(Suggestion) ANET let us mix outfits and armor skins!

[Rovaeden.8546]

-EDIT- See Below

ANET - It is long since passed time that you enable the visual replacement of head-wear on outfits. In fact, I think we, the players of GW2, have collectively all spent more than enough money on Outfit skins to justify you adding a little something something to that system that allows us to mix and match Outfits and Armor Skins as we please.

 

Please update this system so that it is in line with modern appearance systems in so many other games.

If you need an economic incentive, know that I personally rarely spend money on micro-transactions, as I find that entire business practice distasteful, however I would like to purchase a number of skins if only I were able to swap them around as I see fit.
If someone who rarely buys would make a purchase if this simple change were implemented, then I am certain that other people who do make purchases would love the opportunity to have all that variety to chose from when designing their perfect fashion appearance.

To the community - Please make some noise in support of this change. ANET will likely only move the needle in our favor if we make it abundantly clear to them that this is a change that we would like to see happen soon!

------------------------------------------------------------
-EDIT-
Clearly there is a lot of confusion about the mechanics of such a suggestion. Let me attempt to define what I think would be a suitable solution.

You open the gem store. You see there is a cool new Outfit that you want to buy. You purchase it for, what the standard price seems to be, 700 gems.
Your mail icon pings and you open and retrieve your brand new Outfit.
You open your Hero Panel and select Outfits.
You are presented with the big table of icons on the left and your paper doll on the right showing what you are wearing. just like currently.

- Where I think improvements can be made, and the change I am proposing -

You select your new Outfit (or any other Outfit for that matter) and a vertical column of boxes appears, similar to armor, but it is populated by the Outfit parts for the Outfit that you selected.

Now, these boxes could be Head, Shoulders, Chest, Gloves, Legs and Boots, or some combination. Perhaps Head, Shoulders and Chest (Main Body).
These boxes populated with the Outfit parts would have check boxes in their upper right corner that allows you to disable or enable that particular part so that it does or does not display.
So for instance, if you disable your Outfit head visual, but enable your armor head visual, you will appear in-game as wearing your selected Outfit and your armor headgear instead of the Outfit headgear.
Should you chose to disable the headgear visuals on both the armor and Outfit panels, then your character would be seen wearing no headgear.

You can follow this logic through for each piece of Outfit appearance. Turn on and off as you wish any particular Outfit part in order for your armor visual appearance to show instead.

Simple. The workflow and systems already exists. We just need Anet to chose to put a dev or two on it.

 

And again (as I said below in another comment I made in this thread), NO! It will NOT take 9 months per piece! -because that amount of time is for developing from scratch and what we are talking about is tweaking an existing asset which is so much easier.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Rovaeden.8546
clarity

[Linken.6345]

Yes outfits are not skins they are 1 look jumpsuits with a hood so you either get it all or can pull down the hood.

They were never advertised to be able to be mixed with helmet skins ever so asking for this is to fundamentaly change them from what they were told to us players to be.

Ask for Anet to do more skins sure change outfits a big NO on that one.

[Freya.9075]

This has been discussed many times. Its a bad idea. Armor skin parts are more expensive then outfits. As proven with newer armor sets released. Reason being if you make an outfit, it’s one piece and it uses a different system then armor parts does. If you split the outfit, it will become 6 parts. Seeing recent trend with new armor skins released they range from 4-700 gems each. (Might be a bit less or more as I say this from top of my head without fact checking) So the total for one “outfit” is quite expensive. 
 

I’m all for making new armor skin parts as I like these best myself, but they should leave the old outfits as they are. And add new outfits as well. A mix of both kinds like they do now is fine.
 

Outfits are for players who doesn’t care too much about fashion but want an easy option to look nice.  And a good option for new players and low level characters as no transmutation charges are needed. 
 

[HowlKamui.5120]

As people pointed out, outfits are a sort of lower tier of cosmetics that don't allow for mixing and matching, and the pricing reflects that.

What I need though, is the ability to mix and match armor weights PLEASEEEE. I need it.

[kharmin.7683]

Please use the forums search feature. 

[yoni.7015]

no thanks 

[SuavePuppy.2809]

Pretty sure the last thread on this was last week. I understand why people want this change, but then there would be no difference between outfits and individual armor pieces. They are fashion in a box. In the future, I would prefer to see more like what they've done with the water dragon armor skins - essentially an outfit but sold in individual pieces. Outfits also bypass the transmute system.

[Randulf.7614]

Outfits are a fourth armour weight. They can’t be mixed with other armours. No amount of noise is going to change this since a lot of feedback has been made since the implementation 7+ years ago

Calling for modernisation of a ten year old game is all very well, but the code is ancient and spaghetti-like. This is a technical barrier to overcome not necessarily one awaiting it to hit a level of popularity

[Hyomea.9702]

11 minutes ago, SuavePuppy.2809 said:

the water dragon armor skins - essentially an outfit but sold in individual pieces.

This is an interesting notion, never thought about it that way. This skin set took the best of both worlds: from outfits the useability regardless of armor weight and from actual armor skins the interchangeability of each individual part.

I think it's also a good compromise between outfits and armor skins for developers. The development cost of armor skins is obviously much higher compared to that of outfits. The cost of producing hybrid armor skins like the water dragon one may be somewhere in between outfits and armor skins.
The production cost is surely not the only point to be consiered, when making the decision of what to make: outfit or armor skins. They also have to anticipate the demand of what they produce. I can see sets like the water dragon one having higher costs than outfits, but they might well have a similar demand as standard armor skins, possibly making it the path-breaking way of developing gw2 fashion and thus keeping or even increasing a strong part of Anet's income. Imo a stronger focus on making hybrid armor skins would be in everybody's best interest: higher frequency of new, interchangeable armor skins for the community, while Anet can circumvent producing the seemingly uneconomic normal armor skins.

[Fueki.4753]

It's literally not possible, unless Arenanet reworks each outfits into armour pieces.

And they started doing Outfits specifically because they wanted to work less on armour pieces.

[kharmin.7683]

1 minute ago, Fueki.4753 said:

 

And they started doing Outfits specifically because they wanted to work less on armour pieces.

Armor sets can take up to 9 months to create.  Outfits, much less time.  I think it's more about making profits than desire to work on armor sets.  😉

[Fueki.4753]

22 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Armor sets can take up to 9 months to create.  Outfits, much less time.  I think it's more about making profits than desire to work on armor sets.

The desire to make more money from something that is less work than armour is intrinsically linked with the desire to work less on armour.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

4 hours ago, Hyomea.9702 said:

This skin set took the best of both worlds: from outfits the useability regardless of armor weight and from actual armor skins the interchangeability of each individual part.

Not sure I understand this conclusion, other than the different weights look the same when used together (as an Outfit).  Some pieces (Chestplate and Legguards) certainly aren't the same when used with other armor pieces.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Water_Dragon_armor#Gallery

[Sobx.1758]

15 hours ago, Rovaeden.8546 said:

ANET - It is long since passed time that you enable the visual replacement of head-wear on outfits. In fact, I think we, the players of GW2, have collectively all spent more than enough money on Outfit skins to justify you adding a little something something to that system that allows us to mix and match Outfits and Armor Skins as we please.

 

Please update this system so that it is in line with modern appearance systems in so many other games.

If you need an economic incentive, know that I personally rarely spend money on micro-transactions, as I find that entire business practice distasteful, however I would like to purchase a number of skins if only I were able to swap them around as I see fit.
If someone who rarely buys would make a purchase if this simple change were implemented, then I am certain that other people who do make purchases would love the opportunity to have all that variety to chose from when designing their perfect fashion appearance.

To the community - Please make some noise in support of this change. ANET will likely only move the needle in our favor if we make it abundantly clear to them that this is a change that we would like to see happen soon!

 

They are selling outfits for 700 gems or -apparently, from what we know- add work to make armor set skins instead with parts that can mix-and-match for the higher ~2k gems price. Your idea is for them to turn 700 outfits into 2k armor skin sets while losing 1,3k gems on that transactions.

Can if happen? I don't know, maybe. Will it happen? No, they can just "use your idea" to stop releasing outfits and instead keep releasing more pricy skins like they already are anyways.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Sobx.1758

[Rovaeden.8546]

I don't know where this idea that Armor skins and Outfits are somehow mechanically different came from but it is ridiculous.

 

When you build a game system you do so in such a way that it is as simple and flexible as possible. What you do NOT do is create two entirely separate systems to accomplish the exact same task in a slightly different way. Not only does that increase development cost and time but it cause bloat in the code and game assets.

Armor and Outfits are functionally identical.
Appearance meshes are made in such a way that they can easily interface with the overarching system that is in place.
IE The Equipment System. -  Armor has Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots.

When a digital artist designs a mesh, it may be a single contiguous mesh or it may be designed as separate parts. More likely it is designed and modeled as a single piece regardless of whether it is Armor or Outfit, the workflow would be the same.
Now, for armor, the pieces (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) would be cut apart and placed into their appropriate places in the equipment system so that players can equip them in the correct slots. Perhaps this step exists in the modeling workflow as a flag that can be set -this would be the simplest solution- during modeling in order to tell the game whether the overall item should come apart into its component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) or not.

Regardless of any of this   ... pay attention now...   THE WORKFLOW ALREADY EXISTS!

Even if the outfits are a single mesh, given that the workflow exists, it would be trivial for a digital artist to do a pass over all the outfits and split them into component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots). I could probably do it myself in two to three days and I'm just a hobbiest digital artist. A professional developer who is used to their own workflow could do it much, much faster.

 

ANET just needs incentive, from us -the community- that this is something we would like to see.

 

 

[Labjax.2465]

14 minutes ago, Rovaeden.8546 said:

I don't know where this idea that Armor skins and Outfits are somehow mechanically different came from but it is ridiculous.

 

When you build a game system you do so in such a way that it is as simple and flexible as possible. What you do NOT do is create two entirely separate systems to accomplish the exact same task in a slightly different way. Not only does that increase development cost and time but it cause bloat in the code and game assets.

Armor and Outfits are functionally identical.
Appearance meshes are made in such a way that they can easily interface with the overarching system that is in place.
IE The Equipment System. -  Armor has Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots.

When a digital artist designs a mesh, it may be a single contiguous mesh or it may be designed as separate parts. More likely it is designed and modeled as a single piece regardless of whether it is Armor or Outfit, the workflow would be the same.
Now, for armor, the pieces (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) would be cut apart and placed into their appropriate places in the equipment system so that players can equip them in the correct slots. Perhaps this step exists in the modeling workflow as a flag that can be set -this would be the simplest solution- during modeling in order to tell the game whether the overall item should come apart into its component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) or not.

Regardless of any of this   ... pay attention now...   THE WORKFLOW ALREADY EXISTS!

Even if the outfits are a single mesh, given that the workflow exists, it would be trivial for a digital artist to do a pass over all the outfits and split them into component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots). I could probably do it myself in two to three days and I'm just a hobbiest digital artist. A professional developer who is used to their own workflow could do it much, much faster.

 

ANET just needs incentive, from us -the community- that this is something we would like to see.

 

 

Maybe they could hire you. AFAIK, they contract out art assets, so why not this too. I'm not even joking, though I'd doubt they'd make an offer based on a forum post.

[Zebulous.2934]

Eh they could make the outfits headless and bundle them with "helmets" that are the same armor weight. (This 4th armor weight outfits are set to.)

The outfits panel would just have a hat slot added to it.  They should have done that from the beginning. Oh well.

 

I can imagine the confusion among players. I can imagine the time it would take to make outfit versions of every helmet in the game.

[Swagger.1459]

1 hour ago, Rovaeden.8546 said:

I don't know where this idea that Armor skins and Outfits are somehow mechanically different came from but it is ridiculous.

 

When you build a game system you do so in such a way that it is as simple and flexible as possible. What you do NOT do is create two entirely separate systems to accomplish the exact same task in a slightly different way. Not only does that increase development cost and time but it cause bloat in the code and game assets.

Armor and Outfits are functionally identical.
Appearance meshes are made in such a way that they can easily interface with the overarching system that is in place.
IE The Equipment System. -  Armor has Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots.

When a digital artist designs a mesh, it may be a single contiguous mesh or it may be designed as separate parts. More likely it is designed and modeled as a single piece regardless of whether it is Armor or Outfit, the workflow would be the same.
Now, for armor, the pieces (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) would be cut apart and placed into their appropriate places in the equipment system so that players can equip them in the correct slots. Perhaps this step exists in the modeling workflow as a flag that can be set -this would be the simplest solution- during modeling in order to tell the game whether the overall item should come apart into its component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots) or not.

Regardless of any of this   ... pay attention now...   THE WORKFLOW ALREADY EXISTS!

Even if the outfits are a single mesh, given that the workflow exists, it would be trivial for a digital artist to do a pass over all the outfits and split them into component parts (Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots). I could probably do it myself in two to three days and I'm just a hobbiest digital artist. A professional developer who is used to their own workflow could do it much, much faster.

 

ANET just needs incentive, from us -the community- that this is something we would like to see.

 

 

I'm sure you could do it in "two to three days"... So very sure... 

 

"Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it's like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That's for a normal armor set -- legendary is much longer.) It's not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs."

[Healix.5819]

There was a time when you could show a helmet with an outfit. The aqua breather used to bug/show on outfits, which would cause the helmet to show out of water.

[Labjax.2465]

57 minutes ago, Swagger.1459 said:

I'm sure you could do it in "two to three days"... So very sure... 

 

"Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it's like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That's for a normal armor set -- legendary is much longer.) It's not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs."

*with our in-house tools, pre-existing tech limitations due to how our game was originally coded, the skillset of team members we have on hand, and how many people of that skill set we feel we can justify spending money on and putting to work on making armor sets specifically

(is the part they don't say, but is implied)

This is just to say, what they're saying there is probably a truthful statement, but tells us very little about why it takes them 9 months per set. The mention of including weights, races, and sexes is the little that is being told about why, but it's not explaining anything about why that process extends the development time in such a multiplicative way. It makes sense that'd extend the time it takes, but it being like developing 30 sets implies they're essentially starting from scratch for each variation, which sounds pretty strange when you think about it. It may be that's really what it is, but by god, does that sound like an awful infrastructure to be working off of, if so. And if it's infrastructure, then there's the question of, why have they stuck with that infrastructure this whole time, if an improved one could save them loads of development time.

[kharmin.7683]

9 hours ago, Rovaeden.8546 said:

I don't know where this idea that Armor skins and Outfits are somehow mechanically different came from but it is ridiculous.

 

 

 

 

Anet told us.

[lezbefriends.7516]

Idk why people still call it fashion wars. Yeah, rod and bot skins are nice but that’s not fashion, it’s standard video game cosmetics.
 

Either you use outfits, or use the old armor sets from, like, core. This game is a mess.

Edited October 28, 2022 by lezbefriends.7516

[yoni.7015]

23 minutes ago, lezbefriends.7516 said:

This game is a mess.

Then why do you play it? To create troll post after troll post? 

[Hyomea.9702]

On 10/26/2022 at 7:23 PM, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Some pieces (Chestplate and Legguards) certainly aren't the same when used with other armor pieces.

Just checked the wiki page and ingame wardrobe of said waterdragon set pieces. You're correct, some pieces are not totally the same for each armor weight, but not fundamentally different either. The only difference between armor weights: "On the Water Dragon Legguards (medium skin), the skirt is missing and appeares on the Water Dragon Chestguard (medium skin) piece instead." (Water Dragon Armor Set (Gallery)).

On 10/26/2022 at 7:23 PM, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

On 10/26/2022 at 2:32 PM, Hyomea.9702 said:

This skin set took the best of both worlds: from outfits the useability regardless of armor weight and from actual armor skins the interchangeability of each individual part.

Not sure I understand this conclusion, other than the different weights look the same when used together (as an Outfit).  Some pieces (Chestplate and Legguards) certainly aren't the same when used with other armor pieces.

Each individual part is interchangeable nevertheless. Anet probably decided to remove the skirt from medium leg armor, since medium armor traditionally has a lot of trousers.

[Hyomea.9702]

2 hours ago, lezbefriends.7516 said:

Idk why people still call it fashion wars. Yeah, rod and bot skins are nice but that’s not fashion, it’s standard video game cosmetics.
 

Either you use outfits, or use the old armor sets from, like, core. This game is a mess.

I really like gw2 for its fashion, not exclusively ofc. I feel like Anet tries to compensate the lack of new armor skins with producing loads of rod, bot, mount and weapon skins. Shifting some of the resources from there to the production of new armor skins would be very welcomed by the community, I think.