It’s not really an engineering problem, it’s a texture format problem. It’s a lot of work to remake 31 seasons of textures, the opportunity cost is high. Those artists could be doing something that would be a lot more profitable. Artist time is expensive, and they have a production schedule years ahead.
Artists have to be doing things that will make Activision money or they wont have a job. They would probably rightly think that armor dyes would not be some huge draw for people or something that would generate a lot of revenue.
They probably also don’t want to inflate the complexity of the artist’s job. With standard fixed textures they only have to make sure they look right with 1 color palette. If they had set up the texture standard from the start, it would be easier. They would already have a work flow established, but making sweeping changes to what the artists do at this point is also a challenge. Everyone is used to doing things a certain way, and Blizzard tries to maintain an internal consistency in how things are done.
What if they did it just for 1 or 2 armors?
Don’t you have something better to do than spam the forums?
You are not a friendly person are you? You do not seem to understand anything that is a legitimate idea. THey have armor dyieing in Diablo. I am just asking if that can be done here.
It is simple and something that can MAYBE be done if they want to
Blame it on the people I tried being friendly to in my past.
It’s not possible for just 1 or 2. It’s all or nothing.
SO basically coding it the same way they did for diablo would be too hard or use too much memory. I guess those reasons would make them not want to do it. Especially if it costs too much to do
Usually, too much money. But there’s also a very valid reason with Art Direction/Artist Style. There is a very good reason some other games “look like WoW” (those exact words) instead of being generic (like how many games developed in UnrealEngine feel/look similar). WoW has a cartoonish look that it has fostered and held to over the years. Whether it be goofy, giant shoulder armor, or low-fidelity character avatars of the pre-Cataclysm era, you can tell the artwork is definitively “WoW”.
This is also the single best reasoning against “updating WoW to use [Unreal Engine]” – it loses its charm. Those videos look amazing, I especially love the dynamic lighting of UE5 with the way to renders on material surfaces (copper material reflects more light than leather, but a silver material reflects more light than copper material). But it’s simply doesn’t look like WoW. In the same way, Minecraft loses its charm when you use extremely high-res texture packs. It’s more short-term novelty at the expense of long-term charm.
Cell-shaded art styles, like in Genshin or LOZ: BOTW + TOTK were very new to a lot of people. They aren’t commonly used in the west, but they look different. I feel part of the success of those games is their uncommon look. I’d reckon many of our favorite games had a fresh look about them, or some art direction that made them feel special or unique.
This is all to say: art is very important. While dyes might not be possible in WoW for business reasons, it’s important that the art direction feels “WoW”.
Could you imagine the work with all the armor in this game?
yup so it might be too much, and they probably cannot copy the code from Diablo and bring it over to WOW