I think we can just let their opinions be. It’s personal feedback and while I don’t agree with it they are welcome to express it.
If people have new opinions on the matter they would like to share, that’s totally cool. This is a sensitive topic in general and I’d like to avoid this turning sour.
This is probably the most professional way to deal with feedback.
Hello Mike,
Thank you for your level-headed approach to my initial feedback (and that is extended to others here as well). I should have been more elaborate on what I feel is not working with the current setup and in how far it is related to the topic. Let me take the time to do that.
The topic is aimed to view at genderlocked classes and my criticism with the game at the current stage is meant to be related. So first of all, I have reviewed the opening sequences and character introductions for all 4 characters available to far, just to make sure I am not missing out on anything there. I have admittedly not delved deeper into the game from thereon, but neither will any other new player starting the game and making a choice on a character.
So let’s get this out of the way early on. I believe that people would not ask for more options in character customization if the characters were presented in a better, more relatable way. When you present me as a player with a game where I am meant to relate to a character, in my opinion you have two ways to achieving that. One would be to allow me to customize the character enough, that I can make up their story, their motivations or whomever I want them to be. You decided against that approach with regards to how difficult it then is to present a compelling story to a character you essentially do not know beforehand, because I end up making it up. Fair enough. But then it’s your job to present me with a character that I can invest myself into instead. That’s essentially the decision you made in my opinion and again, it’s fine to make it and to me makes a lot of sense in your situation.
So back to my critizism before. Those are the characters, that were presented to me upon clicking all of the possible characters and starting a game:
The Acolyte:
We’re learning about the Acolyte, that she once was the apprentice of a good Mage, but that her ambition turned her away from the path of good and towards evil magic and forbidden lore and that she was found out and exiled for it.
The Primalist:
We learn in the introduction that the Primalist has returned from hunting and finds his family and clan murdered by a supposedly evil army that he seeks vengance against. He has separated over seeking vengance from his tribe to seek the strength and knowledge to lay out his revenge.
The Sentinel:
We learn that the Sentinel has provided an army with weapons until he was drafted into that army himself and forced to witness the slaughter of innocents. Over that, he deserted and turned his back on the army he had been forced into.
The Mage:
The Mage tells us that once he has taken an apprentice that turned away from him and had started seeking dark arts and was exiled for it. He explains that he is looking for that former apprentice of his, presumably to redeem himself.
Now I did criticize that the only playable female character is evil while all male characters are different shades of good. Deserting an evil army because you cannot stand up for their evil deeds is kind of the definition of hero in many works both written and filmed. Seeking vengeance for a loss is an equal heroic theme listed many a times or making up for prior failures in their lifes and redeeming them. So I cannot possibly see why any of the three mentioned characters is not displayed as different approaches to good heroes. Now lets look at the Acolyte. She is displayed as evil and she seems to feel no remorse. You can argue now that the perception is wrong, but making her pick up Necromancy, one of the commonly accepted evil arts in magic and making her mess with the dead is pretty much delivering a point here much like all the other points made for the other characters.
On a side note, it’s kind of nice that you seem to have taken pairs of characters to relate to each other (Acolyte and Mage as well as Primalist and Sentinel).
So yes, I feel like the characters are not well fleshed out. They feel stereotypical in setup and I would have preferred more background to them. I personally would have preferred more depth to your characters and a little more love in introducing them, especially with regard to your concious choice of making fixed characters that I am meant to relate to in some way.
I personally still feel like the choice of characters and the composition of characters is unfortunate at best. I have read a little further up, that someone (sorry, did not remember your name) mentioned it would have been nicer to have a female physical character for a change and both the Primalist and Sentinel would have worked just as well with female characters I think. I really wished, you had looked a bit out of gender roles and stereotypes here and that you generally presented me with more interesting characters than these.
Thanks for your attention and yes, please folks, keep it civil. It’s really not an easy topic to talk about but that again should not be reason to not talk about it.
You’ve got a ton of great thoughts in there. We can do a much better job at presenting the characters and their stories. I’ll be honest, I haven’t listened to the Acolyte’s intro video in quite some time. I watched it a ton when they were getting made but I tend to skip it when working now. I’m waiting for a re-import to happen right now so I can’t really go check it.
I’d also mention that the early character development is not complete so it will be getting significant changes and updates before 1.0 launch. The preparation of revamping the back end is coming next patch. Won’t mean much for people using it but it is getting worked on. Post launch, we will continue to upgrade systems like this. We’d really like to eventually also have more story driven cut scenes between chapters and during major events that will show the character’s growing with the story.
I’m going to speak to how I personally feel about the acolyte and her particular brand of magic. I really don’t think that dark magic = evil. I had it in my head that the college of mages had banned the use of necromancy out of fear and ignorance rather than it being inherently evil. The acolyte has taken a less savory path to power but I don’t think she has really fallen to “the dark side” so to speak. These darker forms of magic might be against some people’s moral code and that might skew an opinion of it differently. Given the classic DnD alignment grid, I’d personally put the acolyte as Neutral Good or maybe Chaotic Good. She has a bit of an “ends justify the means” vibe to me but I think that she is one of the heroes.
I think you might be underestimating the volume of resources that would be required to make male and female variants for each class at this time. We are working to reduce the amount of work required by creating new tools to let us reuse elements made for one on the other. One day we hope to have multiple gender options for each class. Maybe we’ll be able to get several different options in rather than just male or female. Yea it sucks that we don’t have them yet. We decided that having multiple gender options per class was less important than things like extra chapters of story, more enemies, and new skills. With our current character setup, it would take people away from all those areas and many more to get them in now. Every single feature that gets added means another one doesn’t. It seems to me that you would have prioritized getting gender options much higher and that’s totally fine.
My personal goal for this game is for people be having fun with it for a long time. If I’m still making content for Epoch 10 years from now I will be very happy.
That was kinda disjointed as I kept coming back to do this in between other stuff but I hope it clears up a little more about where we are and where we are going to be.
Bonus fun facts:
You could just have made them all Dwarves, then no-one would have been able to tell the difference…
I have no idea how much that would be, I assume it would be double, but double an unknown number, is still an unknown number.
Thanks for sharing Mike, it’s nice to have a bit of a peak behind the curtain sometimes, even if we probably wouldn’t want to have a long hard look inside the sausage factory.
Honestly, I couldn´t care less about it. You have the game, you have the Classes/Characters, you choose, you play.
I played path of Exile. I never read anything about someone actually cared about this same issue in that game.
It´s simple, if you want to play the game, go ahead and just play it. and enjoy it.
Funny you should mention that, but there was a thread on the PoE forums about gender-specific classes & that the person posting really didn’t like playing a particular gendered character.
I personally don’t care either, but some do.
Just dropping by to say please make that happen sir 
The problem I have with some criticism is that it is kind of offensive. DoHan does make some really god points about fleshing out characters and story telling. LE is not best practice in that regard. But I tend to look over these kind of issues because I think as an independent studio you can’t pump out the same quality as AAA studios in the same time. This will improve in the future. When devs have more time.
It’s totally ok to have a different opinion on that and voice it on the forums.
The problem that I have is that some people make accusations like “Female character is evil = devs have a dubious view on women in general”. This is just over the top and totally unfair. With phrases like this the whole post - although there are good points in it - becomes unlikely. Theres no point to feel “disgusting”.
And as @darkdeal mentioned, these kind of accusations have the flavour of defamation.
If I were one of the dev team I would have answered in a different way then Mike did.
You’ll end up chaotic evil in no time if you disturb the rest of the dead in D&D ^^.
Oersonaly I think most gender discussions are over the top. I don’t sit there and stare on my model anymore because I’m not 14 anymore and there is no boob and butt slider to begin with. We have no bikini plate males or mostly unclothed toons so everything tends to be personal taste.
Yes an option would be great but all the voice acting, changes in animations, changes in armor models and so on and so forth would be to much I think. I’m sure EHG could make this happen but the workload for it is big and I prefer they do “more important” stuff rather then schlong or no schlong ^^.
i dont know, if dev were to make both gender for classes, they might need to make an entirely new video and voiceover. that cost money!!
and i prefer those moneys goes into better game rather than just “gender”
for an indie dev (dev are indie right?), most money goes for development, not cosmetic… unless they have some spare money and manpower to do it
besides, it’s not like you’re gonna zooming close up and “see” you character all the time. no way, most people just play the game and not trying to get killed
Gender lock matters in no way to me. Seems like a silly reason to not play a game with fun mechanics.
That’s because it doesn’t matter to you…
For the sake of immersion I always prefer when a character model suits their purpose, playable characters can be as ugly and disgusting as the developers want but unless they create a Glutton Class that devours their foes, save the obese monstrosities for non-playable characters and enemy types.
Just going to do a little housekeeping here. Few posts getting a little topic adjacent so I’m going to remove them.
This topic has not changed our plans for 1.0 release on the topic. Just as before, we would love to have multiple genders. We still don’t have the resources for it as a 1.0 feature. As we can see it is a popular topic and something that most players seem to either really want or not care at all about.
We are still interested to hear if people want or don’t care about getting more genders. Do you care about getting more than 2 genders? Do you care about getting full on character editors? Would you prefer a few (like 3-5) options for each class maybe? I don’t know what we will do but options are on the table still.
While not gender, in the very long term, it would be cool to be able to play different races.
My interest in this topic is a lot simpler than many of the community’s concerns here 
I would also prefer not to have a gender lock. But it’s mostly because I think it helps to an extent for the builds I want to play be less influenced by, or constrained by how I look (with mtx or not).
To give an example, in POE which is currently gender locked and in fact, also model locked - ie ranger, scion and witch may all be female but they all have different resting pose and looks when wearing mtx pieces. Sometimes I might avoid a build as a, say Scion, because I dont like how a particular set of mtx I want to use look on her.
Do you care about getting full on character editors? Would you prefer a few (like 3-5) options for each class maybe?
As someone who loves the fashion endgame, I’d love to have moar customization options if at all possible. Gender is one way to do it, but to me it’s no different than a shiny sword or piece of armor. It’s a purely visual/auditory thing.
I’d gladly settle for a limited character editor for each character though whether it’s by default or as an MTX option. A more limited editor would allow for at least some character customization while not conflicting with the stories EHG has planned for each of the playable characters.
Do you care about getting more than 2 genders?
I’m not sure I want to or should touch this part, but I don’t want more than 2 genders (or ethnicities) and my reason is simply because I don’t want the topic of preferred gender pronouns and the like to creep into this game/the forums and I think trying to be overly inclusive will just open the door to a can of worms and the controversies associated that I’d like kept outside of a fantasy game with a medievalish setting.
I’d rather have a good game than 2021 BAFTA Game Awards material.
I too am a sucker for customisations and gender locked classes while it sucks i can live with them… Prefer not to though, not being able to play certain roles as certain genders limits gameplay a lot and stops many of my friends (girls) from playing said games.
I personally love character editors but if 5-6 options made the game a lot more easy to build then i’d be cool with it… I’m not sure if you remember but dungeon siege character creation was more than enough for me personally. It pretty much got to the point and even allowed you to play as a skeleton (multiplayer) haha.
