Guild Wars 2

Been toying with this idea for a while, and the players I’ve pitched it to thought it was a pretty neat idea. If someone has posted something like this already, please bounce the thread over, or let me know where I can find it. I’d love to talk more about it! Here goes:

Rather than expanding the playable races in the normal fashion, requiring a ton of time energy and money toward only one race…

What about adding a whole bunch of “Half characters” to the game? By half character I mean a playable race that hasn’t got the same depth of customization for armor/combat/skills/build as a normal character.

For instance, these toons would have a fixed amount of hit points, on a general/balanced build. Combat/Attacks would be limited to a couple weapons, (Broken bottle projectiles and a rusty sword for Skritt?)on the left side and on the right; a heal skill plus one racially specific skill. (possibilities are endless there!)

I’m thinking each race could have a really rich storyline that can be built upon as an aside to the expansions and crazy goings-on of the world, chapter by chapter. This would likely be easy and inexpensive to implement in the long run, as it doesn’t have to coincide with what the heros are doing in the main story…

I think pvp would be awesome with everyone on a level playing field too, offering yet another game mode and tournament…

From a financial perspective, Anet would probably make a fortune off the gem store shinies for these characters!

Eager to hear what you think…

That’s a horrible idea.
Who wants to play “half” characters if you can have normal, full ones.
You would have to change so many things regarding PvP and WvW, making a new race would be easier, I guess.

How about if they just give us combat tonics of various races instead of half characters with one set of standard armor and basic skills? You’d still have the one set of armor but you can use your regular skills (and hopefully this would be something an ingame vendor sells, not the gemstore).

Would have to have a separate pvp area for the half toons only… the idea being that they’d be easier to implement for us, and not have to worry about “balance”…

a tonic would probably be easier still to implement, but then you don’t get to make a character with her/his own story….

PvP already levels most of the playing field by:
- Level doesn’t matter
- Gear doesn’t matter
- Skills are tuned specifically for PvP

There are some balancing issues with certain builds, but for the most part it’s fair.

I think you’ve misunderstood how different races work in this game and/or how game design generally works.

All races are the same in terms of stats, weapons and other equipment they can use and apart from a small number of racial skills the skills they can use too. So that’s the easy part to carry over. Reducing it would actually be more work because Anet would have to work out what they can keep and what can be removed without destroying balance (and simply the ability to play the character in all situations) and then modify everything from the trait and skill windows to the combat UI to accommodate it. That’s a lot of work.

And on top of that you’re suggesting that each of these new races should have it’s own, unique storyline, separate from the one everyone else is going through? That would be a huge amount of work. Seriously, writing narratives, building the models and constructing the instances and doing all the animation and voice acting is the vast majority of game design in an RPG. We were told during Season 1 and 2 that they were able to do 1-2 releases per month because the studio was split into 4 teams and each worked on 1 release. So 1 Living Story release took 1/4 of the people at Anet 4 months to build, and that was before they were adding a new map each time.

Unless you can think of a way to produce these “really rich storylines” chapter by chapter which requires fewer people and less time that typical game design you’re basically suggesting they double the amount of work necessary for every release.

And the end result is a severely limited new race with a story that will never relate to what everyone else gets to do?

I think this idea would have completely the opposite of your intended effect – it doubles the time and effort (and therefore money) required to produce new releases for very little benefit for players. For many people no benefit because a race that can’t even use all the existing builds is useless, for people who mainly care about the storyline or the novelty of a new race it might be an interesting choice for one alt, but I can’t imagine it ever justifying the effort required.

Oh wow…. I never thought it so grandiose! I figured maybe an instance, sure… but moreover, books dropped for story… not an entirely scripted/voiced/cinematic sort of thing. I agree that’s way over the top!

Why do the half characters have to be balanced with mains? I imagine playing an “oversized mini”!

Andriel.4618:

Oh wow…. I never thought it so grandiose! I figured maybe an instance, sure… but moreover, books dropped for story… not an entirely scripted/voiced/cinematic sort of thing. I agree that’s way over the top!

Why do the half characters have to be balanced with mains? I imagine playing an “oversized mini”!

I don’t see where you said anything about an instance. And if, as you suggested, it will be used in PvP then of course it will have to be balanced with full chars otherwise they’d be either too weak or too strong.

The OP is asking for ANet to ignore the easier bits of creating a new race and focus just on the more difficult parts… as Danikat said above, that’s more work, not less.

If ANet wanted, they could do something like they did with parts of LS2, in which the player is forced to act as a nominally non-player-character (Caithe), with fixed skills and a fixed storyline. That eliminates nearly everything that makes a new race more time consuming: no special armors or animations, no additional need for background or local color, only one voice actor per language is required (instead of two), and so on.

Unfortunately, that also removes all the really exciting things about a new race and it forces everyone to play exactly the same way, regardless of which character. It’s everything I disliked in LS2 and GW1 bonus mission packs.

tl;dr there’s no shortcut to adding new races. If ANet is going to add them, they’re going to do them “right”, not watered down.

I’m trying to picture a charr-asura half-breed without shuddering. Come to think if it, a Sylvari-anything is pretty nightmarish too