Ever since it launched in the west, Lost Ark has received disappointing feedback from some players regarding its gender-locked classes as well as the prevalence of some needlessly revealing female outfits.
In short, while the game is definitely on PC… It’s not very ‘PC’ (politically correct).
Speaking to Eurogamer, Amazon Games has addressed the female representation criticism in Lost Ark and the franchise’s lead, Soomin Park, has stated that changes are underway for both issues.
“First let’s start with gender-locked classes,” Park told Eurogamer. “This is something that will roll out over time. Classes are tied pretty closely to their character models in terms of function and animation, so bringing opposite gender characters to a class takes more work than just making a differently gendered model available”.
In Lost Ark a player’s character class is always tied to their gender. For instance, only male characters can be warriors and only females can be mages. Developer Smilegate published a blog post last year to acknowledge the issue. Park also commented that the next class to hit the game in Korea is the female Berserker.
“However, Smilegate RPG is actively working on this; the female Berserker is the next class coming to Korea. While not every class in the game currently has a male and female counterpart available, we made an effort to include those that do in our launch class lineup.
“In the future, Smilegate RPG will be creating more counterparts for classes that are still gender locked, and we will bring these to Arkesia in time,” he said.
The Great Lost Ark ‘Cover Up’
And it’s good news for players looking to show a little less of themselves.
“As for armour sets, while we aren’t altering any of the original costumes from the game, we are making adjustments so that the more revealing options won’t be front and centre in places like our marketing or the initial character creation screen (although the original character creator outfits are still available in-game as early drops),” says Park.
“We are also including some new outfit options that are not quite as revealing, but these are an addition and not a replacement.
“As we are aware of the balance between hardcore fans who want a Lost Ark experience that is close to the original Korean version and new players who may not like the current armour and costume options, we are adding outfits and alternatives to the game instead of taking away options.”
Lost Ark has amassed millions of users ever since its release and the free-to-play action RPG has proven exceptionally popular. This soon became an issue as its Europe-based players started to face longer wait times. Since the Europe Central server cannot be expanded, a new Europe West server was created.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
