[Suggestion] Dyable Weapons

Back in the original Guild Wars, we could dye weapons. This feature has been lost in GW2, but I think ArenaNet could try to pull it off now.

I think the key here would be to start slow. In the original Guild Wars, we couldn't dye the entire weapons, and everything had only a single dye channel. Trying to make all currently existing weapons dyable with multiple channels would be a massive effort, and one I think wouldn't be worth it.

Instead, ArenaNet could add a single weapon set with a single dye channel, changing the color of only part of the weapon. They have added something slightly similar to this with the new Obsidian weapons: while I think they're very ugly, some of their effects change colors based on what team the character is on (so red, green or blue).

Assuming this works, ArenaNet could then proceed to sporadically release more dyable weapons as part of a "premium" collection in the Black Lion Chests, requiring more Black Lion tickets than usual. We would have dyable weapons in game, in a way that ArenaNet could easily monetize, without the massive investiment of time and effort that would be required to change what's already in the game.

What do you think?

I believe it would still require significant time investment to create a brand new system where they can make certain exclusive skins Dyeable which are separate to how existing weapon skins are hard coded not to be dyeable.

It is a nice idea though, but i would have no doubt the devs would have thought of it already.

@Randulf.7614 said:It is a nice idea though, but i would have no doubt the devs would have thought of it already.

I'm sure they did - we had that in the original Guild Wars, so they must have thought about doing the same thing when they were creating GW2.

I'm not so sure they have thought about it now, though. Five years ago they may have decided it was not something viable, but maybe, if they try it again now, considering everything that has changed...

I would like this feature, a lot. I also think that it is likely impossible without a massive overhaul and probably not worth the time investment for the devs.

@Erasculio.2914 said:

@"Randulf.7614" said:It is a nice idea though, but i would have no doubt the devs would have thought of it already.

It was mentioned quite recently why it is highly unlikely it will be done now. Not impossible, but a huge undertaking. Whilst your suggestion is nice and certainly more feasible than trying to dye a backlog of weapons not designed to be dyed, it will still require such a workload to separate skins out

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/cqjqrbj/

They could 100% do this with new weapon sets. They would not have to change old weapons.

YES. It's one of my biggest complaints. This game focuses so heavily on cosmetics as an end-game activity yet offers none of the basic stuff you'd expect.

Dare I suggest as well - different 'aura' colors for professions casting spells? Having all the pink for my mesmer and green for my necro makes it awkward when those clash with the color scheme I've chosen for their outfits/weapons. They should be customizable.

Here's a former dev explaining why we can't dye weapons and aren't likely to every be able to

...the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early.

• We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
• This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
• That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
• and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn't bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
• Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But

it would be a nontrivial undertaking

(and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to

re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(text is verbatim; emphasis and bullet points are mine)

tl;dr It's only "possible" in a theoretical sense

• They decided long before launch that there wasn't enough bang for the buck (effort|time) to dye weapons.
• The existing game depends on that decision, so changing it would mean re-rendering every single weapon in the game (whether dyeable or not), plus additional QA to make sure weapons work properly with extra 'metadata'.

For what it's worth, a few of the past requests from the old forums

• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-Dye/4662447
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-dyes/3344528
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-able-Weapons/5768082
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Let-us-dye-weapons/4547784
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapon-dye-Application/4818242
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapons-back-Dye/5090753
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dyes-for-weapons/5836961
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Dye-Channels-on-Legendaries/6521161

@"Erasculio.2914" said:I think the key here would be to start slow.That won't reduce the workload. In order to offer even one dyeable weapon, the entire system has to change first. And if the entire system has to change, then each and every weapon has to be manually adjusted to exist in the new system (at least, if such a new system would have any value for dyeing weapons later).

The quotes are mostly about backpacks, but the tech is similar (as the developer explains).

From Tidgepot.3285, regarding someone asking why the Shining Blade Glider can be dyed, but not the backpack, even though each were created relatively recently.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6257985

It’s extremely hard to alter the engine so backpacks are dyeable. As far as the engine is considered, backpacks are considered items (like weapons) and gliders are considered effects. The engine needs to be fundamentally altered from the ground up to allow for item dye channels. It’s not impossible, but not easy. To add to this, the Shining Blade glider was designed on its own and after it was modeled one of the artists saw that it could be turned into a backpack for the players to enjoy. I think lazy is an inappropriate term for this situation when someone went the extra mile. However, I do understand your frustration with not knowing it couldn’t be dyed. That should be more clear.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6260425

If you need citation, then look no further. I’m the dev who concepted this glider! Granted, I’m an artist so I couldn’t give you the full technical rundown like Josh Petrie, but I do handle our engine daily.

Whether or not the equipment takes damage or not has no bearing on how the engine separates items. The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects. Now I’m not positive on this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if we decided to make gliders as items, we’d have to retroactively alter the system in a way that would allow for weapons/backpieces to be dyed.

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I’d like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we’d also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s SO much more to the process that I don’t have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we’re fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

This feature has been requested since early beta. I think the work required and some internal restrictions is what made this a no. I'd love to see it too, but if we haven't so far, I think there are reasons that keep it from happening.

I Want dye-able back items first.

This is one of the major reasons to expect GW3 in a few years. The actual base technology does no favor to the devs to improve and change things. It's a literal obstacle to the game evolution.

@Ardid.7203 said:This is one of the major reasons to expect GW3 in a few years. The actual base technology does no favor to the devs to improve and change things. It's a literal obstacle to the game evolution.

This wasn't a limitation of the engine; it was a deliberate design decision. They traded off flexibility for us as players in favor of streamlining the development. On balance and given how long it takes them to make dyeable armor, it seems like it's a good compromise for the game. In exchange for not being able to dye weapons, we get a lot of new skins rather frequently (allowing ANet to offer silly and serious, ugly & attractive, ornate & plain, etc... things that they don't have time for with armor skins).

I'm sure it was deliberate. But it also was probably a mistake, because it leaved the tech rigid and unable to adapt. In my book that is always a recipe for failure.I can't share the idea of dye channels being so hard to make you have to scrap them from development to be efficient. Seriously, if they are so hard, there must be something wrong with the mechanic in the first place.

@"Ardid.7203" said:I'm sure it was deliberate. But it also was probably a mistake, because it leaved the tech rigid and unable to adapt. In my book that is always a recipe for failure.I can't share the idea of dye channels being so hard to make you have to scrap them from development to be efficient. Seriously, if they are so hard, there must be something wrong with the mechanic in the first place.

It's not "hard", it's more time intensive. That's not specific to dyeing weapons; it's a general truth about any sort of design choices. The more complexity there is, the more it costs in terms of ramp up and maintenance.

Granted, we don't know exactly what they were dealing with. Maybe including a dye channel but leaving it with a fixed color would have saved nearly as much effort as not having a dye channel. I doubt that, since it sounds like the devs thought about this a lot early on.

Regardless: it's moot now. Whether they made a good call then or not, the game is what it is today. We aren't going to see dyeable weapons in GW2 and, for now, GW3 seems unlikely to be something they'll be working on soon. (They just started nailing down the expansion + LS cadence, to the point that ANet overall plans are predictable for the first time in 5 years. That's good for them, in terms of efficiency and flexibility for special projects. And it's good for us, too, at least for the present. I think living without colorizing weapons is a small price to pay, even if I miss that feature.)

@"Randulf.7614" said:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/cqjqrbj/

The interesting thing there is...

@Josh PetrieAs with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But it would be a nontrivial undertaking (and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

So yeah, redoing all existing skins so they could be dyed would likely be an insane amount of work.

Which is exactly why I think ArenaNet shouldn't bother with that.

It's interesting to see how they mention more than once the difficulties on dying weapons based on using the existing skins (such as the comment about red shift in the existing art). Really, it's clearly more trouble than it's worth.

But, think outside the box. Just to give one example: between having zero options for weapon color and having a limited amount of options, the limited options would be better. Then, consider the Antique weapons. They all share the same models, but under different colors (one example, another example, one more example).

What if, instead of using the same dye system we have for armor, the weapon dye system were based on using a menu (similar to the one we have for picking stats on legendary weapons) to pick which dye the weapon would have? Picture something similar to the Antique weapons, but, instead of there being multiple similar weapons with different colors, a single weapon could be freely changed to have one among a list of seven colors. It would be basically a work around using something similar to the current transmutation system.

Now, I have no idea of how viable this would be, but it would move around the great majority of issues mentioned in the quotes above. I'm sure ArenaNet could come with better systems if they felt it worth their time. And the only way it would be worth they time, IMO, would be if they didn't bother with old skins, and instead released new skins that were heavily monetized and considered to be premium exactly because they would be able to change colors.

Not being ale to dye Weapons was intentional, because of Legendary Weapons. Can you imagine being able to dye Twilight the same color as Sunrise?

Yes please.

Just to give one more example: people have asked often for a way to sit on chairs. The reply has often been that it wouldn't be viable, because ArenaNet would have to change the height of all benches, chairs and etcs in the game to be exactly the same, among a million other necessary changes.

Yet...

!

What was the catch here? Trying to change all existing chairs into something our characters were able to sit on wouldn't work. But making a specific throne in which our characters can sit... Well, you can see the image above.

Same thing with the weapons. A lot has been said about why turning all existing weapons into things that could be dyed wouldn't work, and I agree. Making an entirely new skin that could be dyed, however, is something entirely different.

@Erasculio.2914 said:Same thing with the weapons. A lot has been said about why turning all existing weapons into things that could be dyed wouldn't work, and I agree. Making an entirely new skin that could be dyed, however, is something entirely different.

It's not the same thing. Read the dev quotes: to create even a single weapon that can be dyed, new skin or otherwise, requires changing the underlying tech. If that tech is changed, then all existing weapons have to be adapted to account for it, even if they won't accept dye afterward.

The chair they created is new tech and it's partly a result of already having built that tech to account for sitting toons on mounts (see: other dev quotes elsewhere).

The preexisting analogy for creating something new for 'weapons' is the glider: it pops on the back, as if it's a backpack skin & (as newly created tech) it can be dyed. But it doesn't replace the backpack; it's just similar. Backpacks themselves remain non-dyeable, despite some looking nearly identical to gliders.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"Erasculio.2914" said:Same thing with the weapons. A lot has been said about why turning all existing weapons into things that could be dyed wouldn't work, and I agree. Making an entirely new skin that could be dyed, however, is something entirely different.

Of course. Any new feature in the game requires changing its underlying tech, from the smallest things (sitting on a throne) to the biggest ones (mounts).

You seem to think that a series of quotes saying "X cannot be done in Y way" means that "X cannot be done". The thing with the chair is an example showing otherwise - we still cannot sit in every chair in the game, but that does not mean our characters cannot sit in anything in the game.

Even if it were true that it's not possible to make dyable weapons the way you think of dyable weapons (which is debatable), it does not mean that it isn't possible to have dyable weapons. If you insist on saying so, there's a very simple counter argument - we already have weapons that can change colors in the game.