Guild Wars 2

Would love a couple new characters and classes. Since they obviously arent making GW 3 in the next 30 years. Can we at least get a few more characters/classes and even another race if possible? Revananet was a huge let down and the other ones are almost 5 years old

I know the reasons why I will never likely see them, but I would love to see the Tengu and / or Largos as playable. The tengu are a constant tease with their closed door to their lands right in Lion’s Arch, and the Largos we got to meet one member of their race, during the Zhaitan story, then nothing on them at all.

At the very least I would love some more explorable areas for the Tengu and Largos.

Well since you know what arenanet are doing in the next 30 years you should also tell us if they are making new races and classes, you seem to have 30 years of their game plan in your books.

Yes Tengu would be cool. I would prefer new classes more than new races though.

What would a new ‘character’ be (one can already create up to ~70 characters, if one so desires)? I’m not sure we will see any new Professions (Class) or Race, anytime soon (though, of course, no one knows)?

Im all in for new races but not classes the devs don’t seem to be able to handle it.

While I would like to see new classes, I imagine we’ll only be seeing new elite specs for each, since we have a “balance” of 3-each weight class.

I personally would prefer they spend their efforts elsewhere rather than on a new race. The amount of work it would take to make one work hardly seems worth the cost. And if they excluded a new race from all existing things (armor, story) then it seems not worth the effort.

DeanBB.4268:

While I would like to see new classes, I imagine we’ll only be seeing new elite specs for each, since we have a “balance” of 3-each weight class.

I personally would prefer they spend their efforts elsewhere rather than on a new race. The amount of work it would take to make one work hardly seems worth the cost. And if they excluded a new race from all existing things (armor, story) then it seems not worth the effort.

Why? You would have a new race new voiceactor new animations on skills etc thats a stupid amount of content on its own with value for years.

zealex.9410:

Why? You would have a new race new voiceactor new animations on skills etc thats a stupid amount of content on its own with value for years.

You would also need to remake countless skins. Well, unless we assume that they are a carbon copy of an existing race which would kind of defeat the point. Or maybe if they only have one set of armor.

Anet could in that case just release an outfit with a tengu face mask, claw gloves, chicken feet boots and some shoddily glued on moa feathers.

The pros & cons of a new race have been argued to death. Google it.

If a new race is fully integrated:

“New voice actor” = tons of work (expense) to record every existing place a character is used plus going forward just that much more. Male + female, unless the birdmen are unisex and all sound the same (and the community would not accept that). Plus I would assume there would be a number of birdman NPCs needing voices, so add that to the mix.

“New animations” = similar, 2x for male + female (if unique). And sorry, I don’t view “new animations” as new content.

“Etc” = That’s the kicker. How many armor sets are out there? How slow is Anet about creating new ones? Add to that two more (male + female bird) and it takes even longer. Armor is just an example, but a major hurdle. The real issue is that everything they do now is slow, so you want to add to that burden by adding two new models to deal with? With the community already complaining of a lack of new content?

And as I stated originally, I don’t think the GW2 playerbase would be happy if they only got a few new armors to choose from and none of the existing. Same with the story.

A new race would really be Jumping the Shark. Not only would it require hiring new voice actors and refitting every piece of armor in the game, the entertainment it would provided would be as gimmicky and short lived as a child who takes home a gold fish in a bag from the state fair.

With the amount of resources it would take to do this you would be able to fix the competitive modes, release multiple new maps, add hours of story content, or grant pretty much every reasonable QoL request on this forum and reddit.

Please, no thank you

I also want a new playable race; I like the idea of playing as a Tengu. Developing games, and their extensive content takes lots work, so I would expect this to be part of another true expansion, which I would gladly pay the premium of $70 or higher even.

Ramoth.9064:

Well since you know what arenanet are doing in the next 30 years you should also tell us if they are making new races and classes, you seem to have 30 years of their game plan in your books.

More to the point…

The announcement that ArenaNet was dropping GW1 and moving on to a sequel pretty much came out of the blue. One moment people were wondering why we hadn’t had an announcement for campaign 4 and then BAM! Sequel on the horizon (note that GW2 was originally slated to come out… 2009, I think? Suffice it to say they significantly underestimated the development time).

Talking about races and professions…

ArenaNet initially expressed that they were more likely to go with new races than new professions because new races were less likely to cause balance problems, but I think they’ve decided that new races are simply too much work for too little benefit. Particularly since they way they’ve implemented the story, it would be really hard to slot in, say, a Tengu PC.

Regarding professions… they have the same problem they had in GW1. As the existing professions get new options, any new profession is either going to have less options than the others (as happened in GW1) or they’re going to need to do that much more work out the gate than with the original professions (the revenant, for instance, being developed alongside its elite specialisation: a future new profession would likely need to be released with TWO elite specialisations to keep up). It also creates an increasing burden for future expansions: every new profession is another elite specialisation that they need to make in each future expansion. Finally, unless introduced as “no, really, these things were around all along” (which creates its own problems), it increases the degree of ‘time warping’ each character requires: we already have an issue in which revenants go through the Personal Story and season 2 of the Living Story when according to the lore revenants didn’t exist on Tyria until Rytlock’s return at the start of Heart of Thorns.

Frankly, I’d like to see another profession… if for no other reason than to have something to use my level 80 boost on. But I don’t expect it.

DeanBB.4268:

The pros & cons of a new race have been argued to death. Google it.

If a new race is fully integrated:

“New voice actor” = tons of work (expense) to record every existing place a character is used plus going forward just that much more. Male + female, unless the birdmen are unisex and all sound the same (and the community would not accept that). Plus I would assume there would be a number of birdman NPCs needing voices, so add that to the mix.

“New animations” = similar, 2x for male + female (if unique). And sorry, I don’t view “new animations” as new content.

“Etc” = That’s the kicker. How many armor sets are out there? How slow is Anet about creating new ones? Add to that two more (male + female bird) and it takes even longer. Armor is just an example, but a major hurdle. The real issue is that everything they do now is slow, so you want to add to that burden by adding two new models to deal with? With the community already complaining of a lack of new content?

And as I stated originally, I don’t think the GW2 playerbase would be happy if they only got a few new armors to choose from and none of the existing. Same with the story.

True but a new race would come through a new expansion so the cost would be recovered from the copies sold and with a race such as tengu as a selling point alot of ppl will buy it.

New race is unlikely. It’s vastly more work than, say, a new profession.

Feanor.2358:

New race is unlikely. It’s vastly more work than, say, a new profession.

is it though? Idk about you but having to make a new race from scratch with its own 2 elite spec new elite soec each expac and constand balancing look more to me than a 1 time thing which would be makimg new race.

They’re different kinds of work.

A new race is a lot of artistic work. You need to create a wide range of appearances for that race. You also need to make sure that every existing armour set at least looks passable on that race – while I suspect this is probably less work than some people think (I think, although I might be wrong, that the armour set naturally fits itself to the model), they’ll probably need to at least test each of the armour sets to ensure that it’s being fitted properly and correct any major issues that come up.

A new race would also be story work. The laziest they could possibly get away with would require a story explaining how the character happened to join the Orders before Zhaitan’s death while the rest of their race remained isolated, roughly equivalent to the current 10-30 storyline, along with a home city and zones to support them. In the case of the tengu, this could mean an extended newbie zone that results in the PC being tossed out of the Dominion of Winds when they’re high enough level to survive in the region of the tengu gate in Caledon Forest. The later the hypothesised new race gets introduced, the harder it will be to integrate the new race PC into the storyline. For instance, let’s say a that the new race PC joined the main storyline at around the present time (right after Caudecus’ death). Such a scenario would then need to explain how the new race PC is being treated exactly like the veteran dragonslaying Commander is… or would require parallel storylines for as long as the new race PC s not treated the same as the Pact Commander.

A new profession, on the other hand… you need to program in the skills, generate visual and sound effects for those skills, and balance them. Historically, balancing is probably the hardest of those steps. On the other hand, creating a new profession can sometimes be easier to balance than adding new capabilities to an existing profession.

I haven’t been involved in either task or their equivalent, so I can’t really say which is harder than the other for sure… but it does seem that, with the current means of storytelling used in GW2, implementing a new race seems like it would cause more problems.

draxynnic.3719:

The laziest they could possibly get away with would require a story explaining how the character happened to join the Orders before Zhaitan’s death while the rest of their race remained isolated, roughly equivalent to the current 10-30 storyline, along with a home city and zones to support them.

The simple approach would be skipping the original story entirely, having them start at 80 and using the expansion’s main story to introduce them. If a dragon attacked the Tengu wall for example, your first story would be the defense, while everyone else would be the offense. For repeatable stories (season 2+), they could simply say you’re seeing past events and have you appear as a human or whatever.

A new race will forever increase the workload however, so it’ll likely never happen. They could greatly reduce the amount of work however by sharing assets. Largos for example are just blue humans, so everything would already fit, and they could simply morph the voice. Voices could also be unlocked as a customization option, allowing for any race to use any voice.

i really would love to play as a tengu tho… a necromancer with tengu form would be sweet

With Anet saying a set of armor takes 9 months to produce (and legendary armor showing how true that is), I highly doubt we’ll ever see a new race. Though chances are that half of that time is fitting the armor to the charr, they are just to different from the other 4 races that they probably require an entire need set build instead of copy, paste, fit.

IMO they should stop for a moment and truly take the time to repair whatever is working wrong in their armor production process.

I’m not saying that making armor is an easy task. I’m just saying that is very obvious to me that for Anet is WAY harder than it should be. It is very clear that something is not right from the baseline, and they should aknowledge it once and for all, and fix it.

If they take a year just to make the basics work properly, I would gladly support them. If they take a year to make another half adapted, bulky, weird fitting, not cultural armor, I can’t.

I hope they don’t add new races. It already looks like they chew more than they could bite with 5 races because they regularly reminds us how much it makes it harder to make armors, which happen to be a big deal in a game that pretends to reward with skins. If they keep adding more races it will just increase the workload, for creating new costumes and armors, and in the end most people stick to the humanoids for their main anyway (Norns, humans, sylvs) so it would probably be a waste of effort.

If they want to spend time on player characters, I think that time would be better spent improving their character creator, implementing cloaks and capes and creating more armor sets.

Given their House culture; i have no hopes on Largos as playable race whilst the chances are slim on Tengu because they are part of Tyria ever since the creation, they don’t want to partake in any large scale Tyrian conflict so they bird cage them. though i would love to be proven wrong and have them as Racial race (something like that) thru gemstore if need be.

I think tengu are the most propable if ever, but another cool suggestion would be palawa joko’s undead as a playable race

I understand the difficulties of bringing a New race to a game, but I believe it’s doable.

If they are introducing one I’d imagine it has been in the works since HoT or earlier and is near completion. Same for a New profession. Plus, I almost think they have to introduce a new race/profession. New content and story line is fantastic, and will make all of you who have been here for years happy. If they want new paying blood in the game they need to offer something fresh.

Yeah, a New race is probably not on the books, but it is feasible, and it would be a smart business move.

We shall see…