Guild Wars 2

There is something that’s annoyed me for a long time, and prevented me from buying a number of outfits I would otherwise like. A large number of outfits (and I believe a few armors) have a very overstated shine or edge glow effect. Sometimes it’s only on certain parts of the outfit, while for others it covers the entire thing. I know there are different materials that react differently to lighting, but this effect shows up on cloth, leather, and metal alike. Then there are other metallic outfits that completely lack this shine effect, even though it would make sense to have it on some metallic parts.

For me, the problem with this extra effect is two-fold. Most noticeably, it makes darker dyes appear much brighter than they otherwise would. No matter how dark the dye is, the result looks like a neon color. It’s much less of an issue if the intent is to dye with very bright colors. The other problem is that the edge glow created by this shine highlights aliasing/“jaggies” on the outfit, lowering the apparent graphic quality. SMAA anti-aliasing seems to have little impact on this, though FXAA will smooth it out (at the cost looking like vaseline has been smeared all over the screen).

At first, I wasn’t sure if this effect was intended. The first thing I noticed it on was the Shadow Assassin Outfit added several years ago. I thought it might have been a bug, because it only shows up on a couple parts of the outfit, making them stand out very strangely. But then it was never removed and kept showing up on future outfits, being much more prominently featured on many of them. So many years later, it certainly seems that someone in the art department either really likes this aesthetic or doesn’t realize they can make materials without the glow.

While I can certainly appreciate that different people have different aesthetic preferences, this effect seems to run counter to the design philosophy of giving players control over the color and some degree of material appearance of their outfit/armor using the dye system. Every outfit/armor dyes a bit differently, but the outfit glow effect takes that to an extreme. And the edge glow aliasing isn’t something that can be defended aesthetically. It makes the outfits look objectively worse. The shine can be worked with somewhat, but those edge jaggies have got to go.

I’ll include a couple screenshots of the Shadow Assassin outfit, because it highlights both aspects of this effect very well. The glow on the front dangling ribbons, and the aliasing on the rope tied into a bow on the back. For reference, all dye channels are Shadow Abyss to show the forced glow on what should be the darkest color available.

this might be the shaders

i actually prefer the medium shaders as opposed to high shaders because high makes look like this bright ass white light is shining on you from the sides all the time.

It’s the shaders for some outfits, but others don’t seem to be effected by shader settings. Setting shaders to low does remove all the shininess and edge glow from the Shadow Assassin outfit. At low, it is almost entirely a deep, flat black with slight tinting on the metal bits. But the shader setting has little to no impact on others like Taimi’s and the Spring Promenade outfits. They always have a powerful brightening effect that looks like a spotlight on the outfit turning black to grey/silver.

It’s the inconsistency that makes me think that someone didn’t implement these outfits’ materials inline with how the rest of the game’s skins were done. Almost as if there is some baked-in/hardcoded shader effect on the material that makes it always overly shiny.