Guild Wars 2

Ok so my plan has been to go through one of every race with a different profession. So human and Char now done I’m just starting Sylvari. I’d obviously seen them out in the world but have only just now taken a good look at them.

My comment is really simple, I think there are lots of cool things they could have done with a plant race and so to make it a humanoid made out of plant shapes and textures seems a bit of a cop out. I know the lore supports this as the Pale tree was placed on human graves and also they were intended to look humanoid to better communicate with other races.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the way they look but like I’ve said. There is so many other interesting plant themed race ideas to go at. So I’m wondering was the choice to go for a more simple design brief simply down to time constraints or was it a choice born from what you actually wanted to deliver in terms of the look of the final version?

There is nothing cheap or easy way out about the sylvari design. They didn’t design them just once, they did it twice because the first design was not satisfactory.
Sylvari imo is amaizing with their looks and many options.
I find their design just perfect and I adore them.

I’d have liked them to be more alien, but their design is quite good overall. The only problem for me is the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to actually LOOK like a sylvari unless you’re already at max level and have lots of money to burn. The game would really benefit from more cultural gear.

Chadramar.8156:

I’d have liked them to be more alien, but their design is quite good overall. The only problem for me is the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to actually LOOK like a sylvari unless you’re already at max level and have lots of money to burn. The game would really benefit from more cultural gear.

This, there are only four options available to individual characters and they don’t exactly mix and match well (there are some other sets that can get close but aren’t quite there). It would be nice if there were some more options.

Zeefa.3915:

There is nothing cheap or easy way out about the sylvari design. They didn’t design them just once, they did it twice because the first design was not satisfactory.
Sylvari imo is amaizing with their looks and many options.
I find their design just perfect and I adore them.

Yeah I did see the video where they discussed the second design and why it was changed. I’m not saying they have done a bad job, like I said I like the design and there are some nice options.

I just feel that for a plant race the total humanoid route was one of the easiest routes they could have taken (not that this route was easy). If you take a really close look at plants across the world they can seem very alien in colour and shape so I agree a more alien look might have worked.

The idea of more plant-like Sylvari is cool. I’ve always been a huge fan of stuff like ents and similar fantasy creatures.

But, the fact that this is a playable race in an MMO means it would mostly be impossible. Races need to fit with a number of criteria, including stuff like wearing fairly standard armor, using weapons, size limitations, mostly humanoid bodyshape, and so forth. I can’t really picture ents walking around swinging swords and wearing plate mail, nor can I really picture them jumping around in jumping puzzles and such.

As NPCs, or in a non-MMO where you could custom-fit the game around the characters, then more drastically plant-like being could definately work. But as a playable MMO race, I think the Sylvari are pretty good at being quite plant-like without stepping outside of any reasonable bounds.

I guess they could have played around a bit more with body proportions. Maybe longer limbs to capture a feel of branches, maybe a less defined head / neck, going instead for the whole body (including head) being a semi-continous trunk. Could have hunched them over like Charr, or even had them lean backwards a bit. I have a feeling that kind of look would appeal to less people overall, though, and maybe thats the main reason the Sylvari look like they do.

At the very least though, current Sylvari >>> early Sylvari. At least they’re actually plantlike now, humanoid in shape but made of plant material. Earlier drafts seem to be more elfs in plant clothing.

-Confessions of a Sylvariaholic-

By that I mean that I absolutely ADORE the the way the Sylvari look. I have 8 character slots, and every one of them is a Sylvari, just one of each class.

Their character creation is so amazing. The choices of skin color, pattern color, glow color, etc. has made it so none of my 8 Sylvari look anything alike. I don’t feel that can be said about the other races in the game.

I know that you aren’t arguing along this particular route, I just felt like giving my 2 cents.

I agree with Electro.

I think they didn’t want to have to limit sylvari characters to a unique (and inevitably limited) set of gear, or make players who choose other races feel like they’re denied gear they might want. And the only way for the sylvari to share gear with the other races is to make them largely humanoid.

They also need to be able to fit through the same sized gaps, realistically jump, run and swim and do all the other things players want/need to do.

I remember Kristen Perry said something like she wanted to make some more “alienish” options for sylvari but she had to stop at some point because of the obvious technical problems (gear, animations, all this sort of stuff…). The few asymmetrical faces are probably as far as she could go in terms of crazy plant shapes.

But in the end one of the very first influence for the sylvari are fairies and fae for their youth and joy. Going all treant wouldn’t have been the best way to communicate this aspect of the sylvari race.

Kristen Perry.5260:

Ayeup. Electro, Danikat and Tauril have it correct. There were a lot of considerations with technical and aesthetic requirements that needed to be met. And it wasn’t easy to figure out a middle ground between the ethereal/elf-crowd and the treant/ent followers. I’m impressed you noted those asymmetrical faces, Tauril. ;} They were nearly as far as I could push things while still trying to stay attractive on some definition. Heck, even now you’ll see camps of people saying they’re straight up ugly while others say they aren’t ugly enough. They are supposed to be a beautiful race… I did my best to stretch that line as far as I could to include more than just standard beauty features.

Zeefa.3915:

There is nothing cheap or easy way out about the sylvari design. They didn’t design them just once, they did it twice because the first design was not satisfactory.
Sylvari imo is amaizing with their looks and many options.
I find their design just perfect and I adore them.

About five times, actually. Concepts, mostly. You guys only saw two official waves.

any concept art for the other three?

Humanoid shape is not a problem. Though greater variance might be nice, what we have clearly puts across how alien the Sylvari are – while some shape combinations are indeed beautiful, others can be downright creepy. It’s the fact that their behaviour is too human that is problematic.

The designers managed in many places to show how young a race they are, but – no matter the youth – that is still a human race in behaviour and thoughts. The existence of the Dream/Nightmare is mostly ignored (it is explicitly acknowledged in many places, but does not affect the general behaviour), so is the fact that every Sylvari is a genderless drone. Their culture is also too complete, considering how young they are – with the model they have, it should be still in the most promitive stages, with big patches outright stolen from other races. It isn’t. Why?

Ever since beta I’ve been waiting to get cat-tails on my male sylvari. Cruel anet developers, giving my mushroom heads to females while most of what my male got was asymmetrical straight texture indie cuts ;(.

CAT-TAILS! ON THE GEMSTORE IF YOU WANT.

Kristen Perry.5260:

They are supposed to be a beautiful race… I did my best to stretch that line as far as I could to include more than just standard beauty features.

I love the asymmetrical faces, though I noticed that it’s mostly on the female sylvari. Do you guys plan on adding more face and hair options for them down the line?

It would be amazing to have hair that’s more grasslike, or like trailing flowers, especially for the dudes, who have no long hair options. I understand that y’all were very much down to the wire when it came to releasing Sylvari due to the redesign, and that that likely impacted the number of choices we do have.

(And I think it’s great that y’all compensated for that with the color options, but I’d still love to see more hair at least.) <333

Sylv.5324:

I understand that y’all were very much down to the wire when it came to releasing Sylvari due to the redesign, and that that likely impacted the number of choices we do have.

If any of the races got hosed when it comes to character creation options it is the asura (and/or human if you want your character to be anything but asian, white, or some sort of plastic japanese love doll). It even seems likely that the reason they have such limited options can be directly attributed to the amount of resources & attention spent on the sylvari redesigns given their simultaneous beta release dates.

Check it out sometime. Sylvari even have more sodding ear options than the asura do. Bloody shame that.

Regardless of that, and to stay somewhat on topic, I think the real missed opportunity with the sylvari comes with their lore, not their models.

It really is terrible that the sylvari look a whole hell of a lot more alien and strange than the lore actually makes them. There is a lot of cool tropes and ideas that could be used with a ‘new’ species emerging into an already realized world, but I don’t really see them used to any great effect.

The only conceit I see with any regularity is the idea that they are ‘naive.’ Which I despise. Naive carries too many connotations of childishness and, by proxy, innocence, both of which have an annoying tendency to be used as a shield against criticism for when characters are acting like utter berks. The kender in D&D are a good example of this, a player race with the express permission of the lore to be a complete troll to the rest of the party without breaking character with their ‘innocence & naivete.’

A better descriptor would have been ‘ignorant.’ The sylvari are ignorant of the world at large and the sociopolitical working of the other major races. But we don’t really see that with anywhere. The trait isn’t nearly as pronounced as the norns “beer and everlasting glory” line of thinking, or the asurans “mad science & poltical backstabbing will win the day” theme, or even the charrs “we love meat/fighting/shooting thing and hate gods” schtick.

Instead, for some reason, the sylvari often seem to come off as vaguely noble. Not for any real reason mind, but just as a kind of generality. It gives them a kind of haughty “we’re better than you” vibe, which is only enhanced by the bloody storylines that keep using sylvari characters as a fulcrum for events based around how they aren’t burdened by bickering and squabbling like their non-sylvari peers are.

Which is rather fitting I suppose, since they are the ‘elf’ analog in this game, but it seems diametrically opposed to the whole “brand new race seeking their place in the world” thing.

It’s all rather sickeningly Mary Sue-ish really.

I have a completely different view of sylvari. While I see their innocence and child-like wonder, I ponder why they are sticking around our neck of the woods. True, 25 years is a blink of an eye to races that have lived for centuries but, when sylvari are “born,” they are at the beginning of their adulthood. If they do share the experiences of others while in the Dream then most of the questions npcs ask other races should have been answered repeatedly by these shared experiences. If they truly were as inquisitive as we are lead to believe, shouldn’t they be more nomadic? I would think they’d want to spread out in small groups and try to see as much of the world as possible while trying to satisfy that curiousity. There really should be very, very few in the tiny corner of the world that Guild Wars 2 takes place in, even if it is their home turf. Actually, it’s BECAUSE it’s already so familiar that few will want to explore it further.

It’s also safe. You’ll notice some sylvari npcs in all corners of the world, each saying something like ‘I love adventuring’. That’s true, and you’re right that they are inquisitive and should be going around being nomadic. But some of them are kind of afraid of the world, since one of the firstborn was tortured by Inquest, and another died in Orr. Bad stuff invades the Dream also, so that affects them just as much as their desire to explore for themselves

I absolutely love the sylvari. The only problem for me is that there are too few hairstyles :/

I agree it was a missed opportunity. The original design had too human-like textures, but the second design has too human-like shape. (All my comments are based on female characters as I don’t play male characters and ended up being almost entirely about the visual design aspect.)
Especially the ones that cater to pure sexualization where you turn the model sideways to the profile view and find a simple extension of the butt and breasts to be further from the body but not filled out in proper buttox and breastses shape.
Granted they do this on Humans as well and probably Norns on top of that as a lazy shortcut in the skeletal attributes which is a slightly related but slightly different issue that bothers me. But the point is plant people don’t need breasts or junk in the trunk in the first place. The wider hips are also lacking in sensible proportion which again, a beef on a human, an eye-sore on a Sylvari. It’s less like wider hips and more like the waist was pulled in with an elastic. Ouch.

They took the high road when they designed Charr to not mimic the abomination of Blizzard designs which add humanoid proportions to every race in often disturbing ways (Tauren& Worgen boobs), then took this step back for their sequel for some strange reason.

The faces are also disappointing, compared to humans you already start out with next to nothing in variety, then if you want an actual treeish face you have 5 choices. This is another problem with two sources, as lack of facial variety overall in non-human races is a huge disappointment to boot.

I get that a lot of people for some reason want to be the human hero in the nonsensical fantasy world, they don’t care the first fig about immersion and would never RP, but Anet isn’t the company I expected to cater to them so hard while leaving the rest of us with more of a tease. It seems like the Asura designer was either more committed to his(her? iirc his) vision than the Sylvari designer, or was given more free-reign, or Asura were given more time on the whole because they do a much better job of coming up as unique and fully realized. The Charr are just a generic anthro race really, and were realized in GW1, so I don’t feel the need to compare them to Sylvari at the moment… although their skeletal proportions are decent aside from somewhat unnecessary slim waists, I like that they don’t run on two legs and some unique feature like that would have been nice for Sylvari instead of, you know, sharing animations with humans.

Sylvari is still my favorite race given the completion but they just share too much with humans which makes it seem like they were rushed and not full realized as they could have been.
A good example of comparison I would say is Star Trek(bad) versus Star Wars(good) aliens(not the games, the universes on the whole). There is very little outside of horned and scaled humans in the sentient Star Trek universe. Star Wars brought some specially-featured human types, such as Twilek, but covered all other spectrums as well. When you look at Ewok can you tell the difference between male or female?
Maybe in a game with 5 races, when 2 of them are human, 1 of them is “alien” and one of them is animal, Sylvari just got stuck with the in-between. I dunno.

Square-Enix decided to add female counterparts to their male only buff/muscular races when FF14 ARR comes out, even though 1% of the playerbase at most is like to use these combined and probably only 5% or so even uses the male. It’s a commitment to realizing the vision of the universe which again I just didn’t expect ANet to be the kind of company to falter on something like that. One of 2 new races in a game they spent how many years developing by taking the lazy way out? I’m sorry if the Sylvari designer feels we’re wrong about this but sharing human skeleton and structure exactly is l a z y and nearly takes away the awesomeness of the skin and texture that they worked so hard on after the initial design. Sharing attack animations extensively throughout all races really is another facet of this problem. If I keep thinking the problem just gets bigger and veers more away from Sylvari disappointment!

Anyway that’s a lot of complaining BUT I had high expectations for this game to be the most immersive fantasy MMO experience in terms of design, lore, etc and in my beta account Rose-Colored-Glasses I really thought it was, but it just doesn’t beat Final Fantasy 11 or 14 in that respect(gameplay completely aside and not in consideration or comparison) when it all comes down to it.

Oh, Hi Kristen. Thanks for this awesome race. :P

RainbowSyrup.4130:

I absolutely love the sylvari. The only problem for me is that there are too few hairstyles :/

This kinda applys for all races, and all games actually. I always feel like there isn’t enough hair styles. Wish there was a short hair style made of many small leaves for males.
People are complaining about them being human-shape, what exactly is the alternative without it being too crazy and make armor scale on us even worse? Which is one concern I have about Sylvari. A lot of armor doesn’t look like it fits correctly; being too big or floating. I would like more racial armor, ironically I didn’t think I would like plant armor but it’s actually pretty cool. Need tight fitting stuff though. Got tired of nightmare medium robe being too big and clipping stuff.

It would be great if they gave us Sylvari our own animations. Being humanoid is fine with me but not having the same personality/mannerisms. When Sylvari were born they should of naturally developed their own way of moving and fighting.

Plant-centaurs would have been interesting…

Astralporing.1957:

Humanoid shape is not a problem. Though greater variance might be nice, what we have clearly puts across how alien the Sylvari are – while some shape combinations are indeed beautiful, others can be downright creepy. It’s the fact that their behaviour is too human that is problematic.

The designers managed in many places to show how young a race they are, but – no matter the youth – that is still a human race in behaviour and thoughts. The existence of the Dream/Nightmare is mostly ignored (it is explicitly acknowledged in many places, but does not affect the general behaviour), so is the fact that every Sylvari is a genderless drone. Their culture is also too complete, considering how young they are – with the model they have, it should be still in the most promitive stages, with big patches outright stolen from other races. It isn’t. Why?

These two criticisms may actually answer one another. There’s an interview on a German site that indicates that humans were the first race that the sylvari had a positive first contact with and the Pale Tree was influenced by humans and a few exceptional centaurs – it’s possible that part of the reason they’re human-like is that large parts of their cultural mindset has been stolen from humans. Their culture is essentially a mix of an idealised human cultural template with the addition of the Dream and a greater connection to nature, and even the Nightmare Court has based its hierarchy on human aristocracy.

My problem is that the Sylvari are so unique yet blend in too well. Cultural Armour is too scarce and expensive for a game that isn’t gear focused(especially when the gear is not that great). This forces your sylvari to look like a skinnier human with a different idle and a late night glow. Completely throwing away their uniqueness. Their plant armour is a must for this race. The two were clearly designed to sync well together and without both you basically have half of the design.

This is not only a Sylvari problem, though the severity varies between each race. Sylvari just gets hit the hardest, in my opinion.

I think the Sylvari are awesome! All of my character slots are Sylvari, as I needed to have one of each class. I pretty much knew this would be the case when I discovered they could glow.

I’ve played a lot of races over the years in different MMO’s, but Sylvari take the cake. I think the character design is stunning and intricate. I can control literally everything I want to. I like that I can make the skin more bark-like, or more plant-like, and I LOVE the different patterns! As a horticulturalist I appreciate the fact that the hair designs actually look like different plants/flowers. I only wish there were more of them! I keep thinking how awesome it would be to make a cherry blossom sylvari.

My only complaint is that the character creation timer is too short. It always kicks me out in the middle of designing my Sylvari because it takes so long to test out different features/colors/patterns!

That and I would appreciate more armor that looks good on the sylvari. My poor guardian, she can’t afford the T3 cultural, and regular armor looks hideous on her

o.o
Didn’t realize there was a time limit on character creation
How long were you gawking at your creations XD

Akumu.7238:

My problem is that the Sylvari are so unique yet blend in too well. Cultural Armour is too scarce and expensive for a game that isn’t gear focused(especially when the gear is not that great). This forces your sylvari to look like a skinnier human with a different idle and a late night glow. Completely throwing away their uniqueness. Their plant armour is a must for this race. The two were clearly designed to sync well together and without both you basically have half of the design.

This is not only a Sylvari problem, though the severity varies between each race. Sylvari just gets hit the hardest, in my opinion.

This, this and thrice this.

From the moment I rolled a Sylvari I fell in love with them. Infact I rerolled them several times cos I was new to the game and kept discovering more options in Character Creation and more potential when I actually played. I maintain that my Autumn themed Ranger is the most beautiful Toon I have ever created in any game ever.
Problem is I feel he’s not as great as he could be. This setback is entirely based in the lack of cultural armor options and the extremely limited glows we have with the existing ones. For a start the glow is always white, and the medium armours cover almost all of the body, preventing view of the glow I customised. If the armour kept the correct colour, he would glow like embers among dried leaves.

Are the Sylvari a missed opportunity? I’d say definitely not. They’re beautifully realised, in my opinion, but their potential is greatly held back by the games itemisation. Perhaps more so than the other races. For me, only the Asura could benefit almost as much from more variety.

Mystic Starfish.2586:

o.o
Didn’t realize there was a time limit on character creation
How long were you gawking at your creations XD

It happened to me too. When you get into sylvari aesthetics, you really get into it.