I recently completed my Tailoring epic in Everquest 2 on Yetian and it started me thinking about the appearance clothing items that an Everquest 2 Tailor can make.
If your not an Everquest 2 player then in brief appearance slots are an extra set of inventory slots which allow you to drop armour/clothing items into them. Anything you drop in these slots will overlay your main equipment slots, allowing you to have a set of equipment that controls only your characters appearance. The items you drop in here can be any armour/clothing items found within the game that your class and level can wear. Often players will collect sets, buy them from the broker, or even save their old armour sets and put them into their appearance slots when they upgrade.
From the early levels through to tier 8 Everquest 2 Tailor’s are given recipes for appearance clothing which is great as everyone likes their character to look good. The clothing has different colour variations across the tiers which you might think sounds like a good idea and it does but for one problem. Whilst the colour scheme varies with each recipe the style doesn’t! That’s right, you get one outfit for male characters and one for female characters, just one!! Each tier you are presented with each of these 2 outfits in various colour schemes, but the same style.
Here are a couple of examples (male outfit).
Tier 2 Everquest 2 male tailored outfit
Tier 8 Everquest 2 male tailored outfit
Now maybe I’m expecting too much of game developers in modern MMO’s, but if your going add clothing items to the game that are for purely appearance then surely there should be something more than items that change colour with each tier? I can understand why they don’t want to add dozens of items at each tier as in Everquest 2 you gain an experience bonus the first time you complete a recipe fully. Adding lots of recipes would make it easier for tailor’s to level. Granted there are probably ways around this such as adding a set of clothing recipes that don’t give experience, but that’s not really what I’m getting at here. I remember tailoring in Star Wars Galaxies where lots of various outfits and combinations could be made to change the appearance of your character, so it can be done. All I’d like to see is instead of the same 2 clothing styles each tier with various colours, why not make each one of those recipes a unique style/colour combination? What are your experiences with MMO fashion in other MMO’s? What’s good and bad about character clothing in the MMO(s) you play?
Related posts:
MMOYeti:
mmosymposium:
WodgeFTW:
MMOSres:
I never cared much about appearance-items, although it always bugged me that caster-classes could equip loads of different stuff, and all you would ever see was a pesky dress.
I must admit that some plate-combinations really bugged me for my paladin, but I was always more into stats than colours and textures….right until I rolled me a fancypants swashbuckler *heroic stance followed by a burst of HAHAA's*
I immediatly felt I had to get more into appearance if I ever was to play a swashie to it's full potential, and after spending my first 20 levels sporting a heavy and cumbersome-looking full set of chainmail, I knew I had to find a new look (Chainmail + Swashbuckler = Huh?!).
I must say that I was shocked to find how lacking the playermade appearance-items were. After a lengthy broker-session it was all the same items packed up in a few boring colour-palettes! How could I EVER find my metrosexual swashbuckler self?! *daps forehead*
Luckily I found a few more exciting non-playermade cloth-stuff for my appearance slots, and apart from the headitem and the gold I had to dish out, I was happy with my shoppingspree. This means that ever since my early 20's, I've been sending long glances at the class-hat from the Overrealm, to make my swashie-look complete. So far I've tried out different kinds of ridicoulus looking pieces of damp cloth to brace the most important part of my bodily self (my perfect hair-do), and as I had to go with a very funny-looking green/red frostfell hat to at least be able to show my self in populated places, my class-hat has now become a kind of more-epic-than-epic-epic…and I've JUST started the quest!
And now I will,in a less polite manner than Yeti, shake my fists at SoE's lazy fashion-department who never even had the decency to put in a simple level 20+ hat with a shadow and a bright looking feather on top to fill the void of swashbucklers struggling to define themselves in a world of horrific and sloppy fashionsense!
*shakes fists*
*shakes fists good*
I'm afraid the Warden class hat is not very classy, I do have the quest on Yetian to do though, maybe I can team up wish a Swashy to bring good fashion to Ffaffner. I would however expect a post here about your new outfit in return, complete with screenshot.