Guild Wars 2

I like some of the hats in this game yes even the pirate hat is kinda cool. The one thing I hate about them is they make your character bald. What is the problem here? Why can’t they show hair under the hats?

Makes no sense to me at all it does not have to be perfect. Just the rest of the hairstyle around the edge of the hat. This game has some of the best graphics artists in the gaming world.

So can one of the Dev’s please respond as to the reason why the artists cannot come up with hair under hats (hair that is part of the character)?

In Guild Wars 1 they had the same exact issue as well. This game is using a heavily modified version of the GW1 engine so I’m not exactly surprised that this issue is still present. I guess it’s a technical limitation but that doesn’t make it any more reasonable. It’s actually pretty much the only reason I don’t buy any of those hats.

Chyanne Waters.8719:

it does not have to be perfect. Just the rest of the hairstyle around the edge of the hat.

Would probably be quite easy to do if all the hairstyles were similar – short, straight etc. – across all races but once you start throwing in bunches, pig-tails or dreds, you’re asking for trouble as hats wouldn’t be able to ‘sit’ uniformly on every character’s head.
It may seem lie a bit of a cop out but if everyone appears bald…then everyone’s the same meaning no headaches for the designers.
I could be wrong…but it makes sense.

There actually is a way they can do it without much work.

Just make 2 or 3 hairstyles which work with hats, a player will default to one of those when wearing a hat depending on which hairstyle he or she is using. In fact a few existing ones would just about cut it.

And a much better (but more complicated way) way.

Head, shoulders, gloves, and boots are basically their own models sitting over your character model connecting to a group of points which move them exactly as the bodies own extremities. Give hats a different spacing from the points on the head depending on what hairstyle the player has selected. However, as there is likely no such system to do this, it would take some work to make one, plus there are still some hairstyles this would clip with no matter how you did it, the human female mohawk for example.