Dev Diary: Fashion Upgrades for Spellcasters

For some time now, players who enjoy robe-wearing classes have given us feedback that our spellcaster robes just didn’t look very good. We agreed with that assessment. We’re pleased to announce that as part of the Combat and Progression update, we will be doing something about that.

To fix the problem, we needed to rework the way we are building armor for player characters. The old way we were building armor was contributing to a number of visual problems when trying to make it work across different races, many of which our community has reported as bugs over the last year. Full-length robes are especially tricky due to the way that they interact with player animations. No one wants to see their character’s knees clipping through the robe as they run. At the same time, we also needed to make sure we set things up in a way that allowed us to create a large variety of different looks without having to spend many hours within the animation department trying to account for each and every style variation.

Our new approach uses a series of overlapping clothing/armor meshes that we can show or hide as needed to achieve the look that we want, while still keeping everything skinned properly to support character animations, and that still plays nicely with texel density and everyone’s framerate, especially in situations like raids where you might have many different players on your screen, all wearing different armor. These systemic improvements will apply to all the player armor that we create moving forward, and all of our existing armor will be getting updated as soon as we are able.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the new robes. These are out-of-game renders, but alongside all the gameplay changes, we are working on bringing these into the game and getting everything hooked up so that we can start using them.

This simple robe will be used (in different colors and hooded/hoodless variations) for many of our starting spellcaster equipment.

Here is a fancier robe in several different color variations. This is just one of many new player robe designs that will be coming into the game as part of the Combat and Progression update.