Hello! So, we already know Fatshark is tinkering away at a system to fix the color mismatch issue between hats and skins with something like a color picker!
Which sounds neat, but I think there’s something else that can be added/merged with the color picker thing to enhance our hat options by introducing purchaseable variations to a hat!
Some of the recent additions to the emporium have been, essentially, exactly this sorta thing where we’re getting different versions of the same hat in the emporium:
My idea is to formalize this sort of thing as variations of a specific hat, and tying it together with the color picker.
How it would work is that once you have a hat, let’s call it the Original hat, you can go to the emporium, click on the original hat, and then click on a button that says ‘variations’ to see what different versions of the same hat exist. This is where you buy different colors for the same hat, and where you’d get the version with the hood up (or the version with the hood down!), etc.
Example:
There’s several benefits to incorporating a system like this:
- It’d enable us to have different versions of hats that aren’t obtainable in the emporium (example: The original/base hats for each class, the Premium hats(*), the hats that are locked behind hard-to-achieve challenges, etc)
- Cleans up the emporium of clutter by grouping together hats that are the same hat but a lil different (**)
- Adds more ways to spend shillings (You still have to BUY the new variations!) (Please don’t make it too expensive, imagine having to fork out 1.5k shillings for the base hat and then 1.5k extra shillings to get a hood on top of it)
- Variations of a hat are easy to add, relatively! Definitely easier than making a brand new hat, at least!
- It can really help out some hats that are extremely unpopular, but have the potential to look really good! An example is any and every Kerillian cosmetic that lowers her hood. (***)
(***): Otherwise known as the ‘Why are you using a Balaclava, Kerillian?’ problem, most prevalent in Handmaiden but also something that Shade and Waystalker can suffer from. Quite simply, there’s a bunch of hats for our elf that look terrible not because the hat’s design is bad, but because they lower her hood, and that combined with Kerillian wanting to hide her facial features with a balaclava results in an unappealing hat. Examples:
These hats’ design is actually gorgeous, but they’re a very unpopular cosmetic option precisely because they lower the hood. If we could purchase new variations of these hats with the hood up, however…
(*): Similarly, without this system there’s no way we could ever get new variations of the premium hats, because you can’t just put the new variations in the emporium, then you’d be getting the premium hats without paying for them. The Hat Variation systemic approach would lock all of the variations of a certain hat to require the player to at least own the Original Hat before they can access the variation. This way, we can still get new variations of these hats while still requiring the player to get the original the normal way.
(**): Would clean up clutter like this one:
