One of the things i’ve enjoyed in previous mmo’s are fashion or armor that you can customize your character with. One of the most important things with it was the ability to change it around and use it wherever you go. I rarely ever see people in towns clothing right now in guild wars 2. Which isn’t strange, because there is really no reason to be in it. You can only show it off in town (which is why it’s called towns clothing i guess) and the lack of towns clothing in the boutique doesn’t help much either.
In these previous mmo’s, it didn’t matter if you were in combat or not while wearing fashion clothing. In a game I won’t mention, they made big bucks with fashion where you could chooce between fashion or armor appearance at any time. That game is still the best game when it comes to fashion, with the best possible fashion clothing available with a huge amount of fashion to chooce from AND a huge fashion inventory. My character there had over 60 fashion items (pants, boots, gloves, dresses, tops, hair etc).
It’s personal for everyone when it comes to the importance of “aesthetics”. It’s the biggest reason to make a legendary imo. There is a lot of interest when it comes to aesthetics, especially from female players. A friend of mine is still playing an old game instead of gw2, because the old game has a lot more to offer on the fashion area.
If guild wars 2 wants to utilize towns clothing fully, two things need to happen. First of all, there should be more choices so people can actually pick out something they actually like. Second, somehow towns clothing should be available during normal gameplay instead of sitting idle doing nothing. That means that ideally it should be possible to wear it during combat.
Suggestion:
Right now you can already turn of your helmet, shoulders, wrists and backpiece in your armor window. My suggestion is to give the towns clothing the same feature, except, clicking the boxes on your towns clothing turns on/off that piece of clothing. So turning on a certain piece of towns clothing, will overwrite the appearance of the normal armor your character is wearing. That means you can mix and match armor pieces with towns clothing pieces and have more variability on how you make your character look fashion wise and possibly be more unique.
A light armor and heavy armor can now have the same appearance. I know some people wouldn’t like it. But if i encounter enemies in pvp/wvw. I don’t recognize them by what they wear. But on how they stand and the skills they use. And other mmo’s are allowing fashion in combat as well, proving that it causes no problem.
It’s a somewhat crazy suggestion, but I honestly feel that gw2 would benefit from more variability when it comes to the use of armor skins and town clothing, especially when gw2 has to earn from their gemshop. But that is IF arenanet wants to go this way with towns clothing and pay more attention to this area.
Retsu ~ Inner Monkey [IM] ~ Piken Square
