Steam’s 2nd most played game branded sexist

The latest ‘Lost Ark’ MMORPG hit over one million concurrent players on Steam just 24 hours after release, making it the second-most-popular game on the platform. However, it’s now being accused of featuring “outdated” depictions of women.

‘Lost Ark’ was released on Steam on Monday after Amazon Games collaborated with Korean developer Smilegate to bring the game to the Western market by localizing and translating it into English.

However, some are now taking issue with the role-playing game’s depiction of female characters, after Kotaku published an article accusing the devs of forcing women to wear heels and revealing clothing, and of gender-locking certain classes.

Apparently, some players are complaining that it is near-impossible to find armor and clothing for female characters that would cover up their body, and are also mocking some of the animations as being over-exaggerated.

Another issue for many newcomers to the game is that many of the classes are gender-locked, meaning that if a player chooses to create a female character, they are unable to play as a paladin or warrior - an issue that is near-absent in most modern RPG titles. The developers over at Smilegate have acknowledged this particular issue in a recent blog post announcing that they would add more gender options for classes in a future update.

Meanwhile, the game is doing remarkably well on Steam, and many seem to be accepting the cultural differences between the Asian and Western markets which ultimately lead to these design choices. 

According to SteamDB, ‘Lost Ark’ has 1,311,842 concurrent players, passing records set by ‘Counter Strike: Global Offensive’ and ‘Dota 2.’ The game was originally released in 2019 in South Korea and currently has millions of active players in its home country, as well as in Russia and Japan.