Lost Ark is getting more multi-gender class options and less revealing armor

pcgamer.com:

The big fantasy MMO Lost Ark is a hit, but it's not without problems, including the fact that its classes are gender-locked: Warriors are men, mages are women. It's an old-school approach, and one that doesn't really hold up anymore. Developer Smilegate is attempting to address the situation through the addition of «advanced classes,» which are specializations that enable both male and female characters in individual classes. 

Gunner advanced classes, for instance, include the artillerist, deadeye, and sharpshooter, which are male, and the gunslinger, a female. The Martial Artist class is balanced the other way: Three advanced classes—the scrapper, soulfist, and wardancer—are female, while only the striker is male. 

It's far from a perfect solution, but Smilegate told Eurogamer that further advanced classes, with better gender balance, will continue to «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,» Amazon Games' franchise lead Soomin Park told the site. 

«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.»

The explanation echoes that of Ubisoft's years-ago excuse for not including a playable female character in Assassin's Creed Unity, although at least it didn't end with