Stolen Pixels #150: +2 Shoes of Floppiness

[Velocirapture07]

Yeah my rogue in Dragon Age: Origins is still wearing the Executioner Helmet(+20 Stamina) because it's the only graphic I could stomach seeing on him all the time.

As much as I would love to see more games implement double gear set systems or allow for dying your gear to at least match colors - I really have to wonder what was going through the artists heads when they made some of these models. You go through all the trouble of crafting this dark gritty story, just to be pulled out of it every time you see your character wearing some ridiculously silly hat.

One drawback I have found with the double set method though, is you end up looking pretty much exactly the same the whole time. You keep finding new and shinier loot, but because it looks terrible you end up appearing in the same clothes for huge stretches of time - which takes some of the fun out of finding new gear. Although it does add this strange meta option to loot finding where every piece of armor is looked at for it's aesthetic potential for your appearance set in addition to it's actual stats.

Lord of the Rings Online probably had the best overall system for handling this. It was double set with the ability to dye items, equip other clothing accessories and you had multiple appearance sets you could swap between. You still ran into the same trapping of looking largely the same most of the time, but at least you had a pretty wide variety to customize from.

You're exactly right about looking for cool clothing before the stats. In the KOTOR series, every time I found armor loot I made sure it looked cool before I even considered wearing it. Games need to do a better job listening to the players and putting in options and models that actually look like something an awesome hero would want to wear. You never saw Aragorn in a freaking dunce cap did you??

 

[likalaruku]

"A stripper with a gravy boat on her head." lol! XD

 

[akmarksman]

Winged Helmets only work if your name starts with a T and ends with a HOR.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

You get stat bonuses for wearing matched sets of armour, and these bonuses can be pretty hefty with the one-of-a-kind items. So my characters spent most of the game looking pretty well dressed, although finding decent looking helmets can be tricky.

 

[benbenthegamerman]

I feel that WoW did the same thing with Burning crusade.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

In Mass Effect there was a set of red armor with black insets and on my female Shepard, the one of the black patches in the crotch looked like a patch of pubic hair. Seriously.

In WoW, I always gear for stats, so I ended up wearing some ugly-ass shit, especially around level 50. Thank god I am a shadow priest so I could turn into a smoky silhouette and not look at it. The worst was the +10 Shadow Hat of Goth Gardening, and the collar that made me look, quite literally, like a wingnut.

 

[Mad Artillery]

I made all my mages Arcane warriors to avoid the dunce cap effect and all my rogues got heavy or massive armor. One helmet looked like I had cut eyeholes in a giant bucket and poped it onto my head. Duty looks so bad on a dwarf....

 

[Taneer]

I'd like to momentarily destroy the long argument you are having to say the following.

WOOT! 150 Stolen Pixels Comics! At an average of, what, like, 500000 pixels/comic, that means you stolen around 7.5 million pixels!

Congraaaaaaaaatulations!

 

[luas_dublin]

As for World of Warcraft... well. I still remember the time I ended up wearing what I termed the "Reverse Slutpants of the Mag'har".

hey , you're lucky , I spent two months wearing the "leggings of unstable discharge"(yes it's real!) on my priest ,..in my defense though they had some nice stats...ok!
I've hit 80 on three WoW characters , a priest , a druid and lastly a paladin.
The first two spent ages looking like they'd fallen blind into gandalf's laundry basket, possibly after throwing up into it first.
I got sick of looking like a dorky guy in a dress , so on the paladin I based my levelling gear (and my early 80's epics) solely on how they looked rather than stats .Surprisingly this made very little difference to my gameplay , other than looking awesomesauce that is.

 

[TheBlackKnight]

yeah the mage hats in Dragon Age are really, really ugly, good thing that the characters are ditching the helmets in all the cut scenes

 

[skotie]

The helms in Dragon Age really are horrible! I was disappointed when I couldn't find an option to disable them.

I've always hated the mismatched look of gear in MMORPGs as well. By the time you reach the endgame, you might have a complete set of gear that looks nice. But for the 50+ levels before that? You look like a little kid playing dressup in mommy and daddy's closet.

I find that in some games, the opposite is true. WoW for example: a lot of the low-level armor looks pretty decent and normal, but the higher level stuff is just so much oversized and impractical decorative crap.

Still, this seems to be more of the exception than the rule. I still recall in the beginning levels of KotOR having Carth in a set of bright pink/purple armor simply because it was the best available at the time.

Reading this made me think if this great movie by Nyhm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IGyIpzOBjo

I find the armor seriously lacking in dragon age, as with most games mages have next to no options on decent looking armor, particularly male mages. Its a shame really, mages are always such a mystical and fun class to play but your usually required to look like a total douche bag and use the most hopelessly designed weapon in the world, a wooden stick(staff my *** those were enchanted pieces of firewood)

Rogue class leather was very limited in design as well, most of the armors were just the same models but different tiers, and of course all the helms sucks for almost every class.

Honestly I find warrior and arcane warriors looked the best in the game, mainly because you had the option to wear a full set of non retard armor like say the Juggernaut set, at least I found it to look better then most other armors. That and most of the plate armor looked good, sometimes better without the helmet.

 

[Donrad]

in some cases i actually refused to put headgear on my mages becuase they could only wear the stupidest looking bowls.

 

[mhitman]

I agree about the helmets. They really need a feature to let us toggle that stuff off or something. If anyone here has an account on BioWare's forums can you please tell them!

 

[Tarrker]

I just had to comment on this thread. I too HATE with a burning passion the absurd get ups characters run around with in, quote "RPG" titles these days. I'm a bit of a historical enthusiast but I certainly would NEVER suggest games have to be ultimately realistic in this sense. But COME ON. Is that plate mail cuirass covering only your tits REALLY the best armor you can get? Lemme know how well that works when arrows are flying at you from every everywhere and you got a guy coming at you with a two-handed sword that wants your head for a trophy. This is why people came up with armor in the first place. I'll take a full suit of cloth armor over a single boob-plate any day.

 

[mikespoff]

Something I particularly enjoyed about GuildWars in this respect is the fact that you can hide your headgear all the time, and yet still have its effectiveness. I pretty much always prefer to see my character's head, to the point that in Dragon Age I'll run around with no helmet and just accept the penalty to survivability that comes along with that. It's worth the hit to be able to look at my character and like what I see.