Square Enix have confirmed they will be undoing a very specific “nerf” introduced in a prior patch to Final Fantasy XIV. Namely, one that had removed the enlarged buttocks that came with a costume piece though a Nier: Automata collaboration.
For those unfamiliar, the Shadowbringers expansion also included content based around Nier: Automata, including a quest line, dungeon, and gear. Some of this gear included clothing inspired by characters from the game, including 2B.
While part of the character’s personality certain came from her large buttocks, along with a fake image circulating suggesting the developers had added realistic butthole to the model.
Director Yoko Taro even stated “Due to the 2B butt controversy, many outrageous drawings are being made. Collecting them to share individually is a pain. It would be great if we can group them together to make it easier to distribute them every week.”
Yoko’s love for the character’s design may have influenced the cross-over with Final Fantasy XIV introduced in patch 5.1. Those who obtained the “No.2 Type B Leggings” noticed their characters suddenly had a plumper rear than they usually did with other costumes- even on male characters.
Additional information about the 2B outfit in FFXIV, it fucking increases the size of your character's ass.
Taro you madman. pic.twitter.com/WatsfMIDmj
— Dragon Auto Body & Paint Specialist (@JohnXuandou) October 29, 2019
https://twitter.com/Adventurerulez/status/1189502319639093249
This design change was soon to be short-lived, as future updates soon caused the buttocks to return to normal depending on what costume pieces on torso were being worn.
(Images via r/ffxiv)
The outcry seemingly grew enough to cause the game’s Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida to speak up on December 14th.
“Well aside from that, as I’ve already noted and I’ve said this in the test stream just now […] The 2B equipment you get from YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse, the 2B thighs… The ass that is.
This time we made the knee portion to be transparent. Although players are happy that it’s now transparent, the ass volume has been reduced from the adjustment […], and I see comments in Reddit about how the “ass has been nerfed.” […] It’s gradually becoming a power word here so first I would like to explain why the situation has turned into something like this.
I’ve mentioned this yesterday but we are not nerfing it because we want to. This is something we want to get this across beforehand. We don’t intend to actually nerf it.
First of all, the methods of dealing with equipment in Final Fantasy XIV is actually complicated and it’s true that we tried to make it slightly curvier than before. Though we received a lot of comments about wanting a hip slider…well, it wasn’t easy to just implement one so we tried a workaround by doing so using equipments [sic]. However, when this particular equipment type in XIV is paired together, the ass would… Umm how do I put this,
[…] So to use the word “shape transformation” here, it allows us to pluck and stretch (the polygons) it out and you can make it expands, or shrink it. This function is actually implemented automatically.
It actually gets all equipment to work in a way whereby pairing this equipment with this equipment… Rather this category type and when it’s paired together the shape will shrink while other combinations will display a different kind of result.
But however, when we eagerly released the 2B equipment we didn’t actually set a flag onto it. What then happened was, when the player sits down, part of the equipment was supposed to change its shape and put their asses inside the coat/cloth, shrinking its shape to not allow the ass to stick out.
That’s how we’re supposed to deal with it, but since we did not set a flag for it, it allow the voluptuous ass to actually remain the same for a part for the equipment, and it resulted in the ass sticking out when sitting.
We received a lot of bug reports regarding this… So this is actually a flaw in our specifications here. Since it’s a mistake during checks, if we are to control our checks properly as we usually do, the ass would never stick out and our intention is to release the equipment where the shape does not change drastically when equipping the stick-out equipments [sic].
This was supposed to be specifications we’ve always adhered to but it ended up creating a combination within many equipment combinations where it changes the body shape of the player when it’s not supposed to. The players may have ended up in the situation when coordinating their glamours using 2B legging and liked it as a result.
Though technology-wise it was done correctly, the unwanted state caused by the combination of equipments [sic] by the players ended up creating this situation, so we thought that there is a need to fully review this and test out if we should allow the shape to change for this category or not and this is something need to go through it completely once again. I think we need to since we see an increase in various types of equipment after running the game for quite a long while now.
Therefore, in order to do so we need to review our combination once again and this will take some time. That’s why we removed the flag for now even though we know the buttocks will stick out as a result of wearing certain equipments [sic] when sitting.
And if we can make it we’ll restore it by patch 5.18. In the end, what I’m trying to say here is that it’s not a nerf and we didn’t do that because we want to. Therefore we’re reverting our settings back first and look into the specifications once again, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
(Translation via r/ffxiv moderator iluna “elevenmile” minori).
It seems that the “increased polygons” did in fact return in Patch 5.18. On December 19th, the situation was addressed in the Letter from the Producer YouTube video, when discussing patch 5.18.
“Additionally, after the release of Patch 5.15, we received reports regarding the 2B attire (No. 2 Type B equipment) obtained from The Copied Factory.
To explain how this happened, FFXIV has a feature that automatically adjusts the size of the buttocks based on the combination of equipment worn on a character. However, the 2B attire was released without this feature enabled, which caused the buttocks to stick out when it was worn with certain equipment. We attempted to fix this issue in Patch 5.15 by enabling the feature as how it should’ve been implemented originally, but this caused the buttocks to shrink depending on the combination of the gear worn.
If we can make it in time, we’re planning to temporarily remove the feature in Patch 5.18. Please understand that this will cause the buttocks to stick out once again. We’ll then adjust the feature itself so that it will not make unnecessary size adjustments.”
(Translation via Final Fantasy XIV Community Representative Zhexos)
The video also confirmed that the patch would be coming earlier than planned on December 24th. Sure enough, in the patch notes for 5.18, the following can be found:
The appearance of the equipment No.2 Type B Leggings has been adjusted.
Although adjustments were made to this equipment in Patch 5.15, after receiving player feedback, we have decided to temporarily revert these changes.
What do you think? Sound off in the comments below!
Final Fantasy XIV is out now on Windows PC (via Steam, and the SE Store), PlayStation 4, and coming soon to Xbox One. In case you missed it, you can find our Shadowbringers expansion review here (we can’t recommend it enough!)
Image: FFXIV Shadowbringers 5.1 x Nier Automata: 2B Outfit from the Copied Factory Raid YouTube video by Lady Pandora Heinstein, r/ffxiv user foulveins.
