About gender locked classes

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1453R wrote:

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."

What is this nonsense?. They said they might release different gender with microtransaction. Thats fine by me. They need to make money, dont they?. Stop crying. The gender is not important to the game, yet they might have the courtesy to introduce it through microtransactions.

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Takamorisan wrote:

People complaining about the mtx thing consider they have to hire a VA for that, have the current VA behave with the new addition, create a new model, create new ascendancy arts for the new model and maybe even new animations if the new model dont share the physique as the opposite sex counterpart

Yeah, but it's not like they don't have the cash or profitability to take a hit for this if they wanted to...

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Golden_Order wrote:

What is this nonsense?. They said they might release different gender with microtransaction. Thats fine by me. They need to make money, dont they?. Stop crying. The gender is not important to the game, yet they might have the courtesy to introduce it through microtransactions.

I mean...

I could just restate everything I've already written?

This is more important for a significant subset of players than is a regular shiny-sparklez cosmetic choice. Grinding Gear charging their patented "are you guys, like...actually serious?" prices for something that's near and dear to the hearts of a lot of their players, instead of simply being a shiny new skin someone may want but will be able to play the game no issue without.

It's much like the arguments players keep making about premium stash tabs. To those players, being able to freely and easily participate in trade via premium stashes is important, and they don't like how it feels to have to pay premium MTX prices to do so, even if the stash tab cost is vastly lower than any cosmetic skin. It's not an MTX issue, it's a "the game doesn't feel good to play without this option that I have to pay for, and that's not what PoE is supposed to be about" issue.

For some players, gender selection is similar. The game's classes of the 'wrong' gender, whichever it might be for someone, just don't feel good to play. Charging that someone forty, eighty, two hundred, whatever-hundred dollars to fix the issue "because cosmetics!" is stanky.

Yes, Grinding Gear needs to make money. Given that they're now concurrently developing three different versions of their game (four, if you count the console ports as a different version), had the money to buy out a convention center and redo it as IRL Wraeclast, and have Tencent's uncountable fortunes behind them, I'm going to say that doing some extra VO and adding some new character models isn't going to break the bank. They do the VO with every league now anyways, there's always a new fully voiced NPC for it, and their Path of Exile 2 thing uses updated systems that makes updating and introducing character models and animations significantly easier.

If Chris hadn't said "we're thinking of making it a microtransaction", this thread wouldn't exist. But he said that, which means it's potentially within Grinding Gear's capability to make this happen. if they can, and they do it as a free value-added service for their new campaign, I'd be significantly more inclined to jump back on the supporter pack train.

If they make me spend a few hundred dollars on four female skins so I can play the Marauder, Duelist, Templar and Shadow the way I'd like to? I won't say I'

Purely visual/cosmetic improvement which requires significant resources to create.
This the very definition of MTX in PoE.
I do not know why people are surprised

I want to play poe as an alien!

A female alien, no a male alien, yes yes female it is.

I want my alien to be blue and tall, talk like an elver, yes yes.

Who cares how the game plays, it is all about how my chr looks ingame

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

So... will they limit the choice to male/female? In 202x? A bit shortsighted, I think.
There're so many genders around these days that just having female/male might piss off others.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

So... will they limit the choice to male/female? In 202x? A bit shortsighted, I think.
There're so many genders around these days that just having female/male might piss off others.

This whole thing pisses me off.

In games where the character is meant to be an avatar of the player it makes complete sense to offer as many options as possible to the identity of that avatar so people can build those avatars to reflect themselves if they so choose.

Guess what, PoE isn't that game.

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Archwizard wrote:

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Mikrotherion wrote:

So... will they limit the choice to male/female? In 202x? A bit shortsighted, I think.
There're so many genders around these days that just having female/male might piss off others.

This whole thing pisses me off.

In games where the character is meant to be an avatar of the player it makes complete sense to offer as many options as possible to the identity of that avatar so people can build those avatars to reflect themselves if they so choose.

Guess what, PoE isn't that game.

A game letting people select the gender of their character seems a weird thing to get pissed off about.

POE is, currently, a game that lets you select whether the person who kills the Beast, Kitava etc is a large dark-skinned man from a race of island warriors, an old white male priest who pissed off his boss, a young woman who lives in the woods, etc etc.

If it also let you choose that that person was a large dark-skinned woman from a race of island warriors, a young man who lives in the woods etc, or even an old white non-binary priest, that would cause...absolutely zero problems. What is there to be angry about?

Presumably, locking this feature behind mtx is to cover the cost of more voice acting and model creation. Locking it behind mtx ensures only those who want this feature will pay for it, rather than hiking a price of some other item.

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Archwizard wrote:

Guess what, PoE isn't that game.

Of course it isn't. It has never tried to be. No ARPG (Hack'n Slash) has ever been that game. I don't think I've ever heard Chris or Jonathan used the word "immersion" or "role play" when it comes to the gameplay of PoE.

There are games out there that are brilliant when it comes to roleplaying and immersion. ARPG's will never be those games.