[2020] Gender locked classes

Hi all,

We understand that having a single character which is male or female per class can be disappointing to players who want other options. We would love to do this but it’s just a matter of resources that our indie studio doesn’t have. Creating another gender option per class would require double the animations, character introductions, voice acting, a large amount of work for equippable armor, etc. which is probably more time consuming and resource intensive than some realize. Im saying this so that you guys understand your desire for this isn’t falling on deaf ears and we’re just not tackling this because we don’t think it’s a good design choice. Maybe in the future we’ll have the means to do this - we would love it as much as you guys.

Thanks for your support.

That’s definitely a game pitfall that we will avoid. When we’re designing different armor types for the characters, we are attempting to make them logically. There is a comic strip out there that I love which highlights the issue so well. It’s of a male and female character in an RPG each with very exaggerated gear, full plate for the dude and a chain bikini for the girl. The guy says something like, “ugh, that won’t protect you from anything” and walks away. She takes off the armor set and the whole chest, body, bikini, everything is connected as one armor set and underneath is a normal character with normal clothes on. Just cracks me up as the only way it could make a shred of sense.

Katalaeia, we know that people prefer to play specific genders in many cases and we would love to make that possible for you. One day we might have gender options for our characters. I can say that we’ll do our best to keep the armor that we do have out of the range that the comic I’m referencing is like. It just wouldn’t fit with our overall aesthetic and it’s not the sort of game we’re making.

(I can’t find the comic but it was really over the top)

Thanks for your feedback.

Many heroes start from unlikely beginnings.

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.

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:

• People who were here during kickstarter might remember that the sentinel was called the Knight. She was also very different at first. Oh yea, she was a girl to start with. We received a lot of negative feedback on that one. In general, people seemed to think that it didn’t make sense having female foot soldier in a medieval army as it was incredibly rare. I’d bet that it probably happened more often in secret than we know about.
• Early literature for the rogue was completely gender neutral. We didn’t plan on giving her a specific gender and thought we would let the players decide what they thought. When we changed the Sentinel to male, we figured we should have at the very least 2/5 being female so we changed the rogue to be female.

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.

Just a gentle reminder to everyone, please keep this thread to a civil discussion. If you have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion but to be rude to the community, please choose to not post.

Thank you.

Hello,

Everyone please be aware we are monitoring this thread. Any posts with hateful or disrespectful language will be removed. Let’s keep the focus of this thread on game specific topics.

Thank you.

I’m closing this thread as there’s already many in-depth threads and posts regarding this topic, and it’s clear the conversation in the thread is no longer relevant to the topic.