Broadsword is revamping its dye system, but they haven’t said much beyond announcing it. We’ll discuss the existing limitations of SWTOR’s dye system and how EA and BioWare’s Anthem could inspire the revamp.
What’s going on with Dyes in SWTOR right now?
During the 7.6 Livestream, Broadsword made the following announcement:
The dye packs in the game, we’ve had a lot of feedback about how dye packs are purchased, and stored, and applied to the character, and we want to reevaluate that system. And so while we are doing that, and before that picture solidifies, we do want to go ahead and make the Cartel Market sale of 50% off all dye packs starting November 14th[, 2024].
We are trying to improve the player experience surrounding dye packs. That is our intention, and until we settle that out, they will be 50% off.
Brad Lewis, Art Director for SWTOR
It’s been roughly 6 months and we still haven’t heard anything. I was expecting to see something in the 7.7 Livestream, but I guess they’re still working on it.
Limitations of SWTOR’s Current Dye System
Brad outlined a few major issues and common complaints about the current dye system related to the purchasing experience, storage, and application of dyes.
Dye Purchasing Experience
The dye purchasing experience is pretty terrible.
Some Cartel Market dyes are unavailable for direct sale, like Uniform Blue, Ceremonial Yellow, Winter Scout, and many of the purples, and none of them are organized. Some of the newer ones, like Havoc Squad and Orange/Teal aren’t even categorized as dyes either.
There are a variety of unconsolidated sources alongside the Cartel Market, including from baseline Artifice crafting, Seasons, login rewards, expensive schematics from specific reputation vendors, and the Underworld Exchange, so it’s hard to track down a specific dye or know if it even exists.
Some dual color dyes also lack an inverted version, which is especially problematic for rare colors. For example, the Mandalorian Scout dye is one of the only dyes in the game to feature maroon, and it has charcoal as a secondary, but there is no charcoal primary/maroon secondary dye.
That isn’t clear from the name or icon either, which doesn’t match the actual colors or convey what they are in the first place.
Then we have the Enhanced Dyes, which are ridiculously expensive for being a consumable item while having some of the same limitations mentioned before.
Dye Storage Issues
Dyes are obnoxious to store because they usually don’t stack in your inventory and aren’t in collections because they’re consumed on use. I have a whole tab in my legacy bay devoted to storing dyes and use another tab in one of my alts’ cargo hold for the duplicates.
Dye Application Limitations
There are a ton of restrictions on how you can use dyes, with the most prominent being that there is only 1 dye slot per piece of armor, there are only two color slots per dye, and your options are limited if you only want one of those colors.
Some armor sets or individual pieces also have their primary/secondary slots randomly inverted, making it harder to create outfits and a lot more expensive since you’ll need to use individual dyes for each piece.
Below, you’ll see how components of the Dark Marauder set look next to pieces of the Jedi Knight Revan’s set when equipped at the same time and dyed by the same regular dye modules.
I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here beyond an attempt to distinguish the materials, and of course, we can’t even mitigate this or save money by picking which piece of armor is used for unifying colors, it has to be the chestpiece.
Looking to Anthem for Inspiration
Even though it came out in 2019, Anthem, EA’s failed flagship live service group PvE game, still has one of the best character customization systems I’ve ever seen.
The armor sets are purely cosmetic and comprised of 4 pieces—Helmet, Torso, Arms, and Legs. For the most part, when you buy a set from the cash shop, you’re buying the model, as the colors, materials, and wear state were yours to customize.
Paint Jobs
All of those armor customizations were listed under the Paint Job section, which broke down customization into a whopping 6 components, typically 3 intended to for soft parts of the suit, like fabric and leather, and 3 intended for the hardened parts, like metal.
Material Modification
The material mimicks real life, and determines the overall texture and how shiny, reflective, and bumpy the component will be.
This material element is also what differentiates the new Enhanced Dyes in SWTOR from the original dyes. While we only have a few different types of materials in SWTOR (metallic, pearlescent, and chrome), the same principles apply to create other types of softer materials, like fabric, leather, and rubber.
By the way, the soft vs hard differentiation is only a suggestion, at least in Anthem, so you could do something like make the whole Iron Man-style suit out of leather and give it a metal cape!
Color
Color is determined completely independently of the material itself, and you have access to the entire palette without having to pay a dime! This aspect of customization is analogous to dyes in SWTOR, but with far greater flexibility.
They give you some preset colors, but you can come up with your own. The wheel system they have is pretty decent and shows RGB values, but you can’t enter those numbers manually, nor does it interpret HEX codes.
Some of the fabrics have a base color and then one for the pattern, so you can pick a different color for both!
Coloring bare metal materials works a bit differently. You can have painted metal and get the wheel like I just showed, but if it’s unpainted, you get to pick from actual metals like Tin, Copper, and Brass.
Wear State
Wear State determines how old and dirty something looks. In SWTOR, this is an immutable feature that’s baked into the armor set, with most sets tending towards clean and well-maintained with little to no wear and tear.
Vinyls
Vinyls are basically just tatoos or stickers for your armor. The only thing remotely like this in SWTOR is the Havoc Squad insignia on some Trooper armors.
Adapting Anthem’s Business Model
Anthem sold the following cosmetics to players through its cash shop:
- Armor Sets
- Materials unlocks
- Metals unlocks
- Vinyls unlocks
- Animations unlocks (emotes and such)
If SWTOR were to switch to a system like this, they’d stop selling consumable dyes entirely and instead focus on selling materials unlocks.
They could make accessing the color wheel a subscriber-only feature so F2P/Preferred would only get access to preset colors, or perhaps be unable to modify colors at all.
It would make sense for it to be managed through an interface rather than with items as well, functioning more like another tab in the character creator instead of taking up mod slots.
Predictions for SWTOR’s Dye Revamp
SWTOR is already moving to physically-based rendering, which is where lighting is modeled after real world light interactions between different materials. Along with higher resolution textures, that’s how the planets like Korriban and Ilum are being modernized and how the new shiny dyes differentiate themselves from regular ones.
Moving away from consumable dyes while offering a color wheel in favor of selling unlockable materials is a clean break that I expect the vast majority of players would be happy with.
Even better, the color wheel UI already exists in SWTOR and is in active use for Guild Heraldry. It even lets you manually enter RGB and HEX values!
There’s no way we get 6 components like Anthem has, but I think offering independent color and material selection across 3 layers is quite likely. Most modern armor sets, particularly the heavier armors, have a significant undyeable region, usually the metal bits or undersuit.
I would think those regions could be offered as a tertiary color, though it depends on how their system works under the hood. Perhaps it’s easy straightforward to make an interface that lets us change every color on the outfit like the devs can.
It seems like they have other levers they could offer as well, as some newer armor sets have a materialistic tinge to them like I mentioned earlier.
Given that dyes go beyond the Cartel Market and are one of the foundational items crafted by Artifice, it’s possible that Broadsword would want to wait for an expansion to release something like this.
The biggest concern I have with all of this is the performance cost. It’s possible the game can’t handle displaying such a high degree of customization for every player you run into on your adventures.
Even if it isn’t practical to add a tertiary color (or wear states or vinyls), decoupling primary and secondary dyes from each other and the material would be a boon in and of itself.
