Character Skins Upcoming?

How is this even a contentious topic? It's a free game that makes money off of micro transactions. It's absolutely surprising this has not been an option up to this point and now that they actually put some real effort into creating some memorable NPCs for the campaign, it's a complete no brainer, Geonor, Asala and Napuatzi would all be money printers the likes of which the game has never seen. I'd also have no problem throwing them 20$ for every character to be the Witch or the Mercenary, because I enjoy them far more than the rest.

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Shmaizer#7041 wrote:

How is this even a contentious topic? It's a free game that makes money off of micro transactions. It's absolutely surprising this has not been an option up to this point and now that they actually put some real effort into creating some memorable NPCs for the campaign, it's a complete no brainer, Geonor, Asala and Napuatzi would all be money printers the likes of which the game has never seen. I'd also have no problem throwing them 20$ for every character to be the Witch or the Mercenary, because I enjoy them far more than the rest.

Eh, I'd draw the line at using npcs/bosses as character skins. Other ppl might feel different but it seems tacky to me. Its like 1 step removed from adding goku / thanos as a character skin.

I'd argue there should be no inherent line for a cosmetic, rather there should just be a toggle that allows other players to turn off cosmetics so as to prevent immersion breaking. If someone wants to run around as Goku in what is essentially a single player experience, all power to him.

To attempt to answer what might be legitimate questions, despite their fraught nature:

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Traumtulpe#5992 wrote:

I find myself puzzled by such issues - the character isn't you, what does it matter what gender it has? I don't mean to be abrasive, but that's like saying you can't watch Mission Impossible unless they release an alternative version that replaces Tom Cruise with a woman.

Video gaming is an inherently more immersive and personal experience than watching a film. You are manipulating and controlling the character, stepping into their shoes. This does not mean you have to identify strongly with them, but in many cases this is not an issue of "I need this character to match me", it's "this character matches something I hate."

To speak from my own experience as an example, I am uncomfortable playing the Warrior of PoE2 or the Marauder of PoE1. The hyper-machismo presentation of the character(s) runs into my personal dysphoria and makes those characters a combination of frustrating, depressing, and anger-inducing to play. This is indeed much the same with most modern games - I do not, as a general rule, play games centered unavoidably on Ultra Macho DUDEBROGUYMAN characters. Can I do so anyways, if I sit down and need to for whatever reason? Yes. But I would not choose to do so, and it is a point of forlorn frustration that content available only via those classes (Ascendancies and the various builds they enable) are effectively soft-locked.

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Traumtulpe#5992 wrote:

Why did this start to become a problem? There was no genderswap in Diablo 2, and the game was great regardless. I played a sorceress and I loved teleporting around. I played a Necro and I loved sending my claygolem through doorways to "scout" for arrows. The body parts of the characters didn't really factor in beyond the style and aesthetics.

Diablo 2 is over thirty years old. Gaming has evolved and advanced, and modern gamers have entirely different standards than people did in the annals of gaming history. As well, "aesthetic and style" are an important part of games like Path of Exile, wherein the way your character looks, the way they play, the way they move and fight, the skills and skins they use, are all front and center. PoE2 is not a narrative-focused, story-centric game with a fixed protagonist - it is a build-focused game which empowers its players to make any decision they like about what to do with their characters. Save for one single specific decision.

Nor do people who want a simple toggle feel as if they are asking for something unusual or impossible to deliver. Thousands of other games have done selectable or customizable characters, often with both budgets and development cycles far smaller than PoE2. This is not a wild new feature, this is something that has become largely (if admittedly not completely) standard in the overall genre, and its absence here is noticed and felt.

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Traumtulpe#5992 wrote:

Now I'm not against the option, and doubly so if it helps some people who have an unfortunate mental condition. But people these days come across as so... warped?

I would advise against calling LGBTQ+ folks "warped." For a number of reasons.

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Traumtulpe#5992 wrote:

I really don't mean to be rude, but it certainly feels like you see the fault/responsibility for your issues with other people. As in, you wouldn't want to be cured if it was possible, you'd rather warp the entire world to fit your condition. And you seem to think that's normal.

Or rather, it *has been made* normal in certain parts of the internet.

What you are talking about - "fixing" or "curing" LGBTQ+ people - is called conversion therapy. It has been medically and scientifically proven to not only not work at all, but to be actively and extremely harmful to anyone subjected to it. Such "therapy" does not actually change the person's sexuality or internal sense of their own identity. What it does is it conditions the person to act, externally, as if these things have been changed by inflicting continued, repeated trauma until such time as the individual learns how to act in a way that satisfies the ones imposing the therapy. Afterwards, this behavior persists because the person's sense of identity and/or sexuality has been linked to significant long-term trauma.

people subjected to conversion therapy are not "cured." They are wounded. Badly. Their behavior is scar tissue protecting terrible trauma, and in many cases the person can never be healed or made whole again. Conversion therapy is a nightmare, a travesty, and increasingly it is being made a crime.

it is not "warping the entire world" to increase people's understanding. Believe me, if the global medical community did not think that affirmation and normalization was the best treatment for the problems that come from dysphoria, they would not recommend it or do it. As a species, our understanding of these issues has increased and we've begun the work of adjusting our behaviors and our societies to accommodate that new knowledge.

Again - having a "Skin" MTX slot is better than nothing. I am, however, allowed to be frustrated that I will be charged an absurd and exorbitant fee to assuage this issue. Is that a "Me" problem? Yes. But here's the thing:

Grinding Gear wants my money. In order to get it, they have to give me a product I wish to spend additional money on. Their product has to meet my standards for being worth buying, and the lack of selectable gender is a mark against their product. They've currently won anyways based on other criteria, but those criteria are fading - and frankly I have yet to buy a PoE2 supporter kit. The things I loved about PoE1 have been gone from that game for years, and they're increasingly fading from POE2 as well due to jackholes yowling about how they can't earn enough divines per microsecond.

They're gonna have to work really damn hard to convince me to spend over a hundred dollars on an MTX skin to make the Warrior less agonizingly machismo, and another game will have to work less hard than it might have otherwise had to in order to get me to spend my dollars with them, instead.

if enough people decide that these little annoyances add up to "I'm gonna play something else, instead"? Then it's no longer just a "Me" problem, is it?