Guild Wars 2

How come all of the races have different color selections under the same name? Because they.. aren’t the same color. Mind you, I don’t have an Asura or Norn to check theirs, but I have checked Charr, Sylvari and humans for the new colors, and I am confused? Why give them all different colors (under the same names)? I mean, Charr mahogany.. isn’t mahogany, for example. It’s dirty blonde if anything.

Maybe it’s just because as a Charr main, I feel they got the short end of the stick in this as all of their new selections feel relatively the same where as humans and sylvari feel more diverse, but I’d really like to know the logic behind this decision?

If you doubt that this is the fact, here, have a comparison image
http://i.imgur.com/zkTFJxc.png

I’ll even attach the comparison to the bottom for those who don’t wanna go to the image link, for whatever reason.

Yeah, charr hair colors are inaccurate. It’s annoying, but you can just pay attention to the preview instead of the color. xD

KestrelGirl.9267:

Yeah, charr hair colors are inaccurate. It’s annoying, but you can just pay attention to the preview instead of the color. xD

It isn’t so much the fact that they’re inaccurate that miffs me, it’s that while both of the more humanoid races get nice, diverse colors, charr are stuck with a general light beige/sandy and dirty blonde range. And when I say a range, I mean 8 colors that are light beige/sand and 2 colors that are dirty blonde. Meanwhile both humans and sylvari get a nice range of darker browns and lighter beige/sand/whatever have you. Colors aren’t my strong point.

It might have to do with the racial color palates.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dye

(snip) Also, each race has a cultural palette that reflects the character of the species. This means a red color for a human may not look the same as a red color for a norn or charr.(snip)

They were talking about armor dyes there but maybe it extends to hair dyes also.

There’s a lot of evidence that people don’t perceive colors the same and even more evidence that different species understand colors differently (for that matter, there’s decent evidence that ancient cultures couldn’t have distinguished taupe from brown).

Accordingly, there’s a certain logic in ‘identically named’ colors looking different to the player for each race. Plus, on a practical basis, it’s easier for ANet to keep track of what names they’ve used, maintaining some consistency in the themes, etc.

Finally, I find I have to ignore the name if I want to get colors to look anything like I hope. As we all know, in this game colors and contrasts are affected by material. In addition, the particular armor|weapon set affects how the colors appear. And that’s even before taking into account human perception (is it blue? is it gold?).

tl;dr I recommend ignoring the names when choosing colors.

Colours are also affected by your graphics and monitor settings. You could easily look at the exact same image on two different screens and the colours will look different. (Which means even if you do put together the perfect look for your character there’s no guarentee anyone else will see it the way you do.)

But I agree completely with ignoring the name and just going by what it looks like in the preview. Very few of the names suit the colours IMO, but the important thing is what it looks like.