Guild Wars 2

Currently, there are only a few hats in the game, (mostly Medium, with one Light armor hat), and there is something I’ve noticed about them – they all go out of their way to hide your hair:

The Lionguard-style tricorn puts a bandana over your characters eyes and the back of their head. This one admittedly works and looks okay. It’s the only decent hat.

The Pirate hat resorts to some hideous flap that hides your hair.

The Guild Wars anniversary town clothes cap and the Human Light Cultural t2 hat both render your character as being bald.

Etc.

As such, I’ve come to a conclusion: the Guild Wars 2 engine is currently incapable of combining hats with customized hair, or if it can, the results of this were less than satisfactory with a considerable number of styles. This carries over to the vast majority of headwear, with the only notable exceptions being masks and other face-only head armors.

So why resort to an ugly cop-out? The current hats are (with few exceptions) basically worse than no hats at all. Which is a shame, because tricorns, fedoras, and other headwear can add a lot of personality to a character’s appearance.

Is there anything stopping you from taking a more … visually pleasing approach – perhaps using a basic, set hair style with hats? This could just be a part of the hat – a dye-able location that would hopefully look a hell of a lot better than that Pirate monstrosity.

Most games have two models for the same hairstyle, one for characters with hats and one for characters without hats. There could be several reason as to why ANet didn’t design hat-equipped versions of hair. 1) Saves time not to. There are a lot of hair styles in game. 2)There are too many shapes of hats and it would be difficult to create a hair mesh that would be fitting for all shapes without clipping. 3) It would incredibly difficult to do so for Sylvari Hair; to keep races equal they decided not to create hat-equipped versions for all characters. Blame the tree people.

But anywho, I agree with TC. I go out of my way not to wear hats in this game, even though some of them are really nice. It would be great if these nice-looking hats didn’t render my characters bald.

Unfortunately it’s been this way since GW1. Hair physics was apparently not on the priority list for new engine features. Thankfully the new Tomb Raider is doing a good job of showing how se- uh technologically impressive good hair is.