Guild Wars 2

Dunno if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but I’ll write it anyway and see what comes out.

There’s lately been a few posts about people wanting a playable race, which has a divided opinion on whether it’s easy to do or not. I personally think it’d be too difficult. I was on the side of those who want tonics where we can still use our weapons, but there’s still some animation work to be involved in that and so forth.

So I was thinking of another direction that might give players a chance to ‘sort of’ play a Tengu or a Largos or whatever, and have outfits as a way of doing it. The thinking of t was that instead of a whole piece, the arms of a tengu would be the gloves, the head the mask, the legs the pants etc. Sizes wise it would work great for human and Sylvari most of all, would be force looking for Norn and Charr, and cute little Tengu for those Asura wearing them. I guess it wouldn’t work for all races, but just an idea I had floating around last night.

Right now, there are a couple of tonics that allow you to look like another race for a short period of time (during combat, not just walking around). I’d welcome more of that, whether the mechanic is via tonic or via wardrobe.

However, the reason I’d want a new race in the game is for completely different reasons than new fashions: a new set of personal story chapters, new voice actors, new combat animations, the occasional new dialogue. (And yes, those are all the things that makes it too expensive to add a new race anytime soon.)

An outfit could could undoubtedly change one race into another. It could do it by substituting one body for another as part of the outfit. As an example, the legs on the Lich outfit. With that outfit it removes the legs and puts in a different set. Other outfits remove the Charr’s tail and change it to a tail that is part of the outfit and therefore can be dyed. By extension, an outfit could exchange the char’s body to the body of a different race.

I think this is an idea worth considering. One problem with tonics is that they are time limited, possible for technical reasons. Outfits are not. They also have a wardrobe for outfits. Tonics have to be carried around.

Lich outfit where the legs are swapped out to a different set.
Balthazar outfit where the tail is now part of the outfit and is dyeable.

Yea with the way actual outfits work This would be theoretically possible (im not sure how easy, but in theory anet could do it), personally I think stuff like this would be a much better way to take advantage of outfits instead of more stuff that just looks like armor but isnt.

Also using an outfit for it instead of a tonic means that although you cant customize the clothes the new race is playing, you can customize the colors at least (could potentially use the dye channels for both the skin and armor of the race depending on what anet chooses)

Frenchtoastersticks.8061:

Yea with the way actual outfits work This would be theoretically possible (im not sure how easy, but in theory anet could do it), personally I think stuff like this would be a much better way to take advantage of outfits instead of more stuff that just looks like armor but isnt.

Also using an outfit for it instead of a tonic means that although you cant customize the clothes the new race is playing, you can customize the colors at least (could potentially use the dye channels for both the skin and armor of the race depending on what anet chooses)

Yeah exactly, although there would be no proper character customisation, the feather/fur/skin on the ‘outfits’ could be dyed. I still don’t know if it’s easy enough, but I imagine a lot easier than a new selectable playable race that in the past has already been ruled out (though a U-Turn on that can’t be ruled out either!).

penelopehannibal.8947:

Frenchtoastersticks.8061:

Yea with the way actual outfits work This would be theoretically possible (im not sure how easy, but in theory anet could do it), personally I think stuff like this would be a much better way to take advantage of outfits instead of more stuff that just looks like armor but isnt.

Also using an outfit for it instead of a tonic means that although you cant customize the clothes the new race is playing, you can customize the colors at least (could potentially use the dye channels for both the skin and armor of the race depending on what anet chooses)

Yeah exactly, although there would be no proper character customisation, the feather/fur/skin on the ‘outfits’ could be dyed. I still don’t know if it’s easy enough, but I imagine a lot easier than a new selectable playable race that in the past has already been ruled out (though a U-Turn on that can’t be ruled out either!).

I think it would be a nice happy medium between a whole new playable race (which would make future production of armor more time consuming) and the combat tonics. Sure you cant change the costume like you can on your very own race or the hairstyles and build and so on, but with a combat tonic you cant change ANYTHING its tonic or no tonic. At least this way you can change some colors and if they do it right (or give costumes more dye channels) you could end up customizing quite a bit. not perfect, but progress and possibly simpler.

I think Anet should really put this to a meeting and see how they feel about it. I do like outfits on some of my toons and I do like armor on others. Using the outfits as a way of changing races is a wickid idea! Either that or they keep producing the tonics, like in Bitterfrost Frontier, where you can buy a Kodan tonic with karma, and it changes you into a Kodan able to use your skills and weapons in battle. Either way, this is the solution to the community that keeps asking for new playable races. And most do want them. I think it would take a fraction of the time to do this than to put the Dev team on a character creation playable race that has to either be written in to the existing story, or creating a new story and city etc etc for them ( which would also be cool but not plausable). I like the pace the Dev team is producing new content, so this will keep them moving forward while pleasing the masses.