Guild Wars 2

First of all, apologies if I’m missing something obvious. I haven’t played GW2 much.

My issue is that for no reason at all, people just randomly look like a ‘standard’ character. A standard gear set, all in 1 color, and even a standard character (eg, a human female thief will look like the standard black male human with short hair etc)

At first I saw this in WvW where everybody looked like this. So I thought it was WvW specific.

Then I saw it in Divinity’s Reach, so I thought it had to do with the amount of people that were around me.

But now I’m in Kessex Hills with only 2 people around me. 1 looks normal, the other one looks like a ‘standard’ character.

I’ve tried finding a way to fix this in the option menu, but I haven’t found a solution yet.

Is there something obvious that I’m missing?

This is a recent change that ANet made to graphics settings. If you increase your graphics settings, it will fix this for you.

Under your graphics settings, it’s controlled by the last two options before you get to the check boxes. I can’t remember offhand what they’re called (something about character models and character quality). These two options used to be just for WvW, but now affect PvE as well.

Hope that helps…sorry I can’t remember more details.

Like what Vick says here – the recent change to include PvE client based character model quality extends to PvE.

The two settings are the two last dropdown boxes in the options > graphic options mentu listed as Charcter Model Limit and Character Model Quality. The model limit is the number of character models to load, and will always load nameplates first before loading skins. The model quality relates to what you will see once the skins are loaded. At the lowest setting you will see generic armor for almost every class (devoid of sex) only scaled for height and race. The the low setting the game will at first load the generic armor for the skin, when you get close to the character you will load their actual skin, and so long as you remain close to the character their skin will remain loaded.