Breakfast Topic: Are pretty pixels important to you?
by Stephanie Drury 
Jun 12th 2011 at 8:00AM
I admit it: I judge books by their covers. By the same token, I also judge games by their pixels. The look and feel is a key factor of my enjoyment of the game. If I can't customize a character, the game loses appeal quickly.
WoW doesn't have a huge amount of customization, but it's added a lot with barber shops to keep me and my mood swings satisfied. It may be a niche need or desire, but I am happy it is recognized. There are, however, some colors I think it would be great to see added. Female night elf death knights need a pink hair color option. I would love if my druid could get this same hair color without having to die for it. The Gilnean rogue trainer Lorna and Surwich Innkeeper Donna Berrymore have a dark blue/purple hair color. I wish one of my humans could stumble upon this mysterious hair dye bottle.
Blizzard recently mentioned that it's adding a choice between male and female versions of demons
Some players have voiced a desire for an option to show or hide their gear. I'd like to broach the idea of dyes here as well. Although it would hinder being able to tell heroic from normal gear at a glance, it would make it more aesthetically pleasing for each character to choose an individual look. I wouldn't look the same as every other person in my class.
In what other areas would you like to see the game's aesthetics added to or improved?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Prystus Jun 12th 2011 8:10AM
It surprises me armor dyeing isn't available.
Honestly, EQ showed this functionality in 2003.
And by the same token, they displayed the ability to save item visualizations in EQ2. (the ability to use the look of any previous item you had looted any item you had slotted for use.)
That would go a long way toward customization.
Anton Ochs Jun 12th 2011 8:21AM
I believe Blizz has already broached this subject before, here are some quotes from them about it.
"Dyes sound so simple, don't they?
However, they're very hard to get right.
Yes, while a near-herculean task at this point, the "easiest" way to implement this would be to shift all armor to a greyscale and allow application of a single color. Except... doing that causes either dark colors to look washed out (such as red appearing dingy pink) or light colors to look dim and dirty. Pure white? Pure black? Can't happen, not without almost completely removing the detail on the texture. All the multicolored bits would be gone. And that's something we don't want to do; the textures of the game provide much of the liveliness in the art style of the game.
If we want to do dyes right, it's a far greater task that would require special attention to each and every piece of armor in the game, creating maps to define where the dye would and would not apply, etc. in addition to making sure the colors would be the vibrant and strong shades we've come to know from Warcraft. It's not a simple thing to implement by any means, and there are no plans to do so at this time."
"Character customization is definitely something we would like to increase, but as far as customizing specific armor we would probably move to something that allows you to choose from color variants for some items long before we allowed actual free-form dying. That's just my take on it right at this moment, but of course anything is subject to change.
As Cay said back in the day dyes are extremely difficult to do right as well, and would either be severely limited or just ruin a lot of the art put in to the armor. The ability to dye makes a lot more sense for certain games as the game and art style support it, but World of Warcraft just isn't set up to do so, and tacking the ability on would contradict some core art philosophies for the game.
Like I said we definitely love giving players choices and the ability to customize, and that's only going to increase as we go, but dyes aren't currently something we're considering for any future types of customization."
Even though I'd rather not have dyes in the game, I'm all for an appearance tab. o/
gewalt Jun 12th 2011 9:29AM
its alot easier than you make it out to be. Players dont need perfect dying abilities, they just want something. With all the tech that blizzard already has in the game for drawing auras over items, it would be a pieces of cake for them to offer the ability to just draw a color over any piece of gear. they dont even have to redo their entire rendering engine. Yes, they can even draw an aura that effectively bleaches an item. It's really not hard for them.
I wish blizz would stop being lazy and just add in armor dyes. But I also fear that will lead to the slippery slope of vanity slots.
and other games had it before eq
Wonkey the Monkey Jun 12th 2011 6:33PM
gewalt, you are overlooking some fundamental challenges involved with color mixing. Do you know what you would get if you simply "drew" a red color on top of a green item? It would turn an ugly, muddy brown color. Drawing yellow over any darker color would result in a yellowish version of the original color.
If I'm misunderstanding you and when you say "draw over" you actually mean "replace each pixel of color A with a pixel of color B," then you are getting into exactly what the blue poster quoted above is addressing. Color changes do not involve only hue, as you seem to be suggesting. They also involve saturation and lightness, and all three values must be carefully adjusted across the entire gamut of the item in question.
Auras are different because they float around an object. When you view a piece of armor through an aura, it's like viewing it through tinted glass. You get the color mixing effects that I mentioned in my first paragraph, but it doesn't matter because that is what you would expect to see if such anaura existed in real life.
Bapo Jun 12th 2011 9:53AM
I know rift had dyes in it, and I think that went over pretty well
Jonisjalopy Jun 12th 2011 9:57AM
A lot of games have done dyes. Guild Wars was my first run-in with it.
They could do it with just a palette swap like they already have in place with some gear. If you look at the data mined images you can see multiple color sets for different pieces of gear.
The dye doesn't have to change the entire piece to one color, but at least a general swap of color would be nice.
Quasi Jun 12th 2011 10:55AM
EQ also only had 4 variations of armor for every race, nothing visually different, you had plate, mail, leather and cloth, and everything came with a pre-set "dye" to it already, then you applied your own hue. Wow armor is detailed, heavily, and wasn't pre-designed for this system either. Dyes would be nice, and they are in almost EVERY other mmo out there, even terrible warhammer online. But those games were designed with that in mind. I think from a programming perspective, you need to go almost right back to basics and start over to implement it.
I think the game has a TON of good armor in it already, although un-dyable, and if blizz could just give us a the appearance tab they have in LoTRo, or EQ2, where we have our stats armor on tab 1, and our appearance armor on tab 2(with the ability to toggle visible or not), you would find the game to be incredibly customizable. I have a few outfits in the bank just waiting for this, namely my fishing/archeology clothes, my wrath pvp armor, and a few tiers I prefer to current ones. (paladin T2, f-yeah)
DarkWalker Jun 12th 2011 11:38AM
DCUO has a quite interesting take on dyes, although arguably one better suited for the superhero theme: each character chooses 3 colors. They are used across all his gear, guaranteeing by itself a mostly consistent color usage.
Those colors are most often used in each individual gear piece as the main color, a secondary color, and the highlight color, though the player can swap color channels on a per-piece basis. Each piece of gear might also have parts in a specific, non-changeable color.
GW2 is going for mostly the same system of three color channels per gear piece, except that each color will be unlocked just like a feat or quest reward, and that there will be no restriction on how many colors each character uses in his character. It will be almost as flexible as the Sims3 wardrobe color customization. GW2 is also using this kind of customization to create specific color schemes for each part of their world, reflecting it's culture.
I do agree, however, that to do dyes right each and every piece of gear that could be dyed would need new textures made. Unless Blizzard's art department has been internally doing this kind of work for a long time (which is not impossible, since it's an efficient way to quickly produce multiple color swaps for the same piece of gear), this would require Blizzard to either rework most of their old gear models, or to restrict dyes to just a few select pieces.
On the other hand, I pick a few variations of a specific color scheme on every game I play (dark green and dark blue as main colors, with golden highlights); all other things being similar, I prefer to play games where I can pick a color scheme I like. I see the fact I can readily do so on LotRO, DCUO, GW, CoH, etc, and not on WoW, as a negative point for WoW.
(BTW, I don't care that other players would be able to dress like dorks if we had dyes. If they want to do so, let them; they would have to make a big effort to look more mismatched than a player leveling in Outlands looks right now, anyway. And, for what is worth, over a fairly long time I've only seen a couple characters in bright pink, and they actually looked good.)
Noyou Jun 12th 2011 12:28PM
Altering your armor can't be that hard- what about all the in game items we have to change us- Wands, Deviate fish, Gnome/Troll tokens, etc. etc. I have pretty much disliked every piece of armor they have made since early LK. Especially the shoulders. I mean really. Things smoking/whirling/flaming/towering. Most of the helms make the toons look ghastly (which on some toons makes if very difficult to ID gender for holiday events). So yeah all their arguments seem a little lame. I know they don't want to piss off the hardcores. I don't see this happening anytime soon.
Chad Jun 12th 2011 12:35PM
Dyes are not easy, as players can certainly screw things up. Sure, other games add this as WoW paved the way to explore what was fun and wanted in these games.
So, why hasn't WoW added this you say?
Adding functionality to a six year old game, the size and scope of WoW is daunting.
Software has this thing often referred to as Entropy, borrowing from thermodynamics. The longer software has been around, the more disorder there is in its codebase and the harder it is to maintain and make changes. I'm sure Bliz would love to rewrite it to be better. All programmers want to do this, to add more symmetry and order to the code (huh, just realizing the similarities between programmers and titans...). That isn't feasible. And, it would be in disorder in a few years anyway.
However, I'm sure that whatever they are learning in WoW, they are applying to whatever is coming next. You can see some of this in their exploration with phased content that has slowly been added, with more and more complexity, such that the new firelands area will have some of the most interesting phased content in the game.
So, yeah, other games have stuff... they were designed AFTER WoW with all that was learned by games like WoW that paved the way.
Amaxe Jun 12th 2011 2:04PM
My thoughts on Blizz' excuse. The comment: "Dyes sound so simple, don't they? However, they're very hard to get right" sounds like an excuse where a lot is said where very few things NEED to be said.
I think enough games have done it that I think it isn't as hard as Blizz makes it sound. Perhaps they should just simply say "It might be easy in other games, but our engine makes it difficult."
artifex Jun 12th 2011 2:58PM
Rage, rage against the dyeing of the light.
SamLowry Jun 12th 2011 3:06PM
Lich King? How quickly we forget the clown suits from Burning Crusade. THAT was when I really wanted to see armor dye.
SamLowry Jun 12th 2011 3:11PM
...and for those who have forgotten:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/1/2/
NSFW language; the visuals are "a vibe somewhere between pimp and clown".
Meccaryn Jun 12th 2011 8:24AM
wow
In what other areas would i like to see the game's aesthetics added to or improved?
gee - where should i start with the ever-so-long list?
how about some upgrate on the moonkin form for druids? we can all agree its long overdue
and how about allowing druids to display either 'normal' or 'epic' flight form? with the epic update on the mount system, speed restriction based on flight form has pretty much gone. if anything, druids 'lost' an option of flight form
and how about matching/fixing 'set pieces'? if we go way back from vanilla, the prominent 'set piece' of stormshroud and imperial plate are still left unattended, missing pieces to complete the look. i'm not even going to list the entire 'missing set pieces' that still missing in game.
as for the other great suggestions like armor dye, 'display slot' etc etc - i belief such common requests/proposal does not need to be brought up indefinitely.
while i'm sure the developers prefer the idea of 'your looks display your progression', which they did openly voiced on - i cant help but wonder, is that really a proper 'benchmark' to be used?
Bapo Jun 12th 2011 9:56AM
Wait... imperial plate is missing something? I thought that set had all the pieces for it?
Noyou Jun 12th 2011 12:33PM
You druids have the most forms/art out of any in the game. You just got new ones for Trolls and Worgen. I am sorry what they did to you for Tree form but come on man. Enough is enough.
MusedMoose Jun 12th 2011 8:23AM
In yesterday's edition of The Queue, Ilmyrn talked about having sub-races as an option in character creation, and I think this would be great for customization. Being able to show that your character is from somewhere else in the world sounds just plain awesome, and it wouldn't take much in the way of art assets either. I can only hope that gnomes would get mechano-gnome as a subrace. ^_^
Also, I'd like for more hairstyles and colors to be available among all races. I play my night elf mage as being a bit not-all-there, so some of the goblin female hairstyles would be perfect for her, as would that nifty shade of magenta that night elf DKs can get. Oi.
Noyou Jun 12th 2011 12:31PM
WIldhammer Dwarf. But then how would we change our existing toons without paying for it?
I think I will just like them to update current models. Mainly human males. Tired of having to wear facial hair to hide the fact that they look insanely angry without it.
Shela Monster Jun 12th 2011 12:45PM
I have a troll for a main toon, and let me tell you, if I could pick a tribe of trolls to be from that dictated either skin color, hair, decorations and maybe even voice, I'd love it.
(Blue Frost DK Ice Troll FTW!)
Better yet with all the different skin colors for many druid races I think their skin color or hair color should dictate the boomkin color. There's so many variations out there, I think a blue boomkin would be rather fun. :)