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

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1453R wrote:

Now, before y'all @ me: yes, I know how these threads go. The forum userbase gets vehemently toxic towards anyone who expresses a preference for selectable gender in PoE2 and trots out all the usual excuses: VO costs, 'Artistic Expression', anti-wokeness, "oh here we go not this again", so on and so forth, whatever. I'm not really here to discuss that, though inevitably that's exactly where we'll end up.

I'm posting this not as a Reminder to the playerbase, but as a Reminder to the Grinding Gear team: selectable gender is often held to be a Minimum Bar in modern game development. Jonathan Rogers has - correctly - noted on multiple occasions that the most useful thing PoE/2's competitors do for it is inform Jonathan and the team of what new minimum bars there are that they have to meet - things a game will be seen as incomplete/lacking/Not Good if they do not have.

This is what led to trade shifts in PoE2 - Jonathan Rogers surmised (also correctly) that the larger, more casual playerbase he is attempting to court would not accept the jank that is PoE1 trade, so he found a way to solve the problem via in-game costs associated with trading and making those costs resistant to bamboozling.

Here's the thing, Jonathan - gender-locked characters are as much a relic of old, creaky, non-modern ARPGs as janky trade is. The modern era does not generally look favorably on this sort of thing in a game where customization and personal expression is at the forefront. It's different in a game like Devil May Cry where the story is centered specifically and inextricably around its protagonist and there's no room for self expression. That's fine - you play a DMC game because being Dante/Nero/Vergil (but not V, fuck V and his dumb janky Pokemon trainer bullshit) is awesome and their story is fun to play through and witness.

But that's not the case in PoE2. Oh sure, I hope the story in PoE2 is also fun to play through and witness, but that story won't care if you're an eight-foot roided-out pile of overblown testosterone wearing Karui war paint and a codpiece, an eighty-pounds-wet pallid little waif who hasn't seen the sun in fifteen years and could out-Addams Wednesday Addams, or for that matter an insane conglomeration of light, particles, flame effects, and other MTX skins that turn you into The Primordial Doomguy or what-have-you. The story of Path of Exile does not care who or what you are (and we'll get to that point again later, so sit on your immediate and obvious protest). It reacts to you exactly the same no matter what. The Maraketh sorceress gets no special dialogue from the Maraketh convoy in Act II (presuming that's still a thing), the Marauder gets no special dialogue from the Karui islands in Act 4, none'a it. The story is 100% identical no matter which exile it is whose rope breaks in Char Select.

Now, to address the immediate nay-say: "if the story doesn't care who you are, why should you?!" Because I do. Simple as that. Some people simply have a preference for going one way or another, whether it's because they want to reflect their own identity, because they like the model/animations of one over the other, because they prefer hearing the VO of one over another - doesn't matter. This is a game where you can turn your character into anything you want, so long as that anything involves becoming a walking avatar of murder in some form or another. The game does not tell you who you are - you do. That's reason enough.

Now Jonathan has mentioned in the past that he could see selling MTXs that swatch out your entire character for a different one, VO and all, which demonstrates that the company is not against the idea of selectable genders for Artistic Expression reasons. Which is good because if you can buy eight supporter packs a year that turn your character from a dude/dame into various forms of The Copncept of Death Itself, the idea of 'we want the game to be about these specific characters" is just right out. The traditional excuse of "you'd need seven/six/twelve entirely new animation rigs!" is also out because the game now has ONE rig for all humanoid entities that GGG can easily tweak. There are two remaining stumbling blocks - the price of VO, and the Karui/Maraketh cultural issues in the game's lore.

The price of VO is certainly a factor, given that character VO seems to be dramatically expanded in PoE2. I do not presume to know what GGG's VO costs look like. However. I will point out that Grinding Gear routinely does new VO for random temporary NPCs in new leagues. They did a full set of VO lines for all four schmucks in the Kalguuran enclave for Expedition. Hell, the Parrot of Exile has the ability to echo almost all the voice barks of all seven core PoE1 exiles, and that was a one-off they did for a single supporter pack they can't even sell anymore. While I understand that a full set of VO work for a PoE2 core class will be much more extensive than a league NPC or an admittedly hilarious squawking parrot, I do not believe it to be a dealbreaker expense based on the evidence I have available to me.

That leaves the matter of the Karui/Maraketh characters and there being no combat-capable female Karui/male Maraketh in the lore. To this I say: when has that ever stopped people? Marauder players use bizarre janky bow or spell builds all the time with not a thought in the world for the fact that canonically, a Karui warrior would be branded an outcast and exiled for not picking up an axe.

Oh, wait. Just a sec. Yeah, that's right...all the characters are exiles. Criminals. People sentenced to death, for unspecified crimes. Who's to say the female Marauder wasn't sentenced to death for unforgiveable breach of the Way, or the male Sorcerer wasn't sentenced to death for speaking out against the matriarchal oppressiveness of Maraketh society the way Tasuni did (whether that oppression is real or not)? The lore only tells us what is normal for these societies, and our exiles are by fundamental definition the very opposite of 'Normal'.

Does any of this matter? Likely not. It's too late in development of the game to adjust course on this matter; PoE2 is already feature complete for the most part and simply undergoing final tuning/balancing/polish at this stage. But a conversation with a friend reminded me of this old pain point in the game and as a trans woman, I wanted to shout into the wind one final time in the largely vain hope that at some point - at some point - I'll be able to play a Strength character and experience those Ascendancies and builds without having to be an eight-foot roided-out pile of overblown testosterone wearing Karui war paint and a codpiece.

Because regardless of whether or not this issue matters to you personally, it does matter to a great many other people. And if Jonathan Rogers wants to appeal to a much larger player base, this would've been a great way to do it.

Anyways. You may now commence ripping me several new assholes for bringing this up again and reminding y'all that the gender locking still sucks, and in turn remind me of how fundamentally toxic and awful this community is. Have fun.

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Izrakhan wrote:

It makes zero sense to be there because someone irl wanted it to look like them or act like them. Especially when it breaks narrative and/or immersion.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Yeah I don't buy into the "go woke go broke" in a general sense because there isn't much, if any, objective evidence this is true.

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ArtCrusade wrote:

We're all waiting! Ready when you are done finding excuses why you can't provide any. :)

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Also lol @ "copies sold don't matter". Quite the business acumen.