Guild Wars 2

They have all the same components, and have to fit all the same character models. Why are armors so much harder to make than outfits? If it’s just a matter of outfits not always having enough discreet bits to fill out a full armor set, I doubt anyone would mind if some armors didn’t have some pieces (especially since the missing bits are probably shoulders, which can be hidden anyway). It’s not like we don’t have lots of isolated armor pieces in the game already, so it’s not a technical limitation requiring that all sets be complete.

It just doesn’t make sense. From a graphical standpoint, armors and outfits are identical. It should take no more work to do one than the other. On the technical/database side, making 1 item vs 6 items should not be 6 times as hard. Yes, you have to assign dye channels to each part and maybe put them in drop tables, but that should barely register vs all the modeling work, which has to be done for outfits anyway.

Let’s take the Daydreamer’s Finery outfit. It doesn’t have gloves or shoulders, but it already basically has got a head, torso, legging, and boot pieces (the male boots and leggings run into each other a bit, but that would have been a relatively minor thing to look at at the time it was made, and there is a pretty clear seem where it could be broken now). Why couldn’t it have been an armor instead of an outfit, to allow people more variety? or perhaps an outfit AND discrete pieces, so people could use it together (without cost of transmutes) or separately (but with transmute cost).

They’re only marginally easier because there is no seam to work around.

Game characters are made with geometric planes of only a certain size, in the case of player characters, these geometric planes have seams running in loops at their edges, for each piece of armor and each weight. Armor in a game doesn’t sit over your character’s body like real clothing over a real person, it literally replaces sections of your character body dictated by where those seams are. Furthermore, the fact that these seams don’t always match up between different armor weights, particularly for the midsection, is the reason you can’t mix armors of different weights.

However, I don’t know who told you that, but the difficulty isn’t really the reason they shy away from armors, its the profitability. They can make a single outfit, which is a little less than a third of the work for three armor sets, and it applies to every character in the game, instead of only a third. And time has, unfortunately, shown this to be much more profitable than making armors.

Outfits allow them to unwrap vertexes only once as opposed to armors which need to be done 6 times for each weight.

Outfits are easier because they are a single item. They don’t have to be mixed or matched with anything else, except combat animations. Armor pieces have to be designed to work with every other piece of armor of the same weight (but different location). It’s a lot less total effort.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Outfits are easier because they are a single item. They don’t have to be mixed or matched with anything else, except combat animations. Armor pieces have to be designed to work with every other piece of armor of the same weight (but different location). It’s a lot less total effort.

I thought it was basically impossible to match every single armor piece with the existing ones. Many of the existing armor skins overlap with others or just don’t match well but that didn’t prevent them to release them anyway. They certainly didn’t match them with every other piece of armor of the same weight so I don’t know why it’s still considered to be the reason for selling outfits/taking them 9 months to release a single armor set.

Let’s look at it this way, at the first sight: Outfit = Full armor set.

Difference: The armor set had the ability to customize them, mix and match them with other pieces, while it’s definitely not required to do so. But there’s still a chance to find some pieces that work well together. Outfits won’t even give us that chance. There are plenty of people who say: we can decide ourselves what matches, just give us armor pieces instead of outfits.

Yes, there will be people that complain about clipping, but there are also people (right now) that complain about the shoulder pieces of an outfit that they can’t hide. There will always be people that complain but that shouldn’t be the reason not to release armor sets.