Suggestion: male/female options for all classes

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Luke KB wrote:

* 6 new character models (reuse preexisting body sizes so there would be no need to reinvent the wheel for all of the existing armor mtxs)

* a handful of new art for ascendancies and what not

* record some new dialogue (they've done it for previous leagues)

And viola. Huge qol improvement.
Heck, I'd be willing to pay for this feature.

What do you think? Would you like to see m/f options for all classes?

I don't care at all, one way or another. The gender, sexual preferences, race, political affiliation, library membership status, etc of the character I'm using is not something I even notice 99% of the time, much less care about. Hell, I don't even know what CLASS I'm playing some of the time, so I definitely wouldn't pay for something as meaningless to my gameplay experience as "what if the shadow was a woman." When people ask me what character I'm playing, my answer is "Spark" or "Tornado Shot" or "Glacial Hammer."

And there's the rub: getting the voice actors together to record all of those lines, in multiple languages, is not nearly as cheap or easy as you seem to think it would be - aside from all the new VO artists they'd need to find, they'd have to track down every single one of the original voice actors for various bosses and town NPCs. It would be a very bad business move for GGG to allocate resources to this project unless they were 100% sure it would sell extremely well, and that seems very unlikely to me. The smart move on GGG's part would just be to gender-swap all of the classes for the PoE2 campaign, so that you have male and female versions of the base attribute archetypes (i.e., the new Pure Int class is a Warlock and so on) for the people who care.

this is massive undertaking, you are asking to literally double the amount of character models that need to be animated. DOUBLE!

but yeah, this has been suggested countless times over the last 11 years or so...

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

And when it was written, it was anything but 'cringey' or 'man-hating lesbian' -- I believe that's a measure of retroactive judgment there.

Well, you can make as many wrong assumptions as you like, I guess. This isn't some new reaction I'm inserting into my own memories; I didn't like these lines when I first heard them either.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

So maybe you're a genius, or maybe you hold the bar a little too high

Or maybe it's okay and entirely normal to not like a small handful of lines in a videogame. Come on man, you know those aren't the only two options. I'm sure you have no shortage of posts expressing dislike for things GGG have done over the years; you don't have to be either a genius or holding unreasonable expectations.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

not to me.

Okay!

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

And in the case of Merveil, it's pretty true

I know it's true, that's why it works; it would be a bizarre non-sequitur otherwise. My issue was with the subtext, not the literal truth of the text.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Sooo...if one is going to come down hard on what the ranger says to Merveil as heavy-handed misandry, it's only fair to observe that what two of the Big Bads of Act 3 is equally heavy-handed in its misogyny.

It's fair to observe whatever you like. Villains (especially those who are representatives of an traditionalist authoritarian state) being written very overtly as thick-headed arseholes is normal though. We're supposed to be under no illusions that they're anything but that, so that we want to defeat them.

Also, those lines from Gravicius/Dominus are said as, you know, actual communication. The cliche of the death quip is by nature more transparent about it existing solely for the player's benefit. Of course, everything in a game exists for the player, but if you're being overt about your subtext in a place where the fourth wall is already weaker, so to speak, there's more of a risk of breaking through too much for some people's taste.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Not that this changes your core argument that Edwin McRae wasn't a very good writer

I haven't said anything about anyone not being a very good writer. The vast majority of the game is done really well; I was clear in saying I was only talking about a few lines. Everyone has bits of work that aren't their best.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

or that he was a 'friend' and not a professional writer they hired.

Thanks for the info - no, I didn't know anything about who wrote anything.

Fair enough. I cannot dispute the existence of (more than) a few regrettable lines in what I contributed to PoE either. Maybe the difference is I *know* which ones are really bad (they're objectively bad from a writing standpoint and I've received plenty of deserved criticism for them), whereas the ones in question might be more subjectively offputting...well, not might be. Are. They're not 'bad' writing, just easily taken as too heavy-handed if one's ear is attuned to such. Mine typically isn't, at least not with PoE.

Enough derailing from me. Not that the actual argument of this thread is going anywhere -- OP likely doesn't realise we see threads calling for gender selection options every few times a year, and have done so since the game's release. This has been, to be fair, one of the more pleasant examples thereof.

You are welcome re Edwin's site. Have a safe and happy NYE. :)