Guild Wars 2

Why are some things outfits, while others are armor skins? Just wondering what the reasoning is.

Being able to create a single chest/leggings piece such as long dresses. Not needing to check compatibility with every other armor piece that could interact with it (gloves to chests; boots to leggings; leggings to chest and boots; chest to leggings, helms and gloves).

Price, time and amount of effort to make.

Outfits are one size fits all onsies with no stats. Cheap, easy to make and profitable to sell.
Armor takes months to make and is one of the most expensive items they produce.

Huh, good to know. I didn’t realize it took that much more time to make it modular.

Skins wer what we had the first 1.5 years .. but people complained that new skins
only were available in the gem-store and not ingame .. then ANet took the chance
and started to produce those boring outfits for the gem-store .. and the new skins
we got ingame since then .. there were Carapace .. and i guess that was the only
nice skin they released since then.

If everything is true what they tell us .. i guess they already started to develop the
game 1960 .. because of the time it took to create all the skins that were in the
original game .. lol.

Beldin.5498:

Skins wer what we had the first 1.5 years .. but people complained that new skins
only were available in the gem-store and not ingame .. then ANet took the chance
and started to produce those boring outfits for the gem-store .. and the new skins
we got ingame since then .. there were Carapace .. and i guess that was the only
nice skin they released since then.

If everything is true what they tell us .. i guess they already started to develop the
game 1960 .. because of the time it took to create all the skins that were in the
original game .. lol.

Or….. they had a lot of contract help that wasn’t held on past launch as the extra designers weren’t needed after the game was designed.

The technical differences between outfits and skins:

• Outfits are one-size-fits-all, 4 dye channels applied to the entire set, and free-to-apply.
• Skins are per piece, have 2-4 dye channels applied to each piece, and nearly always cost 1 transmutation charge per piece to change.

Outfits are far easier for ANet to produce in bulk because they don’t have to be tested against any other armor sets in the game. They are probably only produced by a gem-shop-specific team.

Armors take far longer to produce because each piece much be tested against every other possible piece of the same weight. Any PvE armors seem only to come with massive updates, such as an expansion or overhaul (or something that was nearly completed as part of that update).

Beldin.5498:

Skins wer what we had the first 1.5 years .. but people complained that new skins
only were available in the gem-store and not ingame .. then ANet took the chance
and started to produce those boring outfits for the gem-store .. and the new skins
we got ingame since then .. there were Carapace .. and i guess that was the only
nice skin they released since then.

If everything is true what they tell us .. i guess they already started to develop the
game 1960 .. because of the time it took to create all the skins that were in the
original game .. lol.

That’s not accurate.

• We asked that new armors be obtainable in game. Since then, they haven’t added an armor set for gems.
• Since then, they have added more than just one set:
  • “Carapace”: (as noted above)
  • Leystone
  • Bladed
  • Various legacy armors (technically, in the game previously, but not obtainable)
  • Triumphant Armor
  • Glorious Armor and its Heroic version

Some people love the outfits, some hate them.

Gatvin.6510:

Why are some things outfits, while others are armor skins? Just wondering what the reasoning is.

Which team builds it, the team dedicated to producing “sold for money” items that fund ongoing game development, or the team producing all the rest of the content, pretty much.

Beldin.5498:

If everything is true what they tell us .. i guess they already started to develop the
game 1960 .. because of the time it took to create all the skins that were in the
original game .. lol.

They also started development 5 years before launch and I imagine a fair chunk of development time was asset creation. So we have no idea how many additional armor sets they had done before launch but it took them 9 months before we had the first new set in the Gem Shop.

We really didn’t have that many new armor skins added to the game via the Gem Shop.

Profane/Krytan/Primeval – at launch
Aetherblade – June 25, 2013
Phoenix/Magitech/Braham’s – July 30, 2013
Trickster’s/Viper’s/Phalanx – Oct 29, 2013
Flamekissed/Flamewalker/Flamewrath – Nov 26, 2013
Zodiac – Feb 18, 2014
Incarnate/Strider/Rampart – April 15, 2014 alongside the wardrobe

I personally stayed away from buying armor until they introduced the Wardrobe system. I wasn’t going to spend 500-800 gems on a single weight skin that I could only have on one character at a time. Outfits appeared the same time as the wardrobe and at 700 gems, usable on all professions and using no transmutation charges, it was a way to hide your mismatched armor as you leveled up in game, I can see why players were drawn to them.

The flamekissed/flamewalker/flamewrath armors were just reskins of existing armors. I’m not sure if any of the others were as well.

Sartharina.3542:

The flamekissed/flamewalker/flamewrath armors were just reskins of existing armors. I’m not sure if any of the others were as well.

That may have explained the quickness of their release and the large gap between it and the next one.

I believed that was the only time they tried that trick, there was a lot of push back of “tweaking” existing skins and selling them as new in the gem shop, besides the first pass at flamekissed.