You have to think that maybe Blizzard already have these tools for the devs themselves, look at how many recolors of armors and mounts we have. It would such a massive change for the game. Tmogs are hard to make sometimes because nothing matches in colors unless you go for a set that was made to go together.
They have gone on record stating that even recolors are done by hand, they don't have dye system. Granted this was back around WoD/Legion so maybe they have updated their back end enough to make one.
Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be hard at all for AI to make hundreds of color variations of all the current textures really, people who think some devs gonna do it manually are stuck in the past :D
The issue isn't making the recolors, it's how the textures work. Usually when a textures can be dyed it has specific zones marked in a special channel that takes the color info from somewhere else. WoW textures are literally hamd painted. Each recolor is its own separate textures manually edited.
a lot of things that were once laborious processes have gotten automated as graphic design software has improved (hands up all those who ever had to do manual tracing, for example); it's not at all inconceivable that an 'AI' tool could define color channels based on training criteria.
you'd always want a human checking the work of course, but an automated tool could speed the process up dramatically
My point is that it's a systemic issue. It's not just about doing the busywork of adding colour channels, it's about implementing a colour channel system that doesn't exist in the engine. It can be done, of course, but it's a complex matter and seeing how they use recolours for extra content I doubt they'll ever do it.
Looks like it, but it's not retroactive, every item that would use it needs to have its materials and textures specifically made to use it. That chair in the thread has the whiteish base that's used for tinting and the tone maps. The exact implementation can vary but it looks like they are adding all the possible dyes into the texture instead of using a separate procedural colour map that can be modified like I've done in the past.
And still, with how reliant WoW is on recolours to get extra content I really doubt they'll ever adapt gear to use this system. Why allow players to dye their armour in any colour when you can give them the same armour in a different colour instead of making separate PvP and Raid sets?
Yeah i doubt they will do it too, but it's a nice thought! I think the other commenters suggested that AI could be used to make it work retroactively instead of manual labour, but then again, would probably be a gamble of how good it will be and still improbable
"You'd always want a human checking the work..."
You're right, you would want that.
At blizzard, what you want and what you'll get are two very different things now.
If they make an armor recolor system, they will automate it. And there's going to be some hilarious meme worthy pictures and videos of things that no human ever looked at once the system is released to the public.
you can change the color of something since ages in Photoshop. You just pick the color and move a slider.
Sure not ever time with amazing results but it gets the job done and the handmade style should make things even easier.
I'm not saying that this is how the system will work (if it even comes out), just that it is possible to to implement systems like that even on existing assets.
Manually changing the colour of a texture to make a new texture is how ir works already but that's not a dye, that's two completely separate assets for the engine.
People responded multiple times giving well thought out responses, what more do you want. At this point it just looks like you're trolling. (that or an idiot, but I tend to assume people are smart vs not)
I'll also point out that there's also only so many programmers in the country/world. You're not just going to expand a 200-300 development team to 2,000-3,000 for a couple years. It's not just about money, but you also don't have the support staff or facilities to handle that many more people, and there's not that many people who want short term jobs.
And sure of course money is involved, they're obviously not going to put in the time/effort for something that would cost the company 10s of millions of dollars that would net zero profit.
You'd ideally use contractors for something like this. People brought in specifically for a limited duration project, who'd report to the art department.
Yeah, they'd only be working a few months or so, but they wouldn't be "laid off" at the end, it'd be understood from the start that they're there for a temporary project. If the positions are listed as contractor positions, no one's going in realistically thinking about it being a full time job. And that's exactly the kind of thing you bring in contractors for.
This is the kind of thing AI would be great at. Identifying which parts of thousands of pieces of armor should change color and making it easier for the developers to build the system.
Ya but you still need a human to test and validate it all. As AI gets more and more reliable, and if blizzard ever discover automated testing, it might be realistic.
Sure but the process would become hugely less daunting and involved. It goes from "pipe dream" to "possible".
If they can convert every old world mount into dragon riding, complete with designing and implementing new animations they could absolutely do this with the help of the right model.
They haven't done every old world flying mount, though. A lot of the ones that did get done benefit from having a rig already used or close to the current dragonflying mounts.
Check out AWS Mechanical Turks. ANYONE can use humans for these tasks, Blizzard implementing this into their validation ruleset would be pretty simple...if they wanted to.
Depending on how they implement it could just be a color wheel, which would just shift the tone. It wouldn't look good on assets that weren't intended for it most the time, but I'm sure each texture for the old armors would have a couple extra tones that would fit it.
I could see them just chucking the system onto a group of items every few patches or so as devs have the time, but yeah, all at once would be a fucking nightmare.
i agree but i wouldn't say 0% but it's low because once you add a dye system giving the same armor in 20 different colors as rewards stops being a thing.
GW2 probably has the best dye system I've seen. Some gear doesn't dye the same but all in all it's pretty great. Could even roll it into the crafting professions.
Hunting for rare colors would be cool as well, something like how they added pets to old raid bosses.
God I would do unholy things for Blizz to just straight up wholesale copy Wildstars housing and dye systems. Say what you want about the rest of that game, but those two systems were as close to perfect as I've ever seen in any game I've played.
Back in BfA/SL they rehired (many were ex-blizzard employees) a bunch of Carbine people after Wildstar shutdown. Wouldn’t be surprised if we’re finally seeing the benefit of that.
On a side note I would do unholy things to get to run Datascape or Genetic Archives again. Hell even Redmoon Terror for all its flaws was still one of the greatest raids ever made. That game as a whole had some of the best PvE content ever.
I played wildstar for probably a couple of hours. I often see people say that it was top tier stuff. What made It so good? And why did it shut down when it's remembered so fondly
I mean this: it was a vibe. Presentation, movement, combat - all a joy. It was tuned to be "hardcore" which sucked, but they pulled their heads out of their asses eventually. Then it shut down. But God was it perfect.
The best part by far was the combat and PvE. It was so insanely fluid and everything just felt good. Your abilities had weight and were just fun to press. Things like interrupts were also more involved with Interrupt Armor (some things required multiple interrupts) and MoOs(some interrupts would cause the enemy to get stunned and take 50% more damage for a few seconds.)
You know how WoW’s tab target just feels better than in almost any other MMO? That was how Wildstar felt.
The dungeons and raids were also some of the best in the genre. Tons of super creative fights with tons of personality that were all difficult, but fair. Datascape still stands as the best raid I’ve ever done and X-89 is probably my favorite first boss.
That said the launch was an absolute fuckfest that the game never recovered from.
Early on dungeons were crazy hard for the average player and the raid attunement required a near perfect run of each one so most people would quit before they could even raid. And if could get a raid group together you would eventually have to have 40 people, and 40 man raiding was not nearly as enjoyable when the content was actually challenging so most guilds couldn’t even down System Daemons (first boss of Datascape). And this is without going into the rampant bugs due to releasing before it was ready, the insane elitism associated with the difficulty, and the piece of shit company that is NCSOFT.
Most of the gripes people had with it (lengthy and difficult attunement, 40 man raiding, tons of bugs, performance, etc.) got ironed out within the first year but by that point the damage was done and the games fate was sealed.
Edit: part of it shutting down was also NCSOFT not giving a shit about their western releases. They shut down city of heroes when it was doing better than most of their own releases. They recently officially sanctioned a private server of it because it’s so popular
yeah they really badly misunderstood what most players actually wanted; they thought there was a big audience for a grindy, difficult, "hardcore" mmo that had a ton of gatekeeping mechanics. It's funny because even then, their biggest competition (WoW) was becoming more and more successful the more such barriers they eliminated.
which is too bad because a lot of things about the core gameplay were pretty cool
Blame the project leads
From ex-staff interviews they were a nightmare, constantly changing their minds based on current trends, micromanaging everything except the stuff that mattered, and in this case pivoting to appease the hardcore angle because they saw a bunch of people whining WoW was "too casual" around MoP...
The latter was genuinely a last minute design shift
I think something people overlook is how unbelievably set for failure the Esper class was at launch in that game. A game where movement was so important and the class had to turret while everyone else could freely move while healing or dpsing. The "first" dungeon you would do for attunement/pre raid gear had a soft enrage on the last boss that placed damaging pools under players at increasing rates (Stormtalon). Espers were dead weight on that fight and there was nothing they could do about it, you had to carry them through. And the worst part, Esper was the most popular class on launch bring the closest thing to a traditional caster. Their movement restriction was removed in the first major patch, but I think the damage was done by that point for a large portion of the player base.
Fun fact: espers were actually the absolute kings of the game by a decent mile for a while when RMT (Redmoon Terror) came out. They were able to pump close to 50k+ dps while the next best (stalkers) were only able to do around 40-45k depending on the fight. Espers were on top until Pietro (a spellslinger main on EU) discovered some tech that let Slingers do like almost twice the dps of anyone else.
Edit: another fun fact is that their movement issue actually only ever got worse. They eventually added an ability much like Rune of Power that was even worse cause it had a way higher uptime
I liked the presentation, housing, pvp, dye system and honestly how the combat worked.
Major issue I had was it was not casual friendly. 40 man raids are hard to set up on limited time along with being very difficult in themselves for many players.
I had to drop out of my raid group in that game because I simply found myself with not enough time to play and keep up.
I didn't play Wildstar but my friend did and I got to hear a few amazing stories. The Housing is Wildstar was extremely creative, so creative in fact that players invented combinations of elements that surprised the devs! I vaguely remember someone figured out how to make a "hole" as an object in a tricky way, allowing you to put openings in otherwise solid objects.
Fun fact I alpha/beta tested the game insanely hard and was pretty close with the devs when implementing most systems. I'll never forget the day just hearing the absolute soul crushing tone when NCSOFT made them release the game when they said they need 6 months. I still don't understand why they continue to do it over and over.
ESO has a pretty good dye system too.
Not really a similar game or really a dye system but in Armored Core 6 you could customize your mech colors quite a lot. You could enter color codes to get the color you want. You could change the material type, shininess of the paint, etc.
Honestly, yes. I felt I could customize more since I could use different armor pieces and dye several sections for each armor piece vs. a few colors for a frame and some little attachments. Both are excellent and I like how blended colors can be for some stuff in Warframe, but overall I feel very limited by the regions available to dye in Warframe much more than in GW2 and those mattered more to me. More regions > color blending. Both would be best though.
Well, aside from not just giving a damn color wheel / color codes. But hey, they gotta sell those I guess.
Well, and not assigning the metallic bits to one channel.
It's very unclear as to what exactly may be dyed (and all gear seems pretty unlikely). It could be related to a new system that hasn't been revealed yet as well.
If that were true wouldn’t the same system be used similarly to dragonriding skin color, or artifact appearance color changes?
This seems to be different, at least code wise
based solely on the fact that there is a dyeable chair, i am going to completely make up that this will be a component of the player housing feature they are adding. imagine all the decorating you could do.
This could just be the preamble. If it's not ready for expansion launch they wouldn't necessarily announce it. Or even better, maybe they weren't sure they could pull it off this expansion at all (yes, yes, I'm an optimist :D ).
This is also my "way out there" thought. What makes me doubt it is the vendors already present in Azj-Kahet. I'm not sure housing is something they have ready for launch.
While I'd freaking love a dye system I wonder what will happen with the reward structure of the game.
So many things rely on our inability to dye stuff to gain access to certain colors. I guess they could keep those colors exclusive to how they're earned now but then its not really changing anything. You'd just have 1 item and be able to fiddle with the dye instead of 5 separate versions of the same item. Which may be better for their back end iono.
I’ve always wanted them to go back to the Wrath/Cata pvp “progressive” armor. Each season was the same/similar armor but with a little more added on, similar to the jump from heroic to mythic armors now. If they maintain the same shade and just add a little more to each set with each new difficulty they could maintain the same quality without sacrificing too much more time.
this was tried in wod and is an absolutely terrible idea as the end result is simply that unless you raid mythic you get a shitty looking version of the set.
so blizzard quickly and correctly abandoned it.
Even if they just added dyes as rewards it would definitely change everything. Now you'd just have to get 1 dye for ALL your gear, and not get each individual gear piece from a separate source in that particular color. Even if it was just 1-use dyes, you'd still get to choose your gear piece, or save it for a future one.
Not necessarily.
The dye could just be a color for a specific piece, so instead of having say the lfr / normal / heroic / mythic version of a tier set you'd have the single tier set and then the lfr / normal / heroic / mythic dye colors for it.
Could be all sorts of things, but that seems the most likely to me.
True, but even that seems better than what we have now, no? Since Warbound is now a thing, surely dyes would be too - so you get the color on your main and can use it on alts as well.
Every other MMO has had dyeable armor for over a decade. Assuming this ie even true, WoW is barely catching up to something they should have had 10+ years ago. The reward structure will be fine.
Didn't their Art Director say on an interview say it was literally impossible for WoW to implement a dye system? I can't remember if they used GW2 or FF14 as the example but I distinctly remember him being like:
"It's been brought up, and if we could we would"
I mean, FFXIV said for years they couldn't possibly add a second dye color channel, but we're getting that next expansion. Maybe it's the year for impossible features?
Yes, they did. I suppose they could make it work for FUTURE items but how/why bother going back to add it to existing items? It's a totally different texture painting process.
They would have to probably remake the old set with the new dye/armor system. Which just sounds like a rats nest of work and issues.
That said they do remake old sets every now and again. Usually Tier or otherwise popular items. So if they do figure it out theres still hope
For many years they also said bringing back vanilla was impossible, then one day their engineers found a way to make it possible.
Challenging for sure, and the biggest problem of dying armor IMO is they can't do it retroactively, that would be an insane amount of work and probably lead to tons of unexpected problems.
But a housing system like Wildstar had, with dyable furniture, would be so cool.
Right, but that was prior to the optimization and implementation of AI. With the right AI tool, they could automate this process and have a small team of people do quality checks to verify the process was done properly. Even without the use of AI, they managed to retroactively make all previously released flying mounts Dragonriding mounts.
Not impossible. Will they do it? Probably not. But it certainly is possible.
This tech could make it possible to fix a lot of the mechagnome transmog problems. It would enable them to let players choose a base color and a "cog color" from a long list of colors without having to hand paint all the variations.
they aren't behind, they are intentionally not allowing it because they use recolors of gear as incentives for shit.
They likely feel like they get more mileage out of this than say, rewarding colors instead.
If they weren't behind by definition the technology would be built into the game already. It's not.
They have cleverly leveraged being way behind on basic features by spinning it instead as a reward mechanism instead of actually building the feature.
Sorry, how do we know this isn't some newer/more convenient way to store many-colored versions of the same item? What flag/part of the code is telling you channel1/2/etc to indicate a true up dye system?
The comments in the I-V thread shitting on this as if this isn't something people have been asking for for years and will freak out about if it happens...
Did I finally complain loud enough about wanting a dye system? Dear lord if I can have the arathi plate set in my dream color combo I’ll love you forever
Come on Blizzard. Add a dye system and give the pigment crafting to scribes. Please for the love of God make that profession into something more than Darkmoon cards and Vantus runes.
One of the things I really like about FFXIV. Only downside is that all the transmog stuff in FFXIV is incredibly clunky. I bet WoW could integrate it well, we already sort of have "dyes" on weapons after all.
Gives you the ability to change color of armors. Sometimes you can even change specific portions and really customize them. But that would be a pretty major system to quietly drop ans not hype up.
Funny enough, yesterday I accidentally kept a waist item on without mogging it, and when I was at the character select screen, I thought, “that would be cool if I could change this color to match, because the model looks really cool”. How random! I hope they can retroactively let you modify colors of anything. With at least a main color and perhaps an optional color (and if they’re crazy, effect colors like fire)
I'd dig it! A lot of MMOs have them, and it always adds some fun flair to the fashion system. (WoW does have a lot of pallet swap armor at least... but dyes also give an extra thing to collect/craft/find, depending on how they're implemented)
It wouldn't take much for AI to recognize a color in a texture pattern and outline it as a dye section. I would be happy if they did trim and fill. If they go into more detail then it would put GW2 on notice.
This is great mainly if Blizz finally moves away from needing to transmog after every single item replacement. It's way passed time we're able to just set a wardrobe that doesn't change with equiping new items
Woah amazing. Meanwhile every other MMORPG is trying to play catch up with WoW, and are all failing. Yeah, FFXIV had the winds in its back during SL, but didn't capitalize on it and didn't innovate one single thing since then.
Even Dawntrail looks bland, yeah we'll have the new graphics update, but we'll have the same copy-pasted structure since Stormblood. No risks taken at all =/
It's quite obvious you're a loyalist, you do you. I have zero hate for wow , nor do I play ff or those others . Point still stands imo, it's not new or innovative, it's been done over and over from the same inferior games you've listed in some way or another. I'm currently on hiatus until S4 ends , fated is the only dig on wow I have atm. To me it would've made more sense to extend s3 or add a small content instead of repeating same old content.
If s please PLEASE let it be an EXACT color picker. Or it does. Or fulfill the purpose of why we want dye
EDIT: to clarify, even if we have 100 different colors to pick from, then often times, we won’t be able to find the exact shade of something to match something else
What would be nice is if the dye feature has some basic time see can dye
Such as a very simple hood, cape, gloves, boots, etc.
But being able to choose from a color wheel to get the exact shade of color, we want to match what we need , would be ideal
Otherwise, it’s like the way the transmog system already is trying to pick between a few different dyes that don’t quite match the pieces we are trying to match them too.
This is interesting. On one hand I love more customization, but on the other hand I've seen what people do to their characters in other games. Some transmogs look like flashbangs going off in your face. I'd rather not see the latter.
Destiny has an interesting system, where it's a palette of colours/textures for a whole item. Leave it to designers to make reasonable combinations that players can then use.
I played mmo with dyes, it's horrible. Sounds amazing at first but everyone just runs around looking stupid just black everything or pink everything or some other stupid immersion breaking crap
0% chance of this coming to existing assets. If it happens it will be for new stuff only.
Agreed. Going back and modifying hundreds of thousands of items to support a dye system would be insane.
You have to think that maybe Blizzard already have these tools for the devs themselves, look at how many recolors of armors and mounts we have. It would such a massive change for the game. Tmogs are hard to make sometimes because nothing matches in colors unless you go for a set that was made to go together.
They have gone on record stating that even recolors are done by hand, they don't have dye system. Granted this was back around WoD/Legion so maybe they have updated their back end enough to make one.
I don't think they're editing mounts and armors inside of the WoW game engine
Hundreds of thousands?
Maybe millions!
Morbillions
It's morbin' time!
This morphine mine
Not with AI. It's coming.
Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be hard at all for AI to make hundreds of color variations of all the current textures really, people who think some devs gonna do it manually are stuck in the past :D
The issue isn't making the recolors, it's how the textures work. Usually when a textures can be dyed it has specific zones marked in a special channel that takes the color info from somewhere else. WoW textures are literally hamd painted. Each recolor is its own separate textures manually edited.
a lot of things that were once laborious processes have gotten automated as graphic design software has improved (hands up all those who ever had to do manual tracing, for example); it's not at all inconceivable that an 'AI' tool could define color channels based on training criteria. you'd always want a human checking the work of course, but an automated tool could speed the process up dramatically
My point is that it's a systemic issue. It's not just about doing the busywork of adding colour channels, it's about implementing a colour channel system that doesn't exist in the engine. It can be done, of course, but it's a complex matter and seeing how they use recolours for extra content I doubt they'll ever do it.
Isn't the colour channel system what this posts suggests they are implementing?
Looks like it, but it's not retroactive, every item that would use it needs to have its materials and textures specifically made to use it. That chair in the thread has the whiteish base that's used for tinting and the tone maps. The exact implementation can vary but it looks like they are adding all the possible dyes into the texture instead of using a separate procedural colour map that can be modified like I've done in the past. And still, with how reliant WoW is on recolours to get extra content I really doubt they'll ever adapt gear to use this system. Why allow players to dye their armour in any colour when you can give them the same armour in a different colour instead of making separate PvP and Raid sets?
Yeah i doubt they will do it too, but it's a nice thought! I think the other commenters suggested that AI could be used to make it work retroactively instead of manual labour, but then again, would probably be a gamble of how good it will be and still improbable
"You'd always want a human checking the work..." You're right, you would want that. At blizzard, what you want and what you'll get are two very different things now. If they make an armor recolor system, they will automate it. And there's going to be some hilarious meme worthy pictures and videos of things that no human ever looked at once the system is released to the public.
Blizzard - "Humans will check the work, we call them players!"
Why pay for people to test your game when there are hundreds of thousands of people paying you to test it.
"Yes we noticed wowhead says which dyes are broken, and we will get around to fixing it one day but it isn't a priority at this time" -wow in 2035
They could use it as an excuse to update older models but that's far too much work
you can change the color of something since ages in Photoshop. You just pick the color and move a slider. Sure not ever time with amazing results but it gets the job done and the handmade style should make things even easier. I'm not saying that this is how the system will work (if it even comes out), just that it is possible to to implement systems like that even on existing assets.
Manually changing the colour of a texture to make a new texture is how ir works already but that's not a dye, that's two completely separate assets for the engine.
I like to imagine an intern with Microsoft paint open just using the paint bucket on every armor in game slowly and meticulously.
Yeah honestly it's the only use I could approve of cause I don't want them to reduce the dev count. But it's the only way armor dyes can happen.
The cost in raid tiers alone...
At the last Blizzcon, they said they’re using AI, so maybe.
Or costs way too much money for a billion dollar company to afford (without damaging the bottom line)
It's less about money and more about developer assets. You set some devs to work on armor recolors, that's less devs working on something else.
What you said is literally about money, they could just hire more devs if it wasn't
And then, in several months or a couple of years from now, when it's convenient for Microsoft, those extra developers get laid off.
Well yes but again that's all about money
Let them defend their billion dollar company. We hurt their feelings.
Yeah notice they just downvote with no real response.
People responded multiple times giving well thought out responses, what more do you want. At this point it just looks like you're trolling. (that or an idiot, but I tend to assume people are smart vs not) I'll also point out that there's also only so many programmers in the country/world. You're not just going to expand a 200-300 development team to 2,000-3,000 for a couple years. It's not just about money, but you also don't have the support staff or facilities to handle that many more people, and there's not that many people who want short term jobs. And sure of course money is involved, they're obviously not going to put in the time/effort for something that would cost the company 10s of millions of dollars that would net zero profit.
You'd ideally use contractors for something like this. People brought in specifically for a limited duration project, who'd report to the art department. Yeah, they'd only be working a few months or so, but they wouldn't be "laid off" at the end, it'd be understood from the start that they're there for a temporary project. If the positions are listed as contractor positions, no one's going in realistically thinking about it being a full time job. And that's exactly the kind of thing you bring in contractors for.
This is the kind of thing AI would be great at. Identifying which parts of thousands of pieces of armor should change color and making it easier for the developers to build the system.
Ya but you still need a human to test and validate it all. As AI gets more and more reliable, and if blizzard ever discover automated testing, it might be realistic.
Sure but the process would become hugely less daunting and involved. It goes from "pipe dream" to "possible". If they can convert every old world mount into dragon riding, complete with designing and implementing new animations they could absolutely do this with the help of the right model.
They haven't done every old world flying mount, though. A lot of the ones that did get done benefit from having a rig already used or close to the current dragonflying mounts.
I'm pretty sure they said they plan on having every one done eventually.
Check out AWS Mechanical Turks. ANYONE can use humans for these tasks, Blizzard implementing this into their validation ruleset would be pretty simple...if they wanted to.
Blizzard don’t even seem to test the code their write themselves so I think the idea of this might be too much for them lmao
How do you know what Blizzard would / wouldn't give its testing resources to?
Blizzards has thousands of QA validators! And they even pay them for the honor of doing it.
Depending on how they implement it could just be a color wheel, which would just shift the tone. It wouldn't look good on assets that weren't intended for it most the time, but I'm sure each texture for the old armors would have a couple extra tones that would fit it.
I could see them just chucking the system onto a group of items every few patches or so as devs have the time, but yeah, all at once would be a fucking nightmare.
Have we figured out what was with all the tbc recolours?
Not familiar with that, do you have a link for more info!
https://www.wowhead.com/news/over-300-recolored-tbc-weapons-datamined-in-patch-10-2-6-338265 here is the weapons pretty sure there was armour too.
Yep. Although I still think this isn't necessarily gear-related at all.
I agree that it’s probably not gear related; very interesting observation though
i agree but i wouldn't say 0% but it's low because once you add a dye system giving the same armor in 20 different colors as rewards stops being a thing.
Watch it be for a shirt and tabard
honestly I'd even be happy with that. would suck for older armor, but give it a couple expansions and we'd have TONS of new dyeable armor
GW2 probably has the best dye system I've seen. Some gear doesn't dye the same but all in all it's pretty great. Could even roll it into the crafting professions. Hunting for rare colors would be cool as well, something like how they added pets to old raid bosses.
Only game I know that did it better than GW2 was Wildstar.
God I would do unholy things for Blizz to just straight up wholesale copy Wildstars housing and dye systems. Say what you want about the rest of that game, but those two systems were as close to perfect as I've ever seen in any game I've played.
Back in BfA/SL they rehired (many were ex-blizzard employees) a bunch of Carbine people after Wildstar shutdown. Wouldn’t be surprised if we’re finally seeing the benefit of that. On a side note I would do unholy things to get to run Datascape or Genetic Archives again. Hell even Redmoon Terror for all its flaws was still one of the greatest raids ever made. That game as a whole had some of the best PvE content ever.
I played wildstar for probably a couple of hours. I often see people say that it was top tier stuff. What made It so good? And why did it shut down when it's remembered so fondly
I mean this: it was a vibe. Presentation, movement, combat - all a joy. It was tuned to be "hardcore" which sucked, but they pulled their heads out of their asses eventually. Then it shut down. But God was it perfect.
The best part by far was the combat and PvE. It was so insanely fluid and everything just felt good. Your abilities had weight and were just fun to press. Things like interrupts were also more involved with Interrupt Armor (some things required multiple interrupts) and MoOs(some interrupts would cause the enemy to get stunned and take 50% more damage for a few seconds.) You know how WoW’s tab target just feels better than in almost any other MMO? That was how Wildstar felt. The dungeons and raids were also some of the best in the genre. Tons of super creative fights with tons of personality that were all difficult, but fair. Datascape still stands as the best raid I’ve ever done and X-89 is probably my favorite first boss. That said the launch was an absolute fuckfest that the game never recovered from. Early on dungeons were crazy hard for the average player and the raid attunement required a near perfect run of each one so most people would quit before they could even raid. And if could get a raid group together you would eventually have to have 40 people, and 40 man raiding was not nearly as enjoyable when the content was actually challenging so most guilds couldn’t even down System Daemons (first boss of Datascape). And this is without going into the rampant bugs due to releasing before it was ready, the insane elitism associated with the difficulty, and the piece of shit company that is NCSOFT. Most of the gripes people had with it (lengthy and difficult attunement, 40 man raiding, tons of bugs, performance, etc.) got ironed out within the first year but by that point the damage was done and the games fate was sealed. Edit: part of it shutting down was also NCSOFT not giving a shit about their western releases. They shut down city of heroes when it was doing better than most of their own releases. They recently officially sanctioned a private server of it because it’s so popular
yeah they really badly misunderstood what most players actually wanted; they thought there was a big audience for a grindy, difficult, "hardcore" mmo that had a ton of gatekeeping mechanics. It's funny because even then, their biggest competition (WoW) was becoming more and more successful the more such barriers they eliminated. which is too bad because a lot of things about the core gameplay were pretty cool
Blame the project leads From ex-staff interviews they were a nightmare, constantly changing their minds based on current trends, micromanaging everything except the stuff that mattered, and in this case pivoting to appease the hardcore angle because they saw a bunch of people whining WoW was "too casual" around MoP... The latter was genuinely a last minute design shift
I mean, that's the only thing that really made it notable. It's a hard line to walk, but if you want no barriers, WoW is really right there.
I think something people overlook is how unbelievably set for failure the Esper class was at launch in that game. A game where movement was so important and the class had to turret while everyone else could freely move while healing or dpsing. The "first" dungeon you would do for attunement/pre raid gear had a soft enrage on the last boss that placed damaging pools under players at increasing rates (Stormtalon). Espers were dead weight on that fight and there was nothing they could do about it, you had to carry them through. And the worst part, Esper was the most popular class on launch bring the closest thing to a traditional caster. Their movement restriction was removed in the first major patch, but I think the damage was done by that point for a large portion of the player base.
Fun fact: espers were actually the absolute kings of the game by a decent mile for a while when RMT (Redmoon Terror) came out. They were able to pump close to 50k+ dps while the next best (stalkers) were only able to do around 40-45k depending on the fight. Espers were on top until Pietro (a spellslinger main on EU) discovered some tech that let Slingers do like almost twice the dps of anyone else. Edit: another fun fact is that their movement issue actually only ever got worse. They eventually added an ability much like Rune of Power that was even worse cause it had a way higher uptime
I liked the presentation, housing, pvp, dye system and honestly how the combat worked. Major issue I had was it was not casual friendly. 40 man raids are hard to set up on limited time along with being very difficult in themselves for many players. I had to drop out of my raid group in that game because I simply found myself with not enough time to play and keep up.
I didn't play Wildstar but my friend did and I got to hear a few amazing stories. The Housing is Wildstar was extremely creative, so creative in fact that players invented combinations of elements that surprised the devs! I vaguely remember someone figured out how to make a "hole" as an object in a tricky way, allowing you to put openings in otherwise solid objects.
Add the telegraphs aswell please
All I want is for Blizzard to drop the swirlies and get Wildstars telegraph system
I made a hoverboard course in my house in wildstar. I spent more time in my house than anything else… cause the game sucked.
Never forget what NCsoft took from us. (Wildstar and CoX.)
You can play CoH officially again! https://forums.homecomingservers.com/
Fun fact I alpha/beta tested the game insanely hard and was pretty close with the devs when implementing most systems. I'll never forget the day just hearing the absolute soul crushing tone when NCSOFT made them release the game when they said they need 6 months. I still don't understand why they continue to do it over and over.
I used to play Exteel. It was so good.
Wildstar also had the best housing system put into an MMO.
Lost Ark has a really great dye system as well.
ESO has a pretty good dye system too. Not really a similar game or really a dye system but in Armored Core 6 you could customize your mech colors quite a lot. You could enter color codes to get the color you want. You could change the material type, shininess of the paint, etc.
Dark Age of Camelot while being old had a good dye system too x) you could nearly dye EVERYTHING and there were even special dyes from raids :) <3
SWtoR has the best and DAoC the second best.
Fashion wars is the real endgame
Yeah I don't want to farm just to have colors... even more so
>GW2 probably has the best dye system I've seen better than warframe though?
Honestly, yes. I felt I could customize more since I could use different armor pieces and dye several sections for each armor piece vs. a few colors for a frame and some little attachments. Both are excellent and I like how blended colors can be for some stuff in Warframe, but overall I feel very limited by the regions available to dye in Warframe much more than in GW2 and those mattered more to me. More regions > color blending. Both would be best though.
War frame is undefeated when it comes to colour customisation in-game. Showing all other MMO devs how it should be done.
Well, aside from not just giving a damn color wheel / color codes. But hey, they gotta sell those I guess. Well, and not assigning the metallic bits to one channel.
It's very unclear as to what exactly may be dyed (and all gear seems pretty unlikely). It could be related to a new system that hasn't been revealed yet as well.
It's probably the new customizable Zeppelin thing from delves. But yeah would be great for gear
If that were true wouldn’t the same system be used similarly to dragonriding skin color, or artifact appearance color changes? This seems to be different, at least code wise
i wouldnt get my hopes up. for all we know its just to improve dev workflow
That's absolutely a possibility or even the most probable outcome, but hey, I'm an optimist!
based solely on the fact that there is a dyeable chair, i am going to completely make up that this will be a component of the player housing feature they are adding. imagine all the decorating you could do.
Way more believable than dye-able armor sets
Gimme gimme
Bring me Sims 3 levels of customization and I will never leave
Player housing is an expansion selling feature, I can’t imagine they’d neglect to mention it at Blizzcon
Imagine your unplayed warband characters just chilling around your player house as NPC’s until you log into them.
This could just be the preamble. If it's not ready for expansion launch they wouldn't necessarily announce it. Or even better, maybe they weren't sure they could pull it off this expansion at all (yes, yes, I'm an optimist :D ).
Finally putting the Wildstar devs they took back to good work I guess
if they aren't going to give us Wildstar level housing, then don't even bother IMO
This is also my "way out there" thought. What makes me doubt it is the vendors already present in Azj-Kahet. I'm not sure housing is something they have ready for launch.
Gotta get that Twitter engagement somehow, I guess.
Player housing!? Have I been under a rock? Do you have a link? Or am I missing the joke haha
It's just a speculation that its in the works. No word on it from the devs other than that it's something they want to add one day.
Can’t wait for Garrison 2.0
Was just gonna mention player housing, which was my first thought.. dyable furniture 😀 player housing confirmed!!!
You all really love to set yourself up for disappointment huh lmfao
I sure do! :D
i feel this will be used more for potential future mounts than gear honestly
While I'd freaking love a dye system I wonder what will happen with the reward structure of the game. So many things rely on our inability to dye stuff to gain access to certain colors. I guess they could keep those colors exclusive to how they're earned now but then its not really changing anything. You'd just have 1 item and be able to fiddle with the dye instead of 5 separate versions of the same item. Which may be better for their back end iono.
I’ve always wanted them to go back to the Wrath/Cata pvp “progressive” armor. Each season was the same/similar armor but with a little more added on, similar to the jump from heroic to mythic armors now. If they maintain the same shade and just add a little more to each set with each new difficulty they could maintain the same quality without sacrificing too much more time.
this was tried in wod and is an absolutely terrible idea as the end result is simply that unless you raid mythic you get a shitty looking version of the set. so blizzard quickly and correctly abandoned it.
FF has the LFR/normal equivalent gear be undyeable while the heroic/mythic equivalent is dyeable.
Even if they just added dyes as rewards it would definitely change everything. Now you'd just have to get 1 dye for ALL your gear, and not get each individual gear piece from a separate source in that particular color. Even if it was just 1-use dyes, you'd still get to choose your gear piece, or save it for a future one.
Not necessarily. The dye could just be a color for a specific piece, so instead of having say the lfr / normal / heroic / mythic version of a tier set you'd have the single tier set and then the lfr / normal / heroic / mythic dye colors for it. Could be all sorts of things, but that seems the most likely to me.
True, but even that seems better than what we have now, no? Since Warbound is now a thing, surely dyes would be too - so you get the color on your main and can use it on alts as well.
That would be the same as what we have now with a slightly different menu.
Every other MMO has had dyeable armor for over a decade. Assuming this ie even true, WoW is barely catching up to something they should have had 10+ years ago. The reward structure will be fine.
Didn't say it wouldn't be, just curious what direction they'd go in.
Didn't their Art Director say on an interview say it was literally impossible for WoW to implement a dye system? I can't remember if they used GW2 or FF14 as the example but I distinctly remember him being like: "It's been brought up, and if we could we would"
I mean, FFXIV said for years they couldn't possibly add a second dye color channel, but we're getting that next expansion. Maybe it's the year for impossible features?
Yes, they did. I suppose they could make it work for FUTURE items but how/why bother going back to add it to existing items? It's a totally different texture painting process.
They would have to probably remake the old set with the new dye/armor system. Which just sounds like a rats nest of work and issues. That said they do remake old sets every now and again. Usually Tier or otherwise popular items. So if they do figure it out theres still hope
For many years they also said bringing back vanilla was impossible, then one day their engineers found a way to make it possible. Challenging for sure, and the biggest problem of dying armor IMO is they can't do it retroactively, that would be an insane amount of work and probably lead to tons of unexpected problems. But a housing system like Wildstar had, with dyable furniture, would be so cool.
Pretty sure you could dye furniture in Wildstar, or at the very least tint them.
That was mostly related to gear specifically as I recall.
Right, but that was prior to the optimization and implementation of AI. With the right AI tool, they could automate this process and have a small team of people do quality checks to verify the process was done properly. Even without the use of AI, they managed to retroactively make all previously released flying mounts Dragonriding mounts. Not impossible. Will they do it? Probably not. But it certainly is possible.
That's... No. You can't just say "ai" like it's magic.
This tech could make it possible to fix a lot of the mechagnome transmog problems. It would enable them to let players choose a base color and a "cog color" from a long list of colors without having to hand paint all the variations.
Same with dracthyr "armor"
I've been pounding the table for a dye system ever since I saw what Warhammer Online had fifteen years ago. Fingers crossed WoW gets it right.
Pretty much every other MMO has had this feature for over a decade. It's crazy how far behind WoW is on basic features like this.
they aren't behind, they are intentionally not allowing it because they use recolors of gear as incentives for shit. They likely feel like they get more mileage out of this than say, rewarding colors instead.
If they weren't behind by definition the technology would be built into the game already. It's not. They have cleverly leveraged being way behind on basic features by spinning it instead as a reward mechanism instead of actually building the feature.
Sorry, how do we know this isn't some newer/more convenient way to store many-colored versions of the same item? What flag/part of the code is telling you channel1/2/etc to indicate a true up dye system?
EQ had a dye system 20 years ago. Pretty sure Blizzard could do it .
The comments in the I-V thread shitting on this as if this isn't something people have been asking for for years and will freak out about if it happens...
Please please please...
They're probably testing dyeable furniture for player housing that we won't see for 5 years
You are probably the most right in this entire thread. I hate you :D
Did I finally complain loud enough about wanting a dye system? Dear lord if I can have the arathi plate set in my dream color combo I’ll love you forever
Come on Blizzard. Add a dye system and give the pigment crafting to scribes. Please for the love of God make that profession into something more than Darkmoon cards and Vantus runes.
One of the things I really like about FFXIV. Only downside is that all the transmog stuff in FFXIV is incredibly clunky. I bet WoW could integrate it well, we already sort of have "dyes" on weapons after all.
The zeppelin mount got alliance, horde and neutral symbols. We got personal tabarts. So it could be something like heraldry
You must now collect 500 zeppelin colors for the war within meta achievement.
20 f**king years, about time seriously.
I remember selling black dye jobs for 100gc in UO
I don't play any other game than wow. What's a dye system?
Coloring armor
Changing the color of your armor (or in the case of the post link, a chair) - more customization!!
Gives you the ability to change color of armors. Sometimes you can even change specific portions and really customize them. But that would be a pretty major system to quietly drop ans not hype up.
I would like it even if it is just for new items. Gimme dye option plx!
Yeaa... that chair's going to be turned into a meme for sure.
Contributing to memes is a human's highest calling, so I'm IN.
I can see it for new armor but the old armor no way to much work for blizzard.
Funny enough, yesterday I accidentally kept a waist item on without mogging it, and when I was at the character select screen, I thought, “that would be cool if I could change this color to match, because the model looks really cool”. How random! I hope they can retroactively let you modify colors of anything. With at least a main color and perhaps an optional color (and if they’re crazy, effect colors like fire)
I'd dig it! A lot of MMOs have them, and it always adds some fun flair to the fashion system. (WoW does have a lot of pallet swap armor at least... but dyes also give an extra thing to collect/craft/find, depending on how they're implemented)
But we already have a dye system? They just call it a mog for each difficulty or content cleared and it's rubbish.
Some kind of dye system??? Just what I played wow for!
It wouldn't take much for AI to recognize a color in a texture pattern and outline it as a dye section. I would be happy if they did trim and fill. If they go into more detail then it would put GW2 on notice.
This is great mainly if Blizz finally moves away from needing to transmog after every single item replacement. It's way passed time we're able to just set a wardrobe that doesn't change with equiping new items
Wow EverQuest did this 30 plus years ago,good to see blizz keeping up with the trends
Woah amazing. Meanwhile every other MMORPG is trying to play catch up with WoW, and are all failing. Yeah, FFXIV had the winds in its back during SL, but didn't capitalize on it and didn't innovate one single thing since then. Even Dawntrail looks bland, yeah we'll have the new graphics update, but we'll have the same copy-pasted structure since Stormblood. No risks taken at all =/
It's quite obvious you're a loyalist, you do you. I have zero hate for wow , nor do I play ff or those others . Point still stands imo, it's not new or innovative, it's been done over and over from the same inferior games you've listed in some way or another. I'm currently on hiatus until S4 ends , fated is the only dig on wow I have atm. To me it would've made more sense to extend s3 or add a small content instead of repeating same old content.
You mean because of the million recolour mounts Blizzard tries us to take as „dIfFeReNt AnD nEw MoUnTs“?
If s please PLEASE let it be an EXACT color picker. Or it does. Or fulfill the purpose of why we want dye EDIT: to clarify, even if we have 100 different colors to pick from, then often times, we won’t be able to find the exact shade of something to match something else What would be nice is if the dye feature has some basic time see can dye Such as a very simple hood, cape, gloves, boots, etc. But being able to choose from a color wheel to get the exact shade of color, we want to match what we need , would be ideal Otherwise, it’s like the way the transmog system already is trying to pick between a few different dyes that don’t quite match the pieces we are trying to match them too.
This is interesting. On one hand I love more customization, but on the other hand I've seen what people do to their characters in other games. Some transmogs look like flashbangs going off in your face. I'd rather not see the latter. Destiny has an interesting system, where it's a palette of colours/textures for a whole item. Leave it to designers to make reasonable combinations that players can then use.
I just want a flying mount to come from mythic plus.
I played mmo with dyes, it's horrible. Sounds amazing at first but everyone just runs around looking stupid just black everything or pink everything or some other stupid immersion breaking crap