Stop Armor Recolors

[Selsix]

Okay there's no way I am alone in hating this direction in "art design". Every single expansion and every single patch, we see this happen. They dig up some ancient armor set from a previous expansion, recolor it, maybe (emphasis on maybe) upgrade some textures, and re-release it back to us. Can we please stop doing this? I have yet to meet a single player that likes it when they do it. I have to call it out for what it is, it's lazy. Why do we even have an art team if they are being forced to do something like this? Are they otherwise engaged? If so, why are we not hiring more artists and modelers to compensate? This is a horrible practice in a game featuring a dye system in the first place regardless of the reasoning. If you truly cannot spare the resources to make enough unique armor sets every expansion/patch, this is NOT a good remedy for that problem.

Let me be clear, I'm not just here to bash the dev team. I am INCREDIBLY thankful for the recent decision to remove glamour restrictions as that's something I have wanted for years, but as far as art related problems with the game goes I feel this is the elephant in the room we need to address.

[Enkidoh]

'Pallette swaps' are a fact of life in gaming development and are a common way of cutting down the artists' workload (and also reducing the amount of processing the client has to do, by using a standardised underlying 'rig' or model that the textures are just changed on).

It's been the case in FFXIV since 1.0 was launched, it's going to always be a part of it, deal with it.

[0blivion]

hey OP i know you hate hearing this but armor recolors really shouldn't be your issue lmfao
why? we have a good like, 20 unique models directly ported from FFXIII, several more from XI and XII, one from X, one from Dissidia NT, a fuckton from MH, a decent amount from nier:replicant and nier:automata, a couple from FFXVI... hope you get the point. models cost money. there is no video game that doesn't copy and paste its own homework sometimes. else we'd pay like double the sub money.

yr welcome

[Underscore]

I think having variants of gear with different colour placements can be nice - as long as they're dyeable, of course.

[Jeeqbit]

A lot of work goes into making models. Sometimes, only for them to be seen one time, in the background.

In order to solve the problem of them only being seen once despite all of the work that went into them, game developers find clever ways to re-use them. This is so entirely logical that a lot of games do it. They re-color enemies often to the point you'd never guess they are recolors; they re-use old bosses as regular mobs and sometimes they are so small and recolored that you don't notice it; they get enemy models and make small adjustments (such as removing horns or adjusting wings) before recoloring so it seems like a different model and of course, they re-use armor.

There are so many things they have re-used that I actually took many, many years to even notice it. Often they are just good at doing this, while other times it's obvious.

Armor specifically doesn't bother me. Especially if it's consistent which is a new set and which is a re-used set ie. I just glam over crafted gear.

[Destati]

I wish they would stop reusing armor so much too, but I understand it's a necessary evil. I think I would be more okay with it if the recolors were at least dyeable. Like the lvl 91 dungeon has the Pagl'than gear but in worse colors that you can't even change. If they're worried that making them dyeable is gonna give them even less of an excuse to reuse them again in the future then maybe they can just make the dye channels work differently?

[SalamanderIX]

If they stopped doing recolors of stuff they'll simply just give us less content. RPGs aren't like other games. there is multitudes more of everything if it is enemies, weapons, or outfits. So they must repurpose, remix, or even just recolor.

[Shistar]

I'm not against armor recolors myself, what I wish they did with them, since they will add a recolor anyway, is to give us more varied dye tables or colorsets for us to use in glams. I'm disappointed they reutilized the Neo-Ishgardian set in EW but kept the metals a slightly different shade of gold instead of, say, going for silver, gunmetal black, platinum, anything that would actually differentiate them more from the original sets.
I think they should also differentiate the Ornate sets from the regular ones for more dye variants.

[Nyastra]

I'm not against armor recolors myself, what I wish they did with them, since they will add a recolor anyway, is to give us more varied dye tables or colorsets for us to use in glams. I'm disappointed they reutilized the Neo-Ishgardian set in EW but kept the metals a slightly different shade of gold instead of, say, going for silver, gunmetal black, platinum, anything that would actually differentiate them more from the original sets.
I think they should also differentiate the Ornate sets from the regular ones for more dye variants.

Yeah this would be nice, because sometimes you *can't* dye the dang metals, or it dyes weird. At least this way there would be some options?

[CSX]

Heh! With the removal of Glam restrictions, I can see them just doing 4 (fending, maim/slay, scout/aim and heal/mage) variants of the same gear with different dye channels going forward.