What do we think about the ability to allow players to dye their armor?
TL;DRDyeing armor is something they're interested in, but it isn't scheduled, how to implement it is undecided, and they're not committing to any path, though more color variants of existing assets are being pushed.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's two trains of thought, right? You can either say, just like in real life, if you go to a store, you're only going to be able to buy what they have available. So in a way that's like dyeing, because you can say, oh, I'm going to pick whatever color I want it to be from what's available, or maybe I need to go somewhere else to get it. Then the other option is: I bought something and I want to paint it or change it to a different color, which becomes a little bit more complicated, because you're talking about customization of that piece, which means they're going to be changing the shader itself, which means you need a front-end UI and all that fun stuff. Or you can give them the option, which is similar to what other games have done, where it would choose a different color variant that already exists.
Like a dye pack.
You buy a dye pack and it's just blue and black, rather than you going around and flying somewhere and buying the blue and black one when you have the orange one. So color variants in general, we're pushing for a lot, because we want to add a lot of variation to the existing assets that we already have. So all the clothes, all the armor.
Like the gold executive.
Yeah, exactly. That kind of stuff is really fun. I think there's twenty variations of that suit. I think we've only released a couple. The Explorer suit, the deck crew suit. There's a bunch. There's like 20 of each. We're definitely working on that, and I think it's more on the design side: how does the player choose it?
Just to add on there so that everybody understands, it's definitely something that we're interested in, but it's not something that's on the schedule. It's not something that you're going to see in 2018. It's not something that we know precisely how we want to implement, if we want to. As anybody who's ever played an MMO before knows, cosmetic features are also one of the ways that a game can monetize and stuff. So there's a lot of options that have to be explored there. So we're not committing ourselves to any path one way or the other. But it is definitely something that I think we can all agree would add greater variety to the verse.
And it is mostly in there too. It's really just the implementation that we're figuring out. And what might be interesting to people too is, on top of just having the colors, the metrics that design wants to get from players using those colors. It's something we're still thinking about. Let's say, with all the people in the verse, how many people actually wanted the red version? How many people wanted the gold version? And then they can use those metrics to improve the player experience.
As an avid MMO player myself, the meme that's been going around for a couple of years now: endgame is always glamour. For all MMOs, it's always glamour. You beat the raid boss, but I want to look pretty with the raid armor.