Lost Ark Devs are Working on Solutions for Gender-Locked Classes and Revealing Outfits - IGN (2024)

Amazon Games will slowly but surely open up Lost Ark's gender-locked classes.

Classes are currently locked to specific genders, meaning only men can be warriors, only women can be mages, and so on, but franchise lead Soomin Park told Eurogamer that this will change over time.

He said: "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."

When the North American version was released last month, Park said developer Smilegate RPG made an effort to include classes that currently have a male and female version in the further along Korean version. Players will therefore eventually be able to choose different genders within classes but it's unclear when that will be.

Lost Ark has also been criticized for its female characters' revealing outfits and, while Amazon Games is aware of the issue, it has no plans to remove these from the game.

Park said: "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 center in places like our marketing or the initial character creation screen.

"We are also including in 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 become incredibly popular since it released in the west on February 11, shooting to second place in Steam's most-played games of all time by concurrents, and the game now has more than 20 million users worldwide.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said "Lost Ark is an extremely generous free-to-play ARPGMMO that draws a lot from Diablo – including its well-worn story about humans and Heaven teaming up against demons."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.