Guild Wars 2

Most Sylvari NPCs: They just look thrown together and (in my opinion) completely terrible. I wonder if the people who made these NPCs just randomized everything and didn’t bother to look at the mess of vomit-colors they created. Looking around the Grove, you feel like a lot of the messily designed Sylvari NPCs don’t belong in this beautiful, bright, verdant haven.

Customization Options: Too much and yet too little. Too little in the way of subtle and enjoyable differences, too much in the way of in-your-face and awkward differences.
-Some completely inhuman facial options that are too different from each other. The Sylvari were made in the image of man-kind to relate to them, to make them approachable.
-Mushroom head, spike-head, branch head… I feel like the Sylvari would have been better off with more leaf/grass hair-types.
-Way too many coloring and detail options (skin pattern, eye-burning glow that looks weird when all but your head is covered in armor…).
-Way too many skin and hair colors, and not the right ones. Would have liked more shades of green and brown to keep the general appearance more natural and less supernatural. Bright and dark blues, reds, purples, oranges, yellows and pinks just make the Sylvari look like multi-colored aliens or demons instead of a race of nature-spirits.

I really would have liked a more unified appearance for the Sylvari, because to me they just don’t feel as mystical and dignified when they’re visually scattered all over the place and SO different from each other.

Available Armor: The Sylvari should have been my favorite race from the start (yet I really had to struggle to embrace the end result). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to bring myself to level one until I had the gold and transmutation stones to keep a Sylvari character in T1 from level 1-80. The fact is, all other armor looks ridiculous on Sylvari. You don’t dress trees and plants in leather, cloth and metal. That’s one reason I was worried about the extreme new direction that the re-design took. If they had stopped just short of plant-alien and left more humanoid in the mix we wouldn’t have this problem. But we do. Our Sylvari characters just plain look awkward if they’re not in Cultural Armor (tier 1, 2 or 3) or the Twilight Arbor dungeon-gear.

And you know, that would have been okay, if they’d given us more options and made them more available to us. Why should one race have to be bogged down by not being able to look “right” while they play the game? You want us to enjoy our gaming experience, but when we don’t have a look we enjoy at all, we sometimes can’t enjoy the world around us. I just think that there should have been more of an effort to give the Sylvari more options, especially when this redesign made it so difficult for human-styled clothing to “flow” with the concept of the Sylvari.

I’m sorry, but don’t keep saying ‘us’
I for one, love the look of my Sylvari, and was fine wearing Vigil armor for a good month, until I decided to go with a more cultural look. Charr have the short end of the stick imo, any armor covers up what makes them unique.
As for an explanation for why the NPCs look hodge podge, maybe that’s just the way Sylvari dress? They’re fairly new, and they are seen as strange by most every other race, so their peculiarities might just extend to what they see as fashionable. Maybe really horrendous mixings of colors for the other races is what most Sylvari deem as good looking?

First point I hadn’t really noticed and a mish mash of bright colours kind of fits the young and enthusiastic sylvari anyway.

Second point I SRONGLY disagree. The variety GOOD thing. Not everyone wants to play a very human looking sylvari and the ability to have each sylavri look wildly different is great and reflects the great variety in plant kingdom. I don’t want a repeat of humans where pretty much picking the makeup and everyone looks the same.
Why remove the detail options for the body? don’t like don’t use it and they have brightly coloured hair options because they are plants. Flowers are brightly coloured so no it doesn’t seem unnatural for them. Why would just want slightly different shades of the same colour?

With the armour yes, they are in desperate need of more sylvari styled options. They look silly in most human armour IMO. The Charr also have this issue.

The only beef I have is that they did a terrible job of deforming the armor that was clearly made for human models and then slapped on Sylvari.

Other than that, I never really had a problem with the idea of wearing regular clothing but that may be because I chose to create a character that was much more elven in appearance than plant.

In fact, I find the leaf armor to be kind of silly and out of place when I’m not in a jungle area or Caledon itself.

1) The NPCS are fine… They’re Sylvari; bright, colorful, and completely lacking in fashion sense is their thing. The Grove is bursting with color of all varieties. Everything is amazing and interesting in this world, including color, why not apply way too much? I think it adds to their charm.

2) I would have to disagree on parts here. I would be really saddened if they were all brought into a more humanish line. The very reason I bought this game was the most inhuman face in the male Sylvari options, the bark face. As soon as I laid eyes on that I spent hours looking up GW2 and fell in love from there. I just had to have that face.

Besides, they are supposed to have some inhuman elements. They are imitations of humans, not humans, these occasional drastically inhuman elements really show this part of them off in a great way. They’d be way too elfy without this; they wouldn’t really be Sylvari anymore, just really green humans. I will agree however that more grass and leaf hairstyles would be welcome. I’d love my main (barkface <3) to have some willow leaf hair.

(I see no reason to remove variety. It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to Sylvari. The other races are comparatively very boring, especially human, Norn, and Asura. Oh yay… Would you like to be grey or brown?)

3) Yes we need more options. I’m sad that the other races can work fairly well with human based armor (arguably not the Charr as much) but Sylvari armor is just so distinctly not present. Both my main and my pet alt Sylvari stay mostly in human clothes for in-character reasons but some of my other Sylvari would just do so good in leafy armor that’s expensive and annoying to get your hands on.

As a side note: “Mystical and dignified” are not the words I would use to describe the Sylvari. Okay some of them are dignified but they aren’t graceful, disappear-into-the-misty-trees-magestically forest elves by far. They’re curious, they’re earnest, they’re a bit childlike and tiring at times, I don’t think it would help to remove that from them in their appearance.

Mystic Starfish said it. I say it again. Do not say us when this is your opinion which clearly not everyone shares.
I love the customisation options, I love the colors, I love how different each character can feel and look. The alienlike quality of the sylvari is what makes them mystirious and interesting. The branches and the spikes are actually my favorite “hair” styles (not a fan of the mushroom, but it is there and it is cool for others).
Sure they are more or less modelled after the human form by the pale tree, but they are not humans, they are not elves…. they are sylvari they are plants. Not trees, plants, and they come in as many wonderful variations as plants do.
I think the NPC sylvari looks just fine, some even look great. Sure the colors they choose are not what would be fashionable in a human world… but hey… they aint human.
I have seen sylvari that looked great in other than cultural or ta armor. Although for my own sylvari (which is blue with branchy “hair”) I do prefer to stick with the cultural and thus I too would like more sylvari themed armor.
But yeah stop saying us and pretend that sylvari is a huge disapointment for anyone but yourself.
Yes I know others are disapointed too, some actually want the sylvari even more alien/less human, but guess what… a lot of us love the sylvari the way they are, and you just cannot satisfy everyone.
Asking for less varied options and more looking alike? Really?

Yeah, sorry, but I pretty much disagree with all of the OP’s points. I don’t find the NPCs to be bland. The customization is great. Just great. Naturally, more option in character customization is always great, so, yeah, sure I’d like more faces/hair options/etc. But Anet did a great job with the existing customization options for the sylvari.

I also disagree with the OP’s claim that human armor looks silly on sylvari. Mystic Starfish’s point is a good one: leave out the “us.” I, for one, love the way my sylvari toons look when they’re decked out in human armor. Would it be nice if there were more cultural armor options? Sure. More options is always good. But the existing options are just fine. I suppose that if I had to make a criticism of Anet, then I’d like some male armor options that showed a bit more skin. (I’d love to be able to show off more of my male toons’ glow effects.) And some female armor skins that showed off a little less skin. But, all in all, I think they did a great, amazing job with the sylvari.

I have to say that I don’t get a lot of the posts I see on these forums. It seems to me that people are really scratching the bottom of the barrel in trying to find stuff to criticize. Look over the forums and you’ll see people complaining on the forums for each profession and each race. A lot of it seems pretty silly to me, as if people felt compelled to complain about something, even when there’s not much to complain about.

escherbach.8376:

I suppose that if I had to make a criticism of Anet, then I’d like some male armor options that showed a bit more skin. (I’d love to be able to show off more of my male toons’ glow effects.) And some female armor skins that showed off a little less skin. But, all in all, I think they did a great, amazing job with the sylvari..

Have to say that I don’t find much revealing armor for medium class female tbh. The cultural armor for sylvari all tiers medium does not allow for showing the the majority of the glow on the body. Actually… even with the most revealing of the 3 only the belly is revealed… no glow on the belly. Honestly… male or female… medium armor seems to be synonym for coats that cover you up. Which can be nice… if it is not the only option.

Other than that I agree to your post

Just to show some differences in opinions: My main is a Sylvari Guardian and I love the faery knight look he’s rocking with his knightly “human” armour. It looks awesome!

A jaw, for example, can be formed by leaves, vines, or even shards of bark that grow and press together to form the silhouette, but if you look closely you can still see the fibers and holes of the structure.

http://www.arena.net/blog/dream-and-nightmare

They aren’t people made of plants. they are plants imitating people.

My sylvari looks good in just about every armor I’ve put him in. If you find that you’re having trouble with non-racial armor, then use a dye scheme that has at least one color in the same color range as your sylvari. (If you play a green one, try one of the olive tint or green shade type dyes for the metal, or a blue one, blue tones.) Or, try the opposite color on the wheel (or one next to that one), along with ones that match.

Agree, they need more hair and armor on game…. is to hard get sylvari armors, ony at endgame…

I agree with needed more sylvari armor, would love a lot more and hope we get a new set in this up comming armor patch.

Second everything else you said is stupid, every single color for the sylvari IS FOUND in nature.

Also they suppose to only semi copy humans, not become them.
So of course they still got big time saying I am planet, in the basic shape of a human thats ALL.

More armor! I’m okay if they’re gated for later in the game or even somewhat hard to get. I want more options, though. Colors are fine though. More colors. They’re a young race so it is fine if some of the color choices are garish.

I see no reason why Sylvari need to wear cultural armor or should look odd not wearing it. Just because they can shouldn’t mean they need to. Growing your own armor is a handy ability to have, but that doesn’t mean its better than cloth and metal. Actually its probably the opposite, other than cloth I would assume leather and metal are both better protection than leaves and branches (which is why I refuse to put my Sylvari guardian in any cultural gear until I can grab T3, which at least looks relatively sturdy, the others are too leafy to be heavy armor).

I think the reason it seems so odd to some people (maybe you as well TC) is because the vast majority of Sylvari NPCs wear cultural gear. It makes you feel out of place if you aren’t wearing it too. Granted, thats true of almost all races really, there’s a ton of NPCs wearing cultural, but its most noticable with Sylvari because it obviously looks so different from normal clothing. If there was a better balance between NPC Sylvari wearing cultural gear and those wearing “normal” clothes, then the player wearing normal armor wouldn’t seem so strange.

As for sylvari colors… eh, can’t really say I agree with you there. I can see where you’re coming from with wanting to keep them looking like plants, but Sylvari are the only colorful race in the game. I really think there needs to be at least 1 colorful race. Plus, plants are actually really colorful anyway, maybe not leaves and branches which do tend to be green and brown mostly, but as far as flowers and mushrooms (which aren’t technically plants but I guess they fall under that as far as Sylvari go) you can probably find just about any color in nature. So it fits from that perspective.

And don’t be hating on the branch and mushroom heads. Those are awesome. More “hair” styles would be nice, but why remove the most unique ones for more leaves and grass? Just add more, don’t take away.

i want less ridiculous animation of running with drawn weapons. Please, ill give anything for that. I dont get why sylvari (as well as humans) have to swing their huge and heavy weapons on the run. With speed buff it looks like unreal benny hill scene.
Norn females, charr have awesome aestetic animations for that.

Again, the lack of Sivlari armour outside of the Cultural tiers, the missing tier of cultural weapons (all the other races have three) and the lack of white through to green Silvari weapon drops.

This is certaily my favorite race to play, but I’m in the same boat as the original poster – I now level Silvari like crazy just to get to L35 and aquire the T1 sets. I did as he did originally, but I burned through so many transmutaion stones keeping the ethnic appearance and it started getting really expensive resource wise.

It just feels that the deadline for release was approaching, so they dropped the development and released the Silvari with what they’d created at that point.

I truly hope that more development time is spent on bringing this race to parity with the others sooner rather than later. Any annoucement from the devs on this subject would be very happily received from this quarter.

…
I’ll just comment on your first part, there are three tiers of ‘cultural’ weapons
But as with all other races, only the third tier is unique. Unless you’re talking about the shared T1/2 with asura, but that still doesn’t make since with a missing tier

That what I meant. The insertion of Asuran weapons into one of the Sylvari tiers appears to be a placeholder mechanism. Norns, for example have three tiers, each with separate styles but all in keeping with the overall Norn design concept. I’d just like to see a third Sylvari ‘style’ to join Verdant and Warden.

My main sylvari is a lvl 80 ele and shes like very pale frosted blue with a darker blue hue in the pattern i chose and she glows a seafoam color so i love the options they gave sylvari is the race i looked forward to the most because im tired of being an elf in every mmo sure elves are great but they all look alike ,lol thats why i love this race because everyone doesnt look all cookie cutter and can be unique and any color they choose to be just like one of my favorite plants which is the pansy they come in a variety of colors. The npcs in the grove i like them because its like a field of wildflowers. The armor issue i dont have a trouble with seeing as my ele is still working for the nightmare gloves and shoulders to match the top but her headpiece is the blindfold and shes rocking the shoes and skirt from the orr karma vendors that cost 42,000 karma and i agree if you dye the armor in colors that match your sylvari they look fine. I went for mint and mint frost for my armor and it looks awesome on her. My other sylvari is like night skintone with dark purple glow effects and when i made my 1st sylvari i spent like almost an hour choosing the perfect colors to combine together .=) overall im very proud that anet did it this way.

Plants can be extremely colorful. Think beyond leaves and branches, to all other parts of a plant.

Everything you don’t like about customization, I love.

I agree on the lack of cultural armor. Slapping “human” armor on everyone is just a lazy design choice, there should be much more variety for all level ranges. You stick out like a sore thumb as a new sylvari character in that “human” gear while all the NPC wear the much more immersive/appropriate cultural gear.

The customization choices, though? Gotta disagree strongly. The variety of colors is one of the best aspects of this species, and there’s nothing “unnatural” about it either. If anything, I’d like more clearly alien options because that’s what the sylvari are: alien. They’re not just generic humans with some bodypaint and tiny Star Trek-style prosthetics glued on their faces.

Sylvari have much better looking armor than Charr. Only people allowed to gripe on and on about armor and how bad it looks is them, and myself. That’s were Anet got bored. And this isn’t just me, unlike you who seem to think eveyone’s like you OP. Go visit the Charr forum area, there is no shortage of wishing for better armor there. Anet better change OUR armor first, not yours. Sylvari customisation has the most options, and I love it for that. One thing, tell me about glow color beforehand, okay? OP stop complaining. Anet has more important things to do than kiss your butt and give you what you want on a golden platter.

Personally, I think the Mushroom, Cactus, and Wood Sylvari look the best.

But okay, I do have a real complaint:
The Sylvari seem to be to marry-sue to me. Very few of the NPCs have any kind of personality, and it seems nearly none of them are capable of being anything less than perfect. There are a few Sylvari NPCs I really like, and those are the ones with character given to them.
And every time it pops up in NPC dialogue, Sylvari appear to be the best at everything.
Best armor, best weapons, best tank pilots, best scouts, best warriors, best commanders.

There seems to be too much importance and respect put on a race/culture that popped out of a tree twenty years ago.

I sense you wanted to complain about a sylvari whose name starts with a T and ends with rahearne. The biggest complaint I have is that Caithe is supposedly this extremely untrustworthy character (stated by several characters) yet you never see this. The biggest problem the character has is the tendency to execute prisoners.

I’m sorry, but I don’t think I agree with most of your post, OP.

I LOVE all the options in customization; I have spent hours designing different Sylvari just for fun! I don’t know why you think the colors are unnatural. Every color available in customization is out there in nature. Not every plant or flower is in earthen tones. There are plenty of pinks, purples, blues, yellows, every color you can think of! They are walking tiger lilies and pine trees and roses.

They are not elves that dress to blend into the scenery; they ARE the scenery.

As for the hair options, the branch hair is my favorite, aside from Caithe’s hair. I only wish they would have released The Pale Tree’s lily hair, but I understand why they didn’t. Only having leafy hair options would be extremely boring. The mushroom hat does make me giggle, though.

A “unified appearance?” No! Plants and flowers are unique, and that is one reason they are so beautiful. I love the variety, it’s a wonderful representation of the diversity of the humans they modeled themselves after.

In my opinion, Sylvari customization is a breath of fresh air compared to the cookie cutter human faces, and the sparse Asura options. I won’t even start on the Charr, whose females don’t look very female.

The only thing I do agree with you on is the lack of Sylvari armor skins available. I remember being very confused during beta when the clothes my newborn Sylvari was handed were the same frilly garb of my human elementalist.

Buuuuut, I feel like it would be unfair to the other races to shower the Sylvari with tons more Cultural armor than everyone else.

I think a happy medium would be to add just one more set of skins, the skins that Sylvari are born with. One light, one medium, and one heavy skin that are different from the currently available Cultural armor. This would give us one more option for transmuting, erase the awkwardness of donning human clothes right after being born from a pod, and fix the problem of not having any available “RP” armor until level 35.

I think adding any more than just this one set would be cause for the other races to feel like Sylvari are getting favoritism.

It seems like you want the Sylvari to be the elvish race that they were originally planned to be. “Unified,” “humanoid,” and “shades of green and brown,” all sound like what you’d find in the elves. Well, personally I was, and still am, ecstatic about the drastic change in design. Their new concept is so much more exciting, original, and beautiful.

I love how different, how “alien,” the Sylvari are, and I don’t want them to change at all!

Well, with humans they look like barbie and ken super models so it’s almost impossible to make ugly looking npcs.

Sylvari are the most unique and customizable race ingame. You can go generic human/elf look or mushroom head. There’s a lot more room to play with them so you can get a bigger variety of looks.