We do understand and sincerely apologize that there are creative combinations of town clothes that will not exist anymore. Many have asked why remove town clothes as a concept. It boils down to we believe better armor skinning and the outfit system is something we can add more options to more often and will produce a better supported RP game for everyone with more variety in the future. In short, a healthier game.
Incorrect. There are no combinations of town clothes that will exist anymore, not just ‘creative combinations’. By definition, if you cannot separate parts of an outfit to combine with others and if you cannot combine a tonic with anything, there are no combinations. There are a set of what, 3-5 canned outfits that you can dye but will look no different from any other set except for if they have a hat or not.
To expand more on what I mean by better support, It helps if you think of town clothes as a 4th weight class of armor. Clothing was meant to offer visual options that break the class roles, however we were never completely happy with the way it was isolated from the rest of the game and still felt largely the same. Many pieces could have easily been mistaken for light or medium armor. In many ways it was more akin to building an alt character because town-clothes and armor were so separated. Additionally, every time we added something to town-clothes, it didn’t really help someone building their light, medium, or heavy look. And there was no way to add combat gear fairly without creating 3 versions on the back end (light, medium, and heavy). As a customization platform and sustainable expansion design it left a lot to be desired.
I can’t speak for everyone, but at least for me this is entirely missing the point of town clothes. My primary character is a Guardian. He runs around 90% of the time in full armor. When I was RPing with friends… I did not want him in armor. I wanted him in actual clothing (in this case shirt or hoodie and riding pants). The absolute last thing I was interested in right then was him wearing MORE ARMOR.
When we started looking at bringing more of the clothing back into armor with mix and match styles there are some fundamental incompatible things between weight classes. (part of how we set up every armor to allow many dye channels and styles per piece).. There really is no way at this point over six years since we started development to make absolutely everything work together. So we needed something new to continue to grow in the future.
Outfits give us a way to create highly stylized looks that aren’t constrained to armor slots or weight class. In addition to armor skins that are easier and cheaper to collect across characters and the account dye system we do believe the options across a players whole account are much more attractive now. You’ll see more outfits coming out this summer and additions to the game more often usable by your characters. We try not to allow too much ‘hoarder’ design where we just keep stacking more and more options on leaving lots of unsupported things hanging around. Yes, we do have to give up some of our current closet space and clothing to fit the new wardrobe in. Again, apologies for that.
As many people have said, unless the new outfits that are coming are able to be broken into pieces, you are reducing the options for customization, not increasing them. To have a canned outfit that cannot be altered is very restrictive, especially as there are many pieces that look better or worse depending on the species of your character. I have things on a norn I wouldn’t put on a sylvari, etc, for those aesthetic reasons.
As always we ask you to try out the new system of customization and see what’s available to you. I think many people will be surprised by how many pieces have become armor compatible. We hope the benefits to the outfit system and wardrobe in terms of future support and additions will be clear, and you can look forward to more new outfits coming very soon.
To be honest, I’m having a hard time believing that I’ll be interested in anything new that would come out ‘outfit’-wise, if nothing else because I’m not confident at all that anything I would purchase would be usable in the future. I do understand that game content changes, and part of the user agreements is that a company can do so.
However, town clothes are items that were purchased with real funds, and they will now be radically altered from their original design and function. They will exist in a form that I would have never purchased were they laid out that way at that time. So while I think everything else in this upcoming path sounds fantastic, it’s very disappointing that this had to be included.
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