Story time: My friends and I were talking about the new skins for this anniversary update (which look amazing by the way), and one of my friends stated that Blizzard are turning all the characters blonde, as a joke I’m sure. It got me thinking, “What if we could change their hair colours separately?”
Introducing a new set of items in the game, dyes would allow you to personalise your characters a little bit more. Oh sure your enemy may have the same skin as you, but your hair will always be more fabulous.
Much like every item in this game, there will be different dyes for different rarities; solid canvas colours will be the most basic, followed by dual colours, patterns, and whatever else Blizzard can come up with. The combinations would be incomprehensible.
Some characters don’t have hair on some skins? Not to worry, the dyes would affect the next best thing; Reaper’s mask, Orisa’s horns, Bastion’s light, Reinhardt’s visor, Genji’s visor and ribbons, and any others I missed; dyes will be compatible with all skins in some way, but will mainly target the hair.
You can become the unique skilled player you are and show it off with your blindingly bright pink hair, or strike fear into the hearts of your enemies as Mercy with your jet black hair. The game is yours, make it yours.
Thank you!
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For a start I was thinking “meh, seems kinda unnecessary” but by the end of your post I was totally on board - this would be pretty fun.
Love the idea.
The execution though will be hard.
As it is each character skin is a separate character model being made up of the base hero then the clothing elements.
Bliz would have to spend alot of time and manpower into recreating every clothing item/accessory/Hairstyle as seperate meshes for every colour dye they introduce. I mean my guess if they started now they would be down in about 6-12 months if they focus on that mainly.
But again love the idea and hope Blizz can find a way to do this.
The models are separated already, that’s why there’s a lot of texture changes where the model stays the same. The four “blue text” skins that you can get for most, if not all characters are merely colour changes of the original, not recreations of the whole model each time.
It should be incredibly easy to implement, possibly around 3 months to work out the code and marketing and stuff.
We just need people on board, if people love the idea, Blizzard will make it so… I hope.
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I don’t have any idea how models and textures really work but I remembered to play around with Minecraft textures.
One thing I noticed is that the grass texture is in grayscale, the color is applied afterward.
Based on that knowledge, I could assume that the custom color skins might be created by creating a base skin map in greyscale. Once you choose a color (or texture), it will overlay said texture and recolor the part.
With that, not only hair, but complete body parts can be recolored.
You could even create a color scheme system in which you choose 1 primary color and 2 accent colors.
That begs the question, how do you obtain them?
You are correct with Minecraft, as grass, leaves, water, etc… Changes colour depending on the biome, it would be a long process and increase the size of the texture file to create a different texture per biome; as such they make a single texture and created a shader which would control the colour in the varying biomes.
Creating it this way would mean a different shader would have to be created per colour, it’s useful for colour shifting, which I believe is called Chromaflair and is used mostly on cars; however it may not be practical for this purpose; but hey, I’m no coder, it may very well work.
I believe they’ll most likely drop in loot boxes, much like everything else.
The issue with this is that for certain characters e.g. sombra there is a lot of design that went onto the hair and it would make it a lot harder to get the best looking character. Say if the best looking character skin was the Dr. Junkenstein skin with black hair instead. This would mean the best possible combination that would be desired by many, is locked behind to item walls and possibly pay walls which could only be available to those who have the time or money to grind and get the desired items. Yes there is a simular situation to golden guns however those are a sign of prestige and can only be earned in game. The only way I could ever see this happening is if it is implemented in a simular way to cute and pixel sprays, requiring an achievement to unlock the item.
I would love to see this in game.
To be honest, i would add the color customisation to standart skins only.
Some legendary skins are recolored dublicates. Making recolored versions from it would render the dublicates worthless. I doubt that Blizzard would want that.
By adding color customisation to the standart skin only, legendary skins still stay unique and thus keep their value.
![:dragon:](https://d1kzxbyyijk9k6.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/dragon.png?v=6" ":dragon:")
I don’t think that way of unlocking dyes would be very practical; with the amount of single colours, dual colour combinations and patterns that could exist, there would need to be an exponential number of achievements to accommodate all of them.
Although some may think that some would prefer certain colours over others for certain skins, that is entirely subjective; it may be that one colour is seen more than the other, but the other would still be used regardless, especially by those who don’t like to “jump on the bandwagon”; but this reaches much further into human psychology and behavioural patterns than I’m comfortable with saying I know anything about.
I feel as though having it accessible to every skin is important; After all I believe there will be many who will ask why dyes aren’t available for all skins and will ask for it to be implemented. Perhaps for the first few months it should only work on base skins, as a “testing” period. Or maybe the ability to use dyes on higher tier skins can be unlocked through achievements? Making it earned, rather than given.
I absolutely appreciate the feedback though, it is helping me create a more broad picture of the idea. Your feedback is making me begin to think about how this should work, rather than just what it is.
About how you obtain the Colors.
If we say that a specific color has to be obtained, rather than choosing the color on a color wheel yourself. then it could be implemented in Lootboxes all we have to find out it which colors are which rarity.
Earthy colors like brown, gey ord dull blue, could be common. Those colors, in general, are ones that anyone hardly wants. Pastel colors or more saturated colors could be rare. Neon colors and other rich colors could be mythical and special effects colors or even patterns could be legendary.
However, those special effects colors and patterns could instead be purchasable via competitive points. With that, players have more options in the CP shop where they can buy other things but golden weapons as well.
I like the idea of adding effect dyes using competitive points, they would be truly earned.