Guild Wars 2

I understand the idea of creating easy to identify silhouettes for the various armor types. It’s a common design principle that you should be able to distinguish light or heavy armor at a glance.

At this point, however, outfits have completely undermined that principle. A Guardian can run around looking like a lich, a Warrior can go to battle as a chef, and Thief can wear full plate.

So I’d like to suggest going the rest of the way and completely decoupling armor appearance from armor class. Please let us transmute any look onto any other piece of armor of the same slot, regardless of profession.

Thanks.

Yes… This would be great,
I’ve always thought a cosmetic based endgame would benefit from the lotro system.
(Lotro system let’s you ‘equip’ any armor to your appearance while letting you keep your actual gear)

Be careful what you ask for …

If you think clipping is an issue when mix-n-matching some armour of the same weight now, image what it would be like mixing Heavy pants, with medium trench coat and Light dungeon shoulders.
yikes.

No, I’m afraid the ship has sailed for ‘free-form’ armour.

I expected the clipping issue to come up.

My thoughts:

1)People complain about Charr clipping, but even my very humanoid Sylvari has issues with her thighs clipping through some of the narrower skirts and her hands clipping through the fuller skirts when she drops them to her side. I’m afraid the clipping-free-design ship has sailed long ago. It’s hard to imagine how someone’s spikey death-knight heavy legs clipping through their thiefly trench coat would be any worse.

2) In a game with no collision detection, characters are constantly standing inside each other, inside NPCs, inside pack dolyaks, and even cosmetic bits of environment that don’t have collision geometry. How does anyone who gets upset about clipping even play this game?

3)Finding your look for your character involves finding pieces that look good together. Similarly, it can be about finding pieces that play well together in terms of geometry. Don’t use combinations that don’t.

Then we’d see all the females running around with Viper skirt.

If it clips, don’t use it. Not all the armors will look good together but it’s each player’s decision to use what skins they want to. I’d be all for letting us mix and match everything…they’d probably get more sales of the wardrobe crystals that way anyway.

There are programming structures deep baked into the game that prevent this for armor already made. The different weights don’t play nicely together. It goes beyond clipping. You’ll get texture bleeds, odd undyable patches, and twisted up messes. I’m sure ANet wishes they had done their rigs differently when building the game, but now they’d have to completely redo all the armor to allow what you ask. That’s no small task.

Donari.5237:

There are programming structures deep baked into the game that prevent this for armor already made. The different weights don’t play nicely together. It goes beyond clipping. You’ll get texture bleeds, odd undyable patches, and twisted up messes. I’m sure ANet wishes they had done their rigs differently when building the game, but now they’d have to completely redo all the armor to allow what you ask. That’s no small task.

I’m no expert on what goes into these. I’m confident you have more understanding about it. I don’t understand why that would be a case. Each part has dye channels independent of the others, and you can wear different pieces within the same armor class with vastly different textures without issue.

They’ve also released items that are universal that don’t conflict with current items. Does that mean for every universal skin like, say back items like the Fervid Censer, there are actually light, medium, and heavy versions that the game uses to make sure there aren’t these texture and geometry conflicts you allude to?

Back packs are in the trinket section, not the armor section, so they don’t have an armor weight. In addition, they have no seams and no dye channels, like the armors do.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Back packs are in the trinket section, not the armor section, so they don’t have an armor weight. In addition, they have no seams and no dye channels, like the armors do.

Good point.

But with each item having independent dye channels, why would there be bleed? I can do acid green low key cloth texture boots and magenta leggings with a high key metallic texture, and never have a problem with them interacting. Why would crossing armor classes make that happen?

It’s not that I’m an expert, it’s that I’ve seen experts discuss this every time this request has come up in the last few years.

There’s something about the rigging, with each armor weight having a different “skeleton,” and they literally would have to remake each and every armor piece on a new universal skeleton before they could mix together. So all the people asking for new armors would just have to wait for however many months or years it would take the art/programming team to do that just so we could mingle old pieces.