Lost Ark's community is arguing over a minor wearing clothes
The Lost Ark subreddit is at war. On one side are people who are fine with the new class - a child called Artist - wearing shorts under her miniskirt for her release in the West; on the other are some people who need their hard drives checked.
Lost Ark is an MMORPG that originally launched in Korea in 2019. It's currently the third most popular game on Steam by concurrent player count.
Artist is an upcoming class - a small child who battles with ink, paintbrushes, and creatures she can summon by painting them into the world. In the Korean version of the game, she wears a miniskirt, but that's due to change when she launches in the US.
Amazon announced the change in a blog post:
"We know there’s been a lot of speculation in the Lost Ark community on how the Artist Class would arrive in the Western version of Lost Ark, and we want to be transparent with players excited for its release," the company said.
"Previously, we’ve stated that there may be some content in the original version of the game that gets adapted for Western audiences. While our goal is to preserve the authenticity of the original game, we also work with Smilegate RPG to make localization updates to ensure the game feels approachable and representative of our Western players.
"Nothing gameplay-related will change for the Artist Class, but some skins will be modified to better fit Western norms. Specifically, skins with short skirts will have shorts added underneath the skirt, and other skins will have adjusted pant lengths or tights added."
Plenty of fans on the game's subreddit have been petitioning for this change, or for the developers to create an adult model for the new character. Others are calling it censorship and an insult to the integrity of artistic vision, which only ever seems to apply in these cases, and not when developers want a strong, fully-clothed woman as a lead.
There are even posts on the Blue Protocol subreddit where some of the fans are worried that Amazon will "censor" that game when it comes West.
Anyway, I'm logging off for the year.
