#roegadyns

From stats I’ve seen, Roegadyn have the least number of players out of all the FFXIV races. Hellsguard specifically was least popular. While I personally like Roegadyn, I can actually understand how that happened.

Male Roes have really odd proportions in particular and are not conventionally attractive. Elezen have a similar issue on proportions which also delivered a blow to their popularity, which was interesting because in most games I’ve seen elves are some of the top most used races. Dwarves, again proportions go odd and they end up unpopular.

Additionally, some of the faces for Roegadyn of either sex can look unbalanced depending on the combination made. Black noses could be a distraction or detract from designs depending on execution as well, so if most players are after more conventional looks and don’t want to deal with that I can understand not using them.

However. I am firmly in the camp of pretty much anything can be aesthetic if you play your cards right. And so after seeing one too many comments casually bashing Roegadyns I wanted to experiment a bit.

I might expand this at some point, I actually have a lot of design ideas for Roes I haven’t necessarily shown. But for what it’s worth I’ve found that with Hellsguard since black noses are an animal thing, a good way to use them is either to build into that (tigers, bears, wolves, dogs... SERIOUSLY PEOPLE KEEP ASKING FOR CANINE RACES BUT HELLSGUARD ARE RIGHT THERE WITH DOG NOSES AND WEREWOLF GEAR IS CHEAP) or to downplay them as much as possible. Downplaying would involve using either a very dark palette where the nose is almost not visible at all or just including black elsewhere in the design (hair color, eye color, makeup, clothes, something) so that there’s some unifying visual.

Seawolves are easier in some ways, but it doesn’t surprise me that there are more females than males because the females are closer to standard human proportions. There are also not a lot of natural looks available (Hellsguard can manage that more easily since they use red and brown tones) which I think limits designs to either using the heavily desaturated, monochrome skin colors (using makeup or tattoos if hues are wanted) but otherwise embracing blues and greens. In fairness, not everyone is into that.