Cosmetics, appearance, and microtransactions

Feedback and Suggestions
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I am curious as to how cosmetics will be handled. Hopefully, our characters can still look cool without having to buy cosmetics. I understand the business model, but I hope there can be some kind of middle ground on this.

In games where you have to purchase cosmetics, I feel disconnected from my character and it’s gear. If I buy a skin and slap it on right away, I don’t really appreciate my gear progression as much. On the flipside, if I don’t buy cosmetics, my character will look like a level 1 toon. You grind out/craft a perfect set for your build, only to have it look exactly the same as what you were wearing before.

I wonder if there is any solution to this, where you can buy cosmetics, but still have your character’s gear reflect it’s level, rather than reflecting how much money a player has spent on microtransactions.

I don’t know if anyone else shares this sentiment, but I think about it. I hate to constantly compare LE to PoE, but it is a good example of what I am talking about regarding cosmetics.

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This could be a hard task. But in general I am with you on that topic. There should be a good base badass-ness in character appearance that you can advance on with MTX.

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This is just a spit ball, but maybe cosmetics are bought in a pack, then applied based on the number of affixes/their level?

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Yea, i hear you, I feel the same.

I even wrote directly to GGG, i will never buy their cosmetics, because I feel i didn’t earn it so I feel disconnected from my character, but if they would allow me to “buy” each expansion for like 60 bucks, which would give me a small chance, i could find these awesome cosmetics in loot drops, I would pay 60 bucks for each PoE season.

I don’t know, I just feel there should be other option, how to earn cosmetics.

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One thing I do think Wolcen got right from the get-go is their ‘skinning.’ You actually skin the SLOT, not the actual piece. So if you design a look for your character you don’t have to update that look every time you change a piece of gear. I generally like low-key simple looks so most of the stuff I do cosmetically to my character is set fairly early on because in these games the simplified stuff is usually the free/easier-accesed/less expensive stuff to get.

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So if you design a look for your character you don’t have to update that look every time you change a piece of gear.

I guess this is what I’m worried about. I want my gear to have an impact on my appearance.

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Well, I don’t think it’s the same thing. This was just about how to set your characters look.

If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to have a new piece of gear MAINTAIN the look you’ve set for it but gradually get upgraded within the context of it’s ‘basic’ look? Is that correct. Like you set ARM BRACERS 1. Then you find new bracers and equip it. but now your ARM BRACERS 1 'look" is upgrade to ARM BRACERS 2 “look” and has rubies around the wrist? Sort of like that?

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That’s also how POE’s current mtx system works.

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This is so damn awesome. I LOVE it. :two_hearts:

I spent hours ingame to shape my look.

That’s absolutely possible with that’s system. It works this way:

Everytime you find an item you unlock the skin of that item for the corresponding skill slot. You can then choose to equip any skin of items you have found so far. But you can also choose to keep the original skin. It’s up to you. On top of that you can change colours of items as well. An item can have 5 (or even more) different colours you can all be changed. The colours have to be found and added to your collection, too.

By this you can create your own fashion style independent from the items original look. Items have different themes that don’t fit together so you can compensate for that.

But you have to kind of earn all these skins. It’s really great and a big big thing for fashion meta :star_struck:

Edit: I would be damn excited to see something similar in LE. While it obviously wasn’t the best idea to focus on the shiny things first during Wolcen development in disadvantage of the core game mechanics, I hope it’s NOT the complete opposite with LE. I want both! The shiny things of Wolcen AND the very good core game design of LE. I already stated somewhere else that a combination of theses two games that exact way would be king!

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It’s a bit old now, but Sarno made a rather detailed response to a thread discussing MTX in-game on the Steam forums back on May 22, 2020;

It seems quite relevant to your post, and the entire thread can be found here;

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Wow that’s awesome, and it does answer my questions/concerns. I’m not surprised that EHG is taking a high road on this issue. Glad to see they aren’t of the mindset that MTX and cool vanilla armor are mutually exclusive. I hope they continue with that idea that it is more of an alternative style, rather than your hard earned gear looking pretty lame if you don’t drop cash.

As a steam user said:

I think it is much more fun and rewarding to earn cool looking items by completing tasks and difficult content in the game. If my character looks like a homeless person from lvl 1 to max lvl unless i pay real money to look cool that is just the lamest thing ever imo.

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