The graphics of BDO are stunning, the character customization is top notch and the outfits look high-quality.

However, there aren't terribly many outfit styles yet compared to FFXIV for example. If you play around with this web model viewer for a little bit, you can see just how many individual cosmetic pieces that game has: https://ffxiv.dlunch.net/model.html

While increasing the quantity and variety of outfits takes time and the PA outfit task force is working hard to create more, I feel like BDO has a major systematic flaw: There are too many outfits that consist of less than 4 individual pieces (helmet, body, gloves, shoes), but use fewer pieces with a shared slot system instead. In addition, capes and stockings aren't in separate slots, and while there is a "cape setting" button, it behaves inconsistently across outfits. Depending on the outfit, it might hide the cape, hide the stockings or do nothing at all (even if the outfit has capes or stockings to hide).

Please rework current outfits so that the pieces fit into seperate slots and fine-tune the cape and stockings settings. For future outfits, please keep in mind that there are players who would like to mix and match as much as possible.

As an example for shared slot outfit pieces that do not make any sense whatsoever, please take a closer look at the Halloween Outfit Swap boxes. Some original class outfits are in separate slots, but the swapped class outfit pieces have shared slots. Why?

I'd like to add that from my point of view, if mixing and matching is restricted by idle animations at all, mixing and matching is more important than outfit-specific idle animations.

I agree with this suggestion.  The shared slots and lack of cape setting consistency has always annoyed me.

Shared slots doesn't have anything to do with outfit-specific idle animations though.  The animation is just a series of commands telling the skeleton how to move.  The shared slots is pure laziness.  They didn't want to take the time to go through and split the outfit up into separate meshes.  It also saves them the effort of having to test it with other outfit pieces to make sure everything animates with no gaps or clipping.

+1

A rework for outfit pieces would be awesome. While character creation is incredible in this game, outfit customization has always been surprisingly subpar, considering the outfits themselves are beautiful. This would go a long, long way towards fixing that. If you take the time to make each outfit more modular it means there's less of a need to make entirely new outfits, as players will be able to properly mix and match their own.

"This would go a long, long way towards fixing that."

Spliting the costumes would take minimal amount of work....

While it is an important step and less troublesome if implemented earlier rather than later, I don't think the slot revamp itself will be enough. BDO still needs a lot more outfits. I highly doubt players are gonna buy less outfits if there are more mixing and matching options; the opposite, rather.

I don't think the PA team are doing themselves a favor by adding entire outfit sets in 99% of the cases. It would be so much more friendly on their company-internal resources and on us players to release individual outfit pieces, such as 3 different standalone armors for all classes in one patch, 4 different standalone gloves for all classes in the next patch and so on, even if they are just minor variations from each other at times. This approach is a lot more agile and can quickly add much diversity to the game.

This should apply to in game costumes as well. The fact that we can't mix and match between pearl/crafted costumes has always annoyed me.

Yes, having all outfits consist of multiple pieces would be very much preferable over the way it currently is. Having separate slots for capes and stockings would be even better, though that would probably be considerably more work than just splitting the costumes according to the existing slots. (Also, why should the cape setting button hide stockings? If you don't want the stockings, just buy the no-stockings version of the underwear in question!)

Yeah, it would be nice, if we would have seperate slots for everything(panty, bra, stocking, other acessories), and if every costume would be split instead of having one item covering multiple slots.

It wouldn't even be that hard to implement, but as they mainly sell the outfits to be melted for crons, they don't care much...

I don't think that's the reason they're not doing it. If it was, there would be no reason to add new outfits for old classes.

Well they - in fact - barely added outfits for old classes. They only, after people started bitching, did start to create one outfit/week with rotating class.

But you can clearly see the quality and the amount of effort they put into those clothes. No weapons in most cases, parts are together on a single item, bad coloring options, and just look at the latest KR outfit came out this week, it look literately like a crafted outfit...

If outfits could not be cronned, 95% of the outfits would be pretty much never be bought.