With the release of Dawntrail, Final Fantasy XIV will welcome female Hrthogar as the latest race to join the game. But according to FFXIV director and producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, adding female Hrothgar wasn’t as simple as just making a female version of an existing race. Instead, it was a more complicated process.
In an interview with gathered press at the Tokyo Fan Fest, Yoshida opened up about the process behind adding a new race to the game in an article published by Famitsu. According to Yoshida, he initially thought just adding female Hrothgar would be too difficult to combine with the team’s ambitions for the game: “At the same time, there was a graphics update, so I thought adding a female Hrothgar would be extremely difficult. But the graphics team was so dedicated and said “let's do it,” so we were able to make it happen.”
From there, Yoshida had to think of a way to implement the female Hrothgar into the game naturally. “I thought that by combining Wuk Lamat, who will be the main character of the next story, with the female Hrothgar, a new race that is attracting a lot of attention, it will be possible to deeply depict the character's charm, way of thinking, and relationship with the tribe's village.”
Yoshi-P went on to give a breakdown of how he think Wuk Lamat’s story will go in the upcoming 6.55 patch and Dawntrail expansion: “[Wuk Lamat] is deliberately made to be a character that is not perfect from the beginning. I think “growth” will be one of the keywords, so I'd be happy if you could pay attention to her. I think I was able to express the kind of charm that would arise if a female Hrothgar race appeared with a personality.”
Yoshida explained that this kind of development was needed to help players accept the new character: “unless the story is about an appealing character helping someone ascend to the throne, it will not be able to move the emotions of the players.”
Honestly, Yoshida shouldn’t have been so cautious - fans almost immediately fell in love with Wuk Lamat, and fan art is already filling up Twitter/X and other websites.
