Reminder: Selectable Character Gender is a "Minimum Bar."

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Pashid wrote:

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1453R wrote:

A lot of the Boomer Zoomer Must-Go-Faster players that have long since lost all sense of that grounding in the world of Wraeclast forget that they're a vanishing minority of the playerbase - fewer than four percent of players on Steam have the achievements for defeating the Eater of Worlds, and same for the Searing Exarch. That sense of grounding is actually really important for retaining more typical players, even if it aggravates high-speed-low-drag optimancers looking to get to maps fifteen seconds faster.

You can't really take steam achievements as a proper measurement tho.
Those 4% could be like 80 or who knows how many percent of the existing player base. The percentage is based on accounts with the game in their library and not the percentage of players who actually played the game lately.
A large portion of those players might not even play anymore and never experienced the boss fights to begin with as they simply did not exist years ago.
Some are probably players who've picked up this game but did not liked it much, not accounts which obviously don't encounter those fights anyways, and do on.

It's the same with those people who take the steam charts as active measurement of player numbers while it's also just inaccurate.

Some proper statistics after each league would be cool, but that's something only GGG can provide, so heavily unlikely to happen at all nowadays.

they are just trying to make their opinion sound like fact. Steam stats don't mean anything. Even if the steam stats are a small part of the people who keep playing after a few acts, it still doesn't mean anything I can use this number and say '' people don't like killing endgame boss '' I'd have as much proof as they do.

Personally i dont see selectable character gender as a minimum. Its GGG's story telling if they want a class to be either male or female thats totally fine for me.

Yeah, i don't see character gender as a minimum bar in a game like POE, either.

The gender of a character is a non factor here and has literally zero impact on the gameplay. POE is neither a story driven game like The Last of Us or God of War (where gender selection would make no sense), nor a higly immersive make your own adventure roleplaying type of game like BG3 (in which case a gender selection option makes much more sense).

In POE i choose my class based on the build i want to play and idgaf if the model is male or female. But in the end it is GGGs decision.

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1453R wrote:

And yet I cannot blame players at all for not wanting to grind the campaign for the three hundredth time...

It's impossible to blame them.

There is no right or wrong here. But they (GGG) seem pretty firm in their choice and I can't do anything but to respect it. I think the best way forward, is to throw a character defining choice, like the bandit choice on stereoids, into every act. Increase the connection and commitment to your character.

Anyhow, playing through the campaign once every league should always be a requirement. I wouldn't whine or cry if they added the possibility for your second or third character to skip the campaign, but I do not think it's needed in a game that does not try to be as casual as possible.

They're wasting the tabula rasa if they don't do it.

Straight-up. PoE 1 baked *WAY* too much meaningful character progression into the campaign. They painted themselves into a corner with that one and it's why we never got Mapping as the *fucking perfect* story-free mode ever fucking put into a game.

They struck gold with the Map system but had no way of extracting it for isolated usage. So any character that wanted to experience it had to crawl down the same fucking hole...every....tiiiimme....

The flexibility of the Map system in and of itself is enough for a game *in and of itself*. Tell me you can't see a rogue-lite using an Atlas of Worlds style layout as its level assembly, and a more elaborate hideout as the expandable, upgradeable base. It's all there. I would play the everloving shit out of that.

And if they disagree, well that's fine. They're allowed to be wrong about their own genius. Wouldn't be the first time.

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DieGrauenhafte wrote:

The gender of a character is a non factor here and has literally zero impact on the gameplay. POE is neither a story driven game like The Last of Us or God of War (where gender selection would make no sense), nor a higly immersive make your own adventure roleplaying type of game like BG3 (in which case a gender selection option makes much more sense).

The fact there aren't strong rpg story elements is exactly why giving player license via e.g. character appearance makes more sense imo. Certainly GGG seem to agree when it comes to MTX..

But if it's some huge technical challenge to overcome, or it's a choice between this or act 5 - sure don't put in the resources.

Yea I mean its up to GGG if they want to add character customization to the game.

It doesn't affect me either way. Its not like you can really see your character anyways.

Armour is a bit more flashy and you can spot what you are wearing but its kinda hard to make out what you look like in this game with all that's happening on screen.

Up to them what they wanna add I suppose.

Nah, locked gender classes won't make or break the game. A game can be successful even with gender locked classes - you are looking at one right now. Will some people be upset about it? Probably. People get upset even at smaller things. But in general it's a design choice of the devs, and it won't dictate the success of PoE 2.

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BINARYGOD wrote:

There is nothing to lose by adding this is. Sure, everything is an opportunity cost, but so are plenty of things most of you won't like (no one is going to like literally everything about the sequel, of course) that perhaps you dont even know about yet.

Adding another gender to every class would require them to re-rig every single animation for them, create new voice overs and spend considerable time adjusting every single item variation to fit the models.

Poe 2 has been delayed enough, I'm not waiting another 12 months so you can live your fantasy in a hack and slash game. Baldur's Gate is that way ->.

Sure, what about in an Action ROLEPLAYING GAME?

Huh? HUH?

Yeah, that's what I thought.