopeful... if we can just wait a little longer.
