Final Fantasy XIV players want to make their characters’ butts bigger. Fans have requested – nay, demanded a butt slider for ages, and innovations such as the 2B outfit have confirmed that bigger butts are possible. However, director Naoki Yoshida says that a true butt slider is merely a pipe dream for now – in part because your hardware just isn’t powerful enough to handle the majesty of expanded butts.
The 2B outfit actually indicates some of the issues with the butt slider, as Yoshida tells Gamespot. The larger butt on the costume had clipping issues with certain animations, and required manual adjustment.
“But if we were to have a slider where all of our players have the option to enlarge their behind,” Yoshida says, “we would have to look at all of our equipment, which there are thousands in the game! We would have to remake each one because we have to anticipate some people might slide their butt slider all the way to maximum, and trying to accommodate for that is physically impossible unless we implemented this physics simulation so that the model of the fabric wouldn’t overlap with the model of the behind.”
Yoshida says a butt slider is thus unlikely – at least until everyone’s running PCs powerful enough to account for the cloth physics draping over these massive derrieres. “Maybe, perhaps if everybody’s hardware and the specs of the processing power goes up, or if we had hypothetically revamped our graphics engine, it might not be impossible. But unless we do that, I think it’s quite difficult to accommodate. Again, it’s not impossible but if asked when it’s coming, we don’t know.”
God bless you, Gamespot, for asking these tough questions. “There’s one thing we want to say,” Yoshida notes, “and it’s that you all really like butts, don’t you?!”
Even without butt sliders, today is a big one for Square Enix’s MMORPG. The FF14 player count has hit 20 million, the free trial is expanding to level 60, and ahead of the patch 5.3 release date details on the big changes are trickling in.