Bashiok stopped by the forums today and confirmed (again, I think) that there will be absolutely no difference between the male and female versions of the classes except for gender.
[blue]No. There are no gender specific items, skills, advantages or disadvantages. Choosing male or female is simply a choice of aesthetic.[/blue]
His other post was pretty interesting as well.
[blue]
…do not have forced leveling be required in D3, at least give people a choice to turn it off. It was a major let down when they announced that there might be forced leveling in D3.
Forced leveling? I’ll just have to go along with what other people think that means. If forced leveling means a requirement to move through the game, such as “level 10 is required to move to Act II” etc. then no, there are no current plans to put level requirements on progressing through the game.
As far as I’m aware it hasn’t been mentioned by a Blizzard employee as being potentially included in Diablo III, but I could very well be mistaken.
So this level requirement business is usually discussed as a solution to ‘glitch rushing’ or a way of quickly leveling a character through use of bugs and loopholes. The assumption that these bugs and loopholes will exist in Diablo III in the first place is somewhat of a stretch of logic (maybe not as much as I’d like 
. So, the most obvious and popular solution is a level requirement. And yeah, it could work, but unless you can normalize XP gains you’re probably fairly often going to be simply holding people back for no good reason. They’ve completed the act legitimately, but they’re a single level shy of the requirement. Now they have to go grind for no reason other than to level so they can continue playing the game. It’s not a very graceful solution. No, but there are solutions… nay, improvements! in how progression through the game can be handled. Ones that offer not only regulations on progression, but enhance the game itself.[/blue]
