Guild Wars 2

I’m sure this has been suggested & spoken about in the past, but does anyone know of any plans to implement Weapon Dying into GW2 anytime?

I can understand this is a hard task as there is much to be done. But I can hope!

Would anyone else like to see this happen?

This was brought up 3 years ago and road mapped by Anet with no ETA on delivery. I would be VERY surprised if we never get this. But the question is when.

Judging by how there are same skins, duplicated in colour and that they would have a lot of work to implement dye channels in every weapon, I’d be fairly confident that this is not a feature they will add.

As others have said, after 3 years, and the shear amount of skins, and work involved, I can’t see it happening. Sure it would be nice for those who want it, but it’s a lot of work for very little pay off.

BrotherBelial.3094:

As others have said, after 3 years, and the shear amount of skins, and work involved, I can’t see it happening. Sure it would be nice for those who want it, but it’s a lot of work for very little pay off.

well, lets be fair, they could add new weapons with dye channels :-)

Also I want more of the effects dyable more then the actual weapon.

I wish the chak weapons would just die.

Snippets from jpetrie’s response to a similar question 9 months ago. The full text remains at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/cqjqrbj

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)… what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that

1. The decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one …made pretty early.
2. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
3. This [requires] some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
4. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
5. [I]t was decided that we wouldn’t bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
6. Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But it would be a nontrivial undertaking (and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.)

(I added the numbered bullets to make it easier to see the thinking leading up to the situation in which we find ourselves today.)

My paraphrase: ANet decided that weapon colors didn’t stand out enough to make it worth creating the code infrastructure to support weapon dye channels. All future weapon designs depend on them not having dye channels. It’s possible to change this, but it would require creating the new mechanic and then (in effect) fixing every single weapon in the game. (Less than a complete redesign, more than just a simple copy/paste.)

So even just adding dye channels to future weapon sets would be a huge undertaking, i.e. they’d still have to build the infrastructure and still have to make adjustments in existing skins (even if they didn’t get a user-dyeable channel).

So the question is: how many new skins and other major potential features are we willing to give up in order to enable weapon dyeing? (My guesstimate: 20-70% of potential skins and 2-3 major QoL/cosmetic features, e.g. like a 2-year delay in implementing the wardrobe.)

edit: I changed my tl;dr to make the question generic and included the costs only as a guess — after all, none of us know the real tradeoffs that would be required

I agree with sirsquishy, they could add some weapons that could be dyed. The old ones could stay the same.

Just as there are some helms & gloves that cannot be dyed, why can’t we have some weapons that can?

EDIT: After reading the post above mine, I can see the logic behind not dying weapons. It makes sense and as she said, I don’t want to give up 20-70% of new skins and features for weapon dying.

I would love to dye Twilight’s blade.

You can bet your bottom dollar that if something is popular but hasn’t been released in an mmorpg, they are probably holding on to the concept to have something interesting later down the road to help extend the life of the game. That’s my guess anyways. If they release every good idea at once the life span of the game might burn out quickly. Its just a theory, but if they can do something that is popular, can monetize off of it, and is possible and not to complicated, then the only logical reason is to hold on to it to extend product life.

Cobrakon.3108:

You can bet your bottom dollar that if something is popular but hasn’t been released in an mmorpg, they are probably holding on to the concept to have something interesting later down the road to help extend the life of the game. That’s my guess anyways.

Dyeing weapons is not a new concept though.

Randulf.7614:

Cobrakon.3108:

You can bet your bottom dollar that if something is popular but hasn’t been released in an mmorpg, they are probably holding on to the concept to have something interesting later down the road to help extend the life of the game. That’s my guess anyways.

Dyeing weapons is not a new concept though.

It doesn’t have to be a new concept, you simply add a feature to a game that people love and it is simply one more reason to keep playing, one more reason to buy the next expansion, etc etc.

I misunderstood your post. I thought you meant a new concept in all mmo’s, but I see you mean this one specifically