Dye system

Community General Discussion
41

I recall at least one response, I think on a Q&A (remember those?) where probably Ion said that there were a number of reasons why they wouldn’t do it. One was the amount of work that would be involved, second was that they liked to retain control over what gear items looks like and I also think there was some comment to the effect that dyes just wouldn’t work on the armor due to graphic limitations and if they tried the armor would look gawd awful.

This questions has been asked many times over the years in various ways and they have never given any sign of it happening. While that doesn’t mean anything generally, I doubt they would see it as a worthwhile investment, money and timewise. And I certainly wouldn’t want development time on that taken away from something far more fun, content wise.

42

My main question for this is “why?”. Isn’t 'mogging your equipment good enough? Now, you want them all to be a pretty pink color or something? What’s the real purpose?

43

Would be great to dye armor but I do see it being a harder thing to do with all the colours most armor has. It is possible though just like how they used to say how the main bag couldn’t be larger and look how that is now.

44

I would love to see such a system added but I think they said there are some technical issues that make this impossible at the moment. It is still something I hope to one day see added, along side other features like a robust player housing system.

45

Why would I like to better customize my appearance? Is this a real question?

46

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.

Other Blue:

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.

47

Thanks for the reply. I can see it being very difficult, especially for wow’s art style.

I would like to know what these “core art philosophies” are though.