Guild Wars 2

They should open up customization, allowing you to mix the look, voice and animations of the races. They do it throughout the game already, so they could explain it as mesmer magic or whatever.

For a simple racial change, they could just add combat tonics.

For cultural armor, anyone should be able to equip it, but if the race doesn’t match, it should simply be treated as a broken piece. It’d fix the problem with cultural ascended.

It’s not like the deleting or getting a new slot & making a new character is terrible now.

The part that sucks is when you have crafting to 500 on the old one

I honestly think it’s kind of being blown out of proportion just how difficult it would be to implement.

It can just be a skin. The personal story doesn’t have to be affected.

Take a look at the tonics we have in the game. They can change you into any race. The only difference is that the character you turn into has a set look. Let us customize that look and voila.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

I honestly think it’s kind of being blown out of proportion just how difficult it would be to implement.

It can just be a skin. The personal story doesn’t have to be affected.

Take a look at the tonics we have in the game. They can change you into any race. The only difference is that the character you turn into has a set look. Let us customize that look and voila.

How is that a “race change?”

And tonics do not change you into any race — they transform everything:players using the same tonic look identical; there is absolutely no customization of looks, of armor, of weapons, or of voices.

I think more tonics would be great. However, let’s not confuse that with what (some) people are looking for when they ask for a race change option.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

I honestly think it’s kind of being blown out of proportion just how difficult it would be to implement.

It can just be a skin. The personal story doesn’t have to be affected.

Take a look at the tonics we have in the game. They can change you into any race. The only difference is that the character you turn into has a set look. Let us customize that look and voila.

Personal story aside, what should happen when a player is wearing cultural armor while using the tonic? Do they lose the ability to wear it? Does it disappear? Are they allowed to keep wearing another race’s cultural armor as long as they don’t apply another skin or unequip it? What about appearance options? Should they be locked into the appearances you can choose at character creation, or should they be allowed to use makeover kit exclusive options since such an item would be bought with gems?

I don’t necessarily think that this would be super difficult to pull off. But it would still require a significant time investment to decide what to do in this and similar situations, not to mention bug testing and making sure nothing breaks too bad. Yet the amount of people that would use this is incredibly tiny. Its just not worth it for ANet

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

I honestly think it’s kind of being blown out of proportion just how difficult it would be to implement.

It can just be a skin. The personal story doesn’t have to be affected.

Take a look at the tonics we have in the game. They can change you into any race. The only difference is that the character you turn into has a set look. Let us customize that look and voila.

How can it be only a skin? Will the new race still have the old race’s racial skills? Will a char that’s changed to Asura be able to use a Norn bear form transformation or a Charr Warband support but not an Asuran racial skills? If it’s not skin only personal story is affected because the race and personal story are tied together. There’s no telling what sort of bugs would pop up if the personal story and race suddenly are in conflict.

Another option is an endless tonic that allows combat (like Endless Kodan Tonic) but for each race.

Multiple flavors of these can be created to cover different genders, a handful of armor sets, etc.. Not nearly as awesome as a race change, but a good compromise over nothing at all.

Expanding upon endless tonics, a race change could be a wardrobe feature. Such a feature let’s you choose a race “skin” which can then be augmented with armor skins, dyes, etc. Pretty much covers the fun parts of having a race without the baggage of personal story, etc.