What plans are there to make clothing serve a purpose when an undersuit and armor is better in almost every way?
TL;DRClothing won't match undersuits or armor for space-worthiness, but combat clothing with some damage mitigation is being worked on, and Starwear layering will let clothing be cosmetic, with some areas restricting armor.
Okay. I'm not going to lie. Clothing is never going to fulfill the same purpose as those things. It's never going to be space-worthy. But we are working on combat clothing, which will have more damage mitigation. So if you want to imagine a kind of John Wick style suit, that kind of thing. But I think the main problem now is that it's one or the other. You have to wear clothes or you have to wear armour, right? And that's where Starwear is going to come in and change all that, because the purpose of clothing is cosmetic. It's to dress the way you want to look. So to just go into that in a bit more detail, you'll be able to, with Starwear, have your own suit on if you want it, and then put certain, well, jackets over the top, all the jackets, certain trousers, gloves, boots on the top, then armor on the top of that. And then in future, we're going to have hoods and big overcoats that can go over some of the armors too. So all these layers.
It's like we said at CitizenCon as well, there will be areas where you can't wear armour, so clothing and all that will have particular uses and things like that.
We've talked about that in the past, locations that prohibit it, and you have to go through customs, so you're wearing your, I mean, I don't think we're going to ever block an undersuit in that scenario, but it's probably more useful to wear the kind of combat clothing we were talking about.
There's never been an MMO where cosmetics isn't the end game.
It cannot be overstated. I'm really glad you brought that up. Chris and other people have mentioned for years this idea of wanting to facilitate the wearing of clothing as opposed to armor. He hates that everybody wears armor everywhere. So this will always be kind of a goal at some point to go to. When I first saw the outfit scanners that were part of Stormbreaker, the ones where it forced you to change into the scientist outfit in order to open the door, I was really excited about what that means for the future, forcing people to switch into outfits as opposed to armors in order to infiltrate something. The gameplay options there were really exciting. Combat clothing is a bit interesting though. I heard the term and I didn't realize.
Not full-on John Wick. Not bulletproof, but some decent mitigation. Not to the point of being better than lights.
It's a thousand years in the future. There's going to be clothing that's a little better than what it is today, anyway.