Guild Wars has so far been the game for players wanting to customize their characters. I myself love exploring all these options, the dyes and armors are amazing.
The thing is when it comes to the character creation there’s kind of a let down. There are no realistic afro hairstyles. Compared to the very detailed flat haircuts, the dreadlocks look pasted on the head of the character. Here’s a few points about how real dreadlocks are.
1. Dreads are often dry so they don’t shine as much as other hair.
2. Dreads aren’t only attached on the top of your head, they’re attached on all sides.
3. The bits of your scalp you can see between the dreads normally has the same color as the dreads (the scalp in game is much lighter than the dreads for some reason).
4. Take a picture of Bob Marley or anyone with actual dreads and please pay attention to detail.
On to the next one. The afro. It is down right terrible. I have an afro in real life and many people do too. Anyone could tell that the in game ones don’t look realistic at all. There are a few simple changes that should be done to the afros to make them less of a mockery and more of an actual hairstyle.
1. Make them less round. This isn’t the seventies. A lot of the ball afros are wigs, a real afro doesn’t remain in pure spherical shape unless extreme amounts of hairspray are used.
2. Set them lower. If you look at actual afros, you’d see that most don’t fade into the neck. Sure, there’s slightly less hair in the back of the head but they don’t fade in to the neck that smoothly.
3. Afros leave space your ears. Although sometimes, for example with huge afros, it hangs a little over the ears. Like every other hair, it doesn’t grow on ears.
4. Afros aren’t smooth as eggs. While plenty of the other haircuts have meshes sticking out here and there, the afro is smooth. This is completely impossible, even for wigs. The core of an afro is dense but it becomes thinner towards the end, this leaves space in between meshes..
5. Afros don’t move as much as flat hair. This is a very important issue. You might not have noticed, but afros tend to stay in place. They don’t shake around much, even when swinging your head. But the afros in game fly around with each step; when jumping it literally moves position and flings backward. They look like a waterballoon was stitched to my characters skull and starts wobbling all over the place. Please change the motion, even no motion at all would be more realistic. It’s one of the main reason, if not the main reason, why afros in Guild Wars 2 are completely ridiculous.
6. Afros are often somewhat smaller than the afro in game.
7. Afros for women. Even though afros are worn by both and women, women have afros more often than men.
Conclusion: afros in game look terrible, no offense to the artist creating them but they look very rushed and cheap. Please heed my suggestion and remake the afros. Do not model them after wigs or Angela Davis’s afro. Take a look at regular afros or invite someone to model for a sketch, the staff must have some acquaintances of African origin? If all else fails, please google afros a bit more, look at a few celebrities with afros (e.g. Lenny Kravitz), compare and pay attention to detail. So far Koss (a character from Guild Wars 1) had the most realistic afro in game to date; it wasn’t great either, but it was a good start.
Please change the afros and dreadlocks since it doesn’t fit a game of such high quality as Guild Wars to implement cheaply designed afros and dreadlocks as they are now.
P.S.: Here’s a picture of what a typical (long) afro looks like (this isn’t me I just found this through Google)
