Guild Wars 2

I want to talk about armour sets for a little bit. During the recent Reddit AMA, Mike provided this answer to why armour sets aren’t included more often (or frankly, at all) in content for Guild Wars 2. I apologize for the length of this post, but this is the biggest gripe I currently have with the game. What personally drives me in content droughts is unique styles and setting goals to attain them. Outfits undermine the ability to customize, and so fall short of being goalworthy.

Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.

I understand how difficult this makes the whole idea seem, but I wanted to poke a few holes in this answer in hopes to get some solutions discussed. To get some more perspective, I want to list the last 9 months of new outfit releases:

• Lyssa’s Regalia
• Bandit Sniper
• Slayer’s
• Winter Solstice
• Nature’s Oath
• Crystal Savant
• Ironclad
• Gwen’s Attire
• Sentinel
• White Mantle
• Verdant Executor
• Inevitable Marjory’s LS3 Outfit

Outfits face the same challenges when it comes to number of races and sexes, but benefit from not having to be tied to a specific armour type even though many clearly fit a specific type visually.

Mike mentions that a full set includes light, medium, and heavy armours. It isn’t very clear here if he means that they must be attainable at the same time, or must visually be linked, or must be attainable all through the same method (crafting, karma, dungeon, etc.).

In the original game, many armour sets were visually unique within each armour type without tying directly to a visual theme. HoT focused a lot of its armour sets on a linked visual themes and I dare to speculate that this choice may have contributed to the low number of additional sets for an expansion. I don’t feel it is necessary to tie armour sets to visual themes, nor do I believe it to be necessary to release all three types as rewards at the same time, though this is entirely possible. Without these limitations, could we see more armour sets released instead of outfits?

The problem I have with outfits is that they are so limiting compared to the tansmute system. While the art team has done a fantastic job with each, they lock you into a look that lacks any customization past dyes. For example, I cannot use the chest piece from the new Verdant Executor set with a mixture of Nightmare Court and Sylvari cultural to make a great mix for a heavy armour wearer. I have to instead be tied to the one size fits all concept. Of course, every character can wear outfits regardless of armour type, but that seems to be a really cheap way to get around the challenge of armour set building while simultaneously undermining one of Guildwars 2’s strongest tenets – customization.

9 months per armor? is he really trying to be serious? Legendary much longer? and what should justify legendary armors take so much more time since they are armors like others? I see a lot of bullkitten here…one new set of weapons every month or so in the last year, about the same for outfits, cash shop armors came out with about the same interval in the first months after release…so, they don’t have problems to create a lot of items you can buy for real money, but they can’t produce an armor to obtain in game for living story episodes. Seems to me they didn’t have this problem in the past, to be honest, but maybe I’m wrong.

And in the end, if you’re wearing medium armor, you have so much choice to justify that loooooooooong armor development, that you’re stuck with 90% longcoats that look almost the same. Wow.

shalywen.9548:

9 months per armor? is he really trying to be serious? Legendary much longer? and what should justify legendary armors take so much more time since they are armors like others? I see a lot of bullkitten here…one new set of weapons every month or so in the last year, about the same for outfits, cash shop armors came out with about the same interval in the first months after release…so, they don’t have problems to create a lot of items you can buy for real money, but they can’t produce an armor to obtain in game for living story episodes. Seems to me they didn’t have this problem in the past, to be honest, but maybe I’m wrong.

And in the end, if you’re wearing medium armor, you have so much choice to justify that loooooooooong armor development, that you’re stuck with 90% longcoats that look almost the same. Wow.

They are simply not putting enough manpower into making armor sets. It would have taken over 28 years to make all of the armor sets that came with the base game on release, if they took 9 months each. Keep in mind that I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here too. I counted the culturals as half armor sets, because they didn’t have to fit them to other races.

This is not good for the longevity of the game. The primary goals in this game involve cosmetics. They can’t just put new stat sets and expect players to constantly grind them. Most new stat sets aren’t worthwhile as it is. And some players don’t even bother with the worthwhile ones because they don’t care about min/maxing.

To be honest, I found the armor variety at the beginning of this game very poor. That being said, I came directly from WoW where armor sets were abundant and you would rarely come across two armor pieces that looked similar. I was just disappointed, when scrolling down the Trading Post screen, to see that the look of some armor was just transferred to higher-level items. That just goes to show how much of a foreshadowing that was.

I can understand the reasoning for Anet not including armor sets in the Living World Story, as it’s expensive. What I don’t understand is that it takes 9 months to develop… that simply doesn’t add up. Meanwhile, f2p games are adding armor sets like nobody’s business.

The only way I can see this being looked into is if the masses stop buying gems and I don’t see that happening because it’s clearly been working for them. Since the game was developed with a cosmetic endgame in mind they should’ve implemented a system where introducing new armors to the game isn’t extremely difficult from the very beginning since armor sets are generally most visible and desirable cosmetic (even though it did not seem like it took 9 months to develop each of the gemstore armor sets that were added to the game throughout the period Anet was doing that). They’ve expressed no interest in improving their efficiency in this area of the game since the focus is rightfully on new gameplay and delivering on what was botched or promised with HoT.

I got the impression that implementing new armor rewards via their needlessly complex collection system is what they wanted to do even though that’s what seems to be where all the difficulty comes from given their abandoning of new Legendary weapons and the fact that legendary armor still isn’t in the game. Hell, adding pieces to the loot table for new encounters or existing ones is enough for most people. If the content is fun and engaging people won’t mind grinding it out for something they want. It wouldn’t be the first time going back on a vision for the game.

I dunno if the team is lacking in resources or skill and that’s why things are the way they are so I won’t speculate but it’d be awesome if new armor sets were added at a pace comparable to literally any other mmo on the market, I don’t know of any xpac that had only 10 new armors sets (Bladed, Leyline, Guild, Mistward)

If I’ve understood correctly (if I did he didn’t word it very well) he’s not saying each individual armour set takes 9 months but that they can’t release just 1 at a time – they have to release 3 together – 1 light, 1 medium and 1 heavy.

Whereas outfits they can do 1 at a time. I imagine not having to make them separate pieces makes it quicker as well.

9 months still seems excessive to me, but I do know making anything in a game takes forever. I once made a snow overlay for a game – just a static image that sat on top of the landscape (and this was a 2D game as well so it was literally just a picture) and that took forever. I have friends who are much better at it than me who will still spend all day doing things like recolouring a horse.

I also think that the outfits they create and release in the gemstore are absolutely hideous and Anet lacks a sense of good taste (but that’s ofcourse my personal opionion). Just take one look in the ’’gemstore’’ from Black Desert Online and see how beautiful their outfits are for all classes and genders. You have a plethoria of dye panels and what not to customize them although their core are beautiful as it is. I’ve been wondering alot lately (especially with the new lws3 update) whether Anet is just lazy or whether they lack numbers or if it’s just a matter of being bad at what they do. In lws3 we only got a new headpiece but it looks bad and also it looks the same on all 3 armor types. Must’ve been hard work!

Danikat.8537:

If I’ve understood correctly (if I did he didn’t word it very well) he’s not saying each individual armour set takes 9 months but that they can’t release just 1 at a time – they have to release 3 together – 1 light, 1 medium and 1 heavy.

Whereas outfits they can do 1 at a time. I imagine not having to make them separate pieces makes it quicker as well.

9 months still seems excessive to me, but I do know making anything in a game takes forever. I once made a snow overlay for a game – just a static image that sat on top of the landscape (and this was a 2D game as well so it was literally just a picture) and that took forever. I have friends who are much better at it than me who will still spend all day doing things like recolouring a horse.

That’s also what I understood. I don’t think that anyone could honestly think that Mike meant that it took 9 months to only make a single weight.

Their pace is still very slow though, and this is when you compare it to how quickly they made the armor sets during GW2’s initial development. You don’t have to compare Anet to other companies to realize that they are slow, you only need to compare them to themselves.