About gender locked classes

Do you guys know of some info in poe2 related to gender in classes? Are they gonna unlock them? Because i really want to play as a male ranger....

They were mentioning the possibility of them being released as MTX.

Personally, I'd just double the Classes/Ascendancies.

They said that you will have the ability to change gender via MTX.

Edit:
someone beat me to it.

p2w gender switch?

it's so crazy it might just work.

Don't really care for the thought of this particular decision being locked behind an MTX.

Their traditional stance has been "these are characters, with specific personalities and voices, and changing their genders messes with that." Okay, fair. That's a development/design direction decision, and game companies are allowed to make those. I disagree with it, especially in a game like this which is all in on customization, buildability, and expression, but okay. They don't want to pay for double the voicework on what most folks think is just a cosmetic thing, understandable.

Saying "we don't want to offer gender customization because we see our characters as characters, with fixed genders tied to their stories...but if you give us forty bucks we'll walk that back for you" is not a design direction decision. It's an asshole decision. Made by assholes.

Let me play a devotee of Hyrri in the Marauder start box/Ascendancy position. Let me play a Blackguard battle witch in the Templar start box. Let me play a Duelist-withbreasts in the Duelist start position because nothing about that character is specific to males; braggadocio, machismo, and swagger are hardly restricted to menfolk.

Or don't let me do those things. I'm willing to accept a design decision saying the game has fixed character models because resources are better used elsewhere and the dev team likes their characters having fixed personas. I'm not really willing to hear "unless you give us forty bucks a character for us to decide otherwise."

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1453R wrote:

Or don't let me do those things. I'm willing to accept a design decision saying the game has fixed character models because resources are better used elsewhere and the dev team likes their characters having fixed personas. I'm not really willing to hear "unless you give us forty bucks a character for us to decide otherwise."

I dunno it makes perfect sense, you can't do that because resources are better used elsewhere, but if you're going to give us more resources to dedicate to this, sure we can do that.

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1453R wrote:

Saying "we don't want to offer gender customization because we see our characters as characters, with fixed genders tied to their stories...but if you give us forty bucks we'll walk that back for you" is not a design direction decision. It's an asshole decision. Made by assholes.

You're conjuring up an argument where you know absolutely nothing about the facts, and then getting mad about it.

You don't know why they made this decision, and you don't know how much it will cost.
JFC, relax people.

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j33bus wrote:

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1453R wrote:

Or don't let me do those things. I'm willing to accept a design decision saying the game has fixed character models because resources are better used elsewhere and the dev team likes their characters having fixed personas. I'm not really willing to hear "unless you give us forty bucks a character for us to decide otherwise."

I dunno it makes perfect sense, you can't do that because resources are better used elsewhere, but if you're going to give us more resources to dedicate to this, sure we can do that.

Which scans until you remember that for some players this is not just a "hey that looks pretty" thing like normal MTXes, but is instead a pretty important facet of expression.

As a nonbinary individual with a strong preference for playing female characters in games, the ability to choose a gender for my characters is a not-insignificant selling point for me. It's not a dealbreaker by any means, but it's something that draws my attention to a game, especially in situations without Playdoll Protagonists. In games that do the Playdoll protagonist thing, like Path of Exile, I consider it to be an expected feature these days; its absence is a deficiency, rather than its presence being a boon.

If Grinding Gear can put in the effort and eat the cost ahead of time to create characters in each class of both genders, I would hope they would do so because it's important to a portion of their playerbase, more so than whatever the latest glitz and glam MTX is. But attaching their brazenly overpriced MTX tags onto an option some people feel so strongly about that they haven't played half the characters in the game due to refusal to play the 'wrong' gender is pretty smelly.

Telling people "you can fix this serious issue with the characters in the game, but only if you spend two hundred and eighty bucks to get the alternate gender skin for all the characters so you can pick properly, so long as you're willing to move the MTX around every time you play" is super smelly.

EDIT:

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Gulch wrote:

You're conjuring up an argument where you know absolutely nothing about the facts, and then getting mad about it.

You don't know why they made this decision, and you don't know how much it will cost.
JFC, relax people.

I'm doing no such thing. My stated reasoning was exactly what Chris Wilson has said, more than once, concerning character gender. The team considers each PoE class - the Witch, Duelist, Shadow, etcetera - to be a character with its own personality, history, and story, of which its assigned gender is an integral part.

During ExileCon, Chris also said, for the first time, that he was considering making the 'off' gender for each character available as an MTX.

Now, as for pricing? When was the last time Grinding Gear released a non-consumable MTX that cost less than thirty fuckmothering dollars? The days of ten-buck skins or one-dollar graphical tweaks are long dead - everything is a hyperanimated Total Skill Overhaul or Total Model Redesign that costs as much as many entire actual games. Their pricing is absurd and obnoxious and I hate it, which is one reason why they haven't gotten nearly as much of my money since the Tencent acquisition as they used to.

I'm not making shit up here, dudebro. I'm extrapolating from information available to me on a likely course for the future, and hoping to throw my lonely little insignificant voice out in front of it to get it to change directions.

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1453R wrote:

I'm not really willing to hear "unless you give us forty bucks a character for us to decide otherwise."

They have been pretty hesitant to provide gender choices for the classes. They have never been very specific as to why, as far as I know (any quotes/links here would be appreciated). But as long as the community shows GGG that there's an urge (and a market) for it, selling it as an MTX makes perfect sense for me, as it DOES require some expenses, both in terms of voice acting and programming/art work/modelling. At least as long as there's a limited market for it.

They have to make revenue somehow. I think this is more than fair to lock genders as mtx.