Guild Wars 2

Treise.6958:

Seeing as HoT came with the new profession, Revenant and Anet said flat out theyre not adding anymore more professions….

I don’t remember them saying that. I do remember saying that they weren’t considering a new race. (Maybe they did; I just don’t remember it.)

Treise.6958:

that leaves a slot open for development of a new race

No, it doesn’t “leave a slot” open because the amount of work isn’t comparable. New profs require the combat/skill people; new race requires the writers, the artists, level designers, and voice actors.

A new prof uses the same armor and a lot of the same voice over. Nothing major has to change in the personal story or the Living World.

A new prof requires a lot of balancing work, especially for PvP and WvW and I can see them wanting to stick with just elite specializations (that’s complicated enough).

At first thought it’s a good idea but then you realize that most of the races in the game currently still have a lot of unexplored storyline possibilities. Humans seem to be getting a bit of attention now with LS3 but Norn/Charr have been all but ignored.

I think efforts would be better spent on the races we have now rather than toss a new one into the mix.

Anet did say they were very satisfied with the 3rd heavy armor profession, so they weren’t going to add any other profession, only specs from now on.

I think adding a new race (or races) WILL be indispensable for GW2 at some point in the future, just to make enough hype and catch more buyers as the game became older.

If Anet take that very probable necessity as a great opportunity or as a lame excuse, is to be seen.

Zaxares.5419:

If they do introduce a new race (and I hope they will), I’m 90% certain that it will be the Tengu. They were originally slated to be the 6th playable race at launch, but got cut due to lack of time. They already have a capital city of their own, have a distinct and unique model and culture (one reason why I don’t think Kodan would be a good idea is that they’re too similar thematically to the Norn, both of them being big, physically powerful arctic-dwelling beings), and unlike some of the other races, they presumably have the numbers and the resources to contribute to a global fight against the Elder Dragons and other world-spanning threats.

As for the Personal Story, I suspect a 6th race would have its own Personal Story, tied to a big trip to Cantha or Elona that all the races can play through. Think of it as something similar to Factions or Nightfall, where new characters (in this case the new race) gets to play some early missions before starting the level 80 content, which is also where all existing characters join in.

That would just make me so happy. As I never played GW1 (I played WoW in those days), I have been desiring to play in Cantha and Elona. And I’ve always wanted a playable avian race in an RPG, but no one has ever made any. Elder Scrolls has Khajiit (feline) and Argonian (reptilian), and GW2 has Charr (feline). Makes me sad!

I am most interested in playing tengu and kodan. Quaggan would be awesome, but probably not practical due to their mesh.

I might be misremembering, but I thought I read that tengu use the same mesh as charr. So armor meshes could be somewhat retooled, although we have plenty of clipping issues with charr.

We don’t necessarily need to start with the Zhaitan story and shoehorn the new race in. Story could also use the old gw1 style with a message that pops up. “this happened before your arrival.”

Cecilia.5179:

Rauderi.8706:

I shamefully admit I would shamelessly shovel $90 in new character slots at playable Tengu. :|

Pfft. If the designs were good enough, I would spend $180 on Tengu slots.

I’ve been 1-up’d. ;_;
Doubled.
Outbid.

Proof the money is out there, ANet. Take the number of Charr characters, multiply by $10, and let that be a starting estimate for how much money Tengu would rake in.

+1 for good idea but won’t happen

… and I’m fine with that. Especially since they would probably add Tengu and I’d rather play Skritt.

I REALLY wish they’ll give us a new playable race. And I hope it’ll be Tengu. They are unique. Culturally and lore wise they have ties to Cantha (hail Cantha!!). They already have main city which I believe almost all of us want to visit. And they might have strong reason why they’ll join us after such a long time. Their home is being threatened, by things like destroyers. And destroyers are coming from Primordus. And they’ll probably grow in power, because of what we heard about Primordus. So the main thing that’s threatening them will be more dangerous. And that may finally overcome their tradition of making their city inaccessible to outsiders. Because they’ll need our help, and we might need theirs…
And why I would not like these races:
- Kodan: They are super cool, and I like them, but I just don’t see it. 1st, they are too close to Norn I think. They are both nordic/ice themed. 2nd, if Kodan would ever appear as a playable race, where their main city and leveling zones will be? In Far Shiverpeaks I guess. And Far Shiverpeaks are what? Well, you guessed it, ice themed. And we already have ice themed locations, the Norn ones. And also an important thing, Far Shiverpeaks are being swarmed by Jormag’s minions and highly probably by Jormag itself too. It’s just a war zone. And it’s not a good idea putting new playable race right there. That would be like putting human’s main city + starter areas at the corner of Orr. It’s just not good.
- Largos: For me it’s terrible idea making them playable race. They may be cool, but only as nps for me. First off, I hate their voice. 2nd, their body structure. Their wings will collide with backpacks. And honestly, it would be really weird if they’ll just disappear when you have a backpack. It’s just part of their anatomy, they just cannot simply turn it off (imagine if various armors would turn off charr’s tails). And it was stated that they never appear without their mask. That would mean less face-making options and many helmets will be unusable.
- other races like Quaggan, Skritt, etc.: These races are considered as lesser races, which means they are in lesser stage of evolution than our playable ones. Their intelligence is lower, and they are not even able to fluently talk in a way other races do, which would be a big problem because our character is conversating at many places. Also most of them are not centered in one area, but instead in small communities around the world. They probably do not have any main city. And, honestly, can you imagine a quaggan revenant, or skritt mesmer? Like rly? Maybe it would be funny to see, but lore wise it would be hilarious and nonsense.

And now about those problems of even making a new playable race.
The lore and story: I think it would definitely be a nonsense if new playable race will have the same personal story as the others. But on the other hand, writing a complete new story lvl 1-80 would be probably too expensive. So there might be a solution like this:
The tengu (I’ll talk about tengu now) will have a main city and one zone for lvl 1-15 (or 20 maybe?). In the update (or before the update) where tengu become playable, these zones are opened to others. And the playable tengu will have some restrictions: you can create Tengu only if you have already lvl 80 character with completed personal story (so new players do not get confused with their story + reasons I’ll explain below) and only to HoT owners (their personal story will be directly followed by living world/expansion story). And they will start in their starter zone. They will have to solve problems around destroyers. Their story and starter area will be about that (+ maybe about things like dealing with the gates of Dominion of Winds suddenly opened up → their story will start short time after they are opened). Their story will continue until lvl 15 (or 20?). Then with some big finale/boss/discovery they will get an option to instantly lvl up to 80. They don’t have to, but their story will only continue if they make it/reach lvl 80. Then a 2nd part of their personal story will start. This one may be about meeting our characters like Rytlock, Marjory, Taimi, etc. and become integrated into their group. This part may end with defeating together some boss? Then, after that, their personal story is done and then living world story will continue. In that, Tengu might have slight variations of it depending on their story overall.
I can see it working this way, or in a similar way…

And about the other things, like making new armor, hiring voice actors, etc. … well I’m not a developer, so I can’t say how to deal with these… but if Anet manages to deal with it, and gives us a new playable race, I would be extremely happy.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Start Up Costs (for a new race)

• Create three variations each of the L10, L20, and L30 chapters of the Personal Story.
• Insert new race into all the other chapters.
• Insert new race into LS2, HoT, and LS3 chapters.
• New & adapted stories must be translated into French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin.
• Hire male & female voice actors (in all five supported languages) to cover all of above, plus skills.
• Create new cultural skills.
• Figure out what to use as new race’s home city, starter areas.
• Invent cultural armor (3 tiers, 3 armor weights each)
• Adapt/QA all existing armor, weapons, backs, and gliders so that it works for new race.

Ongoing Costs (for a new race)

• Write new race into new stories.
• Ensure actors (in all five support languages) are under a contract that makes them available at the appropriate times.
• Also ensure actor availability any time there’s a new elite specialization
• Extra time for rendering/QA for weapons, armor, backs, gliders.
• Extra time for animating new skills (for elite specializations).

(I’m sure I’m forgetting something)

---

The short of it is:

• Huge initial costs.
• Increased costs for new stories, skins, and skills.

What else could ANet do with those same resources? How much more story? How many more armor sets, outfits, weapon skins?

I’d love to see a new race; I’d just rather see all the other things we’d miss out.

Illconcived summarized it pretty well. It not going to happen. Too much cost and would not cause enough traction.

New playable races are something I would’ve considered really valuable. I love creating tons of different characters.

It’s all about the looks, I don’t care about the stories very much. Something like the biography in character creation is nice, to learn some background detail about characters. I adore my noble and the street rats.
(I only ever played any story one time because stuff just kept distracting me. I did read tiny bit about some of the others)

Tengu … superior race. Still guarding there door to the homeland.

Back when the game was in its infancy (I started at 3 months after launch), I tried playing every race and profession to get a feel for what I’d enjoy most to play but I only played up to around level 15 or so.

Ultimately, I picked Asura and Elementalist and got to level 80. I also made a couple Warriors, a Mesmer, an Engineer and later a Ranger then Thief. Since making my thief (and making the best choice I’ve made so far by making her female! XD) I’ve resolved to wait until a more desired race/gender combo arises before finally making my level 80 Guardian, Necromancer (and now, Revenant).

I would LOVE to finally play a Guard or Necro but I want to play them as something different. A Tengu Necro would just be perfect and would finally give me some personal experience with that profession.

Fix the clipping on old races before we get a new one.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I wouldn’t play a new race, but I wouldn’t mind it if people wanted it. Anything that helps the game is good in my book.

Same here. I’ve been reading through all the threads about the new races (aka. “We want Tengu”) and was like “Sure, why not, as long as this game gets the support it deserves”. I am happy with what we have now. When you look to other games (except for a few ones) they basically just have humanoid ones, e.g. FF14: Humans, tall humans, stretched humans, humans with tail and ears attached, humans with hideous horns attached.

It was refreshing to see we have plant people and cat-like beasts with a great lore behind. Having another species would be nice, but then, I will be very pleased with the Asura forever (they dragged and hooked me into this game after all).

It’s just sad that the gigantic and awesome lore this game has to offer might be hold back like this. I wonder if any sort of survey with a pre-paid feature would ArenaNet consider this; If they would know a chunk of this cost would be covered by players of the new race. Some sort of kickstarter funding thing. (Even though of course the costs are immense and not covered by having 1,000 x €50)

Having a new playable race is a good idea IF:
1: It’s not only about the race but also the starting areas, several low level zones with a new exploration achievement, hearts vistas and so on. So that low level players starting in vanilla could eventually migrate to the new maps and explore them without get killed by high level mobs.
^ this means having a bunch of little chain events like the vanilla game.
2. deep lore explorable with the outside and inside perspective.

I still like the idea of having new races, and the different appearance of each race and lore is something that made me buy Gw2.

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

There could be a new race.
What if your character could actually be a mursaat hibernating in another race's form. And at some point the game asks if you want your character to stay as an asura/charr/etc or metamorphose into a mursaat.
Make it a legendary quest or something.

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

I think the Skrit would be a fun race to play :P Love those little dudes

LucosTheDutch.4819:

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

I’d go 1 step further and require certain achievements from the PS so, at the very least, the player has experienced the portion of the game before the point of the new race’s PS.

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

Zedek.8932:

It’s just sad that the gigantic and awesome lore this game has to offer might be hold back like this. I wonder if any sort of survey with a pre-paid feature would ArenaNet consider this; If they would know a chunk of this cost would be covered by players of the new race. Some sort of kickstarter funding thing. (Even though of course the costs are immense and not covered by having 1,000 x €50)

Shut up A-net and take our money! All of em… i’ll pay with the souls of forum posters if that’ll help too! oh.. wait.. skip that.. but even if you have to employ another hundred workers, to create this, and do it via kick starter project, I think it would be worth it! If you cant make the donations needed, at least you wont loose anything from trying!

Since it is a buy to play kind of game, it would make sense to treat each expansion with the same care as a stand alone game. Thus put the budget into it! Even if we have to pay though kick starter I’m all for it!

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

It wasn’t because they lacked the funds? Here MO talks about tough decisions they had to make between making new content or making new Legendaries. They didn’t have enough people to work on the new Legendaries and also to make the new content so they halted production and switched them over.

In that quote he specifically said they knew it was long term project. So therefore if they knew it would take years then the time the team was taking wasn’t the problem. They did, after all, get 3 new ones and all the old ones done before they quit so they were on track, or even ahead of schedule. However they needed more devs working on new content and in spite of having to go back on expansion advertisements and what was paid for, they didn’t hire the new devs. So that shows it’s a finance problem. They couldn’t afford new devs. They had to retrench and reallocate.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we’ll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That’s a big responsibility. We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I’ll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I’m always available by email.

Mo

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

It wasn’t because they lacked the funds? Here MO talks about tough decisions they had to make between making new content or making new Legendaries. They didn’t have enough people to work on the new Legendaries and also to make the new content so they halted production and switched them over.

In that quote he specifically said they knew it was long term project. So therefore if they knew it would take years then the time the team was taking wasn’t the problem. They did, after all, get 3 new ones and all the old ones done before they quit so they were on track, or even ahead of schedule. However they needed more devs working on new content and in spite of having to go back on expansion advertisements and what was paid for, they didn’t hire the new devs. So that shows it’s a finance problem. They couldn’t afford new devs. They had to retrench and reallocate.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we’ll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That’s a big responsibility. We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I’ll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I’m always available by email.

Mo

Are you aware that reallocation of resources doesn’t mean exactly that they don’t have enough founds? You are still making a bunch of assumptions…
Here in the quote all that MO states is that he preferred to focus on living story and faster shipping instead of wasting time on the legendary journey that will take years to be properly finished. That’s it!
No sign whatsoever of what you and other people keep talking about of Anet not having enough founds to focus on a new race or “no don’t suggest new stuff because they already don’t have enough people to fix the bugs”. This doesn’t make sense!

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Gehenna.3625:

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Well why should you play anything else then human when 90% of the armors are made for them then streched to kinda fit the other races.

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

It wasn’t because they lacked the funds? Here MO talks about tough decisions they had to make between making new content or making new Legendaries. They didn’t have enough people to work on the new Legendaries and also to make the new content so they halted production and switched them over.

In that quote he specifically said they knew it was long term project. So therefore if they knew it would take years then the time the team was taking wasn’t the problem. They did, after all, get 3 new ones and all the old ones done before they quit so they were on track, or even ahead of schedule. However they needed more devs working on new content and in spite of having to go back on expansion advertisements and what was paid for, they didn’t hire the new devs. So that shows it’s a finance problem. They couldn’t afford new devs. They had to retrench and reallocate.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we’ll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That’s a big responsibility. We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I’ll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I’m always available by email.

Mo

Are you aware that reallocation of resources doesn’t mean exactly that they don’t have enough founds? You are still making a bunch of assumptions…
Here in the quote all that MO states is that he preferred to focus on living story and faster shipping instead of wasting time on the legendary journey that will take years to be properly finished. That’s it!
No sign whatsoever of what you and other people keep talking about of Anet not having enough founds to focus on a new race or “no don’t suggest new stuff because they already don’t have enough people to fix the bugs”. This doesn’t make sense!

He said he had to make a tough choice. You don’t have to make a tough choice when you have the resources needed to do both things.

New Legendaries were a part of the new expansion that we paid for. When a business announces to the people who paid for something that they have to make a tough choice and not provide it, it’s not a decision lightly made. If he couldn’t do both things then there were constraints. They could have hired new devs, but they didn’t. They instead retrenched. Reallocated. And that says lack of funds.

That quote is 4 months old. If you look on the other thread about their finances you see that last quarterly report had their lowest earnings so far.

Linken.6345:

Gehenna.3625:

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Well why should you play anything else then human when 90% of the armors are made for them then streched to kinda fit the other races.

Because I see plenty of them every single day in RL so they get boring no matter how well their clothes fit. For example.

anninke.7469:

Linken.6345:

Gehenna.3625:

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Well why should you play anything else then human when 90% of the armors are made for them then streched to kinda fit the other races.

Because I see plenty of them every single day in RL so they get boring no matter how well their clothes fit. For example.

Yea I agree with you this was jab at the devs taking the easy way out, in my oppinion the legendary precursor armor we seen are the human ones.
Were are the ones to fit charr, asura, norn and sylvari

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

It wasn’t because they lacked the funds? Here MO talks about tough decisions they had to make between making new content or making new Legendaries. They didn’t have enough people to work on the new Legendaries and also to make the new content so they halted production and switched them over.

In that quote he specifically said they knew it was long term project. So therefore if they knew it would take years then the time the team was taking wasn’t the problem. They did, after all, get 3 new ones and all the old ones done before they quit so they were on track, or even ahead of schedule. However they needed more devs working on new content and in spite of having to go back on expansion advertisements and what was paid for, they didn’t hire the new devs. So that shows it’s a finance problem. They couldn’t afford new devs. They had to retrench and reallocate.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we’ll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That’s a big responsibility. We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I’ll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I’m always available by email.

Mo

Are you aware that reallocation of resources doesn’t mean exactly that they don’t have enough founds? You are still making a bunch of assumptions…
Here in the quote all that MO states is that he preferred to focus on living story and faster shipping instead of wasting time on the legendary journey that will take years to be properly finished. That’s it!
No sign whatsoever of what you and other people keep talking about of Anet not having enough founds to focus on a new race or “no don’t suggest new stuff because they already don’t have enough people to fix the bugs”. This doesn’t make sense!

He said he had to make a tough choice. You don’t have to make a tough choice when you have the resources needed to do both things.

New Legendaries were a part of the new expansion that we paid for. When a business announces to the people who paid for something that they have to make a tough choice and not provide it, it’s not a decision lightly made. If he couldn’t do both things then there were constraints. They could have hired new devs, but they didn’t. They instead retrenched. Reallocated. And that says lack of funds.

That quote is 4 months old. If you look on the other thread about their finances you see that last quarterly report had their lowest earnings so far.

Wrong… they are not hiring other people for the legendary team because MO thought it was not worth it. In fact they are hiring more people for all the positions, and they keep doing it because they can afford it, just take a look at the anet site once in a while. If the situation was as you are saying they wouldn’t hire that many people. Also the posts in careers are much more than a year ago..meaning? they are intensifying hiring for the expansion and new content..
Legendaries were not delivered most probably because the planning for the shipping was wrong and too positive about the timing. The though choice was about reallocating devs on things that they know they can do right and letting prople down about the decision…
Sure we could have had new legendaries in a year or so…or maybe with the release of the next expansion but MO took the right decision to cut with the lies.
But if you prefer to belive the “Anet has not enough money!” theory, you are welcome to do so… just don’t spread misinformation please…

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Dantert.1803:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

A new race would be possible and it would make most sense to introduce them as a “hero race”. Those familiar with World of Warcraft know what I mean. It would be a race that starts at lvl 80 and would have a short introductory mission that introduces the race into the world and story, after which they start with the new content straight away.
They would not have acces to the vanilla personal story or any of the previous living world stories, instead they would start with the story of the newest expansion straight away.

That’s a clever work-around to some of the cost issues raised above. It presumes that future players won’t care about missing out on the Personal Story (or the 9 mastery point unlocks it offers), LS2, HoT, and LS3. I doubt that’s a good assumption given how many people are clamoring for Living World, Season 1. Although, of course, the existing stories would (and points) would still be available via other character slots, so let’s accept the idea.

ANet still needs to hire new actors and write appropriate dialogue for specializations, for future stories. They still need voice overs for existing skills/specializations. It’s still much more expensive to add a new race than add 9 more specializations.

Again, I would love to see a new race. I just don’t think it’s practical in the current environment, in which people are worried about ANet being able to deliver quality content on a regular basis.

I should have explained it more properly I guess: They idea of a hero class/race is that you need to have at least 1 lvl 80 character already before you can create one.

It still wouldn’t be cheap to develop such a race but if WoW and other MMOs can introduce new classes and races (even non-hero ones) with expansions than why not GW2? I know Anet doesn’t make as much money as Blizzard but WoW today isn’t THAT much ahead of GW2 in terms of popularity and revenue. Yet they still launch their upcoming expansion with the Demon Hunter, a new hero class/race similar to what I proposed Anet could do for future playable races.

The last reported subscription numbers for WoW was over 5 million. From the NA and EU subscribers at least Blizzard gets $15 or $20 dollars for each month they play (depending if they pay outright or buy tokens) plus they have a cash shop on top of that. That’s a lot of money on a per month basis. Compare that to gw2’s numbers (unknown but undoubtably less than 5 million) and not only no subscription but it has people who proclaim they’ll never spend a dime again unless ANet changes something or other to their personal satisfaction. This last quarter was the lowest one for ANet. Blizzard has reported exceeding expectations, both company wide and for WoW only and their company wide income is in the billions.

ANet has to look at its costs carefully before committing to a new feature. They didn’t even have enough money to continue with Legendary crafting, an advertised and paid for feature of this expansion. There’s a lot of costs involved in making a new race, both immediate and ongoing, and they’ll need to know they’ll get that money back.

You are actually making assumptions from nothing… you don’t write like someone that knows how game production works, so why your ideas about the current state of A-net should be of any importance? No offense meant there…
A-net cut the Legendaries not because they lack the founds but because they lack a team able to produce the legendary journey fast enough and in an interesting way.
On the other side they have shown us with the 5 races we have that they are more than capable to deliver Lore and interesting appearances for new races, because they have a team that has experience in creating characters animations and so on(experience that comes from ex Blizzard devs also).
Looking as things are now, a new race, with the quality of the current races, the much better storytelling and ability to deliver lore that we got in the Ls3(tat was amazing in my opinion btw), would be a really good plus to push people to buy the new expansion. Because, I want to repeat myself, that is what arenanet can do best and they should focus on their strong points instead of spreading too thin.

It wasn’t because they lacked the funds? Here MO talks about tough decisions they had to make between making new content or making new Legendaries. They didn’t have enough people to work on the new Legendaries and also to make the new content so they halted production and switched them over.

In that quote he specifically said they knew it was long term project. So therefore if they knew it would take years then the time the team was taking wasn’t the problem. They did, after all, get 3 new ones and all the old ones done before they quit so they were on track, or even ahead of schedule. However they needed more devs working on new content and in spite of having to go back on expansion advertisements and what was paid for, they didn’t hire the new devs. So that shows it’s a finance problem. They couldn’t afford new devs. They had to retrench and reallocate.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we’ll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That’s a big responsibility. We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I’ll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I’m always available by email.

Mo

Are you aware that reallocation of resources doesn’t mean exactly that they don’t have enough founds? You are still making a bunch of assumptions…
Here in the quote all that MO states is that he preferred to focus on living story and faster shipping instead of wasting time on the legendary journey that will take years to be properly finished. That’s it!
No sign whatsoever of what you and other people keep talking about of Anet not having enough founds to focus on a new race or “no don’t suggest new stuff because they already don’t have enough people to fix the bugs”. This doesn’t make sense!

He said he had to make a tough choice. You don’t have to make a tough choice when you have the resources needed to do both things.

New Legendaries were a part of the new expansion that we paid for. When a business announces to the people who paid for something that they have to make a tough choice and not provide it, it’s not a decision lightly made. If he couldn’t do both things then there were constraints. They could have hired new devs, but they didn’t. They instead retrenched. Reallocated. And that says lack of funds.

That quote is 4 months old. If you look on the other thread about their finances you see that last quarterly report had their lowest earnings so far.

Wrong… they are not hiring other people for the legendary team because MO thought it was not worth it. In fact they are hiring more people for all the positions, and they keep doing it because they can afford it, just take a look at the anet site once in a while. If the situation was as you are saying they wouldn’t hire that many people. Also the posts in careers are much more than a year ago..meaning? they are intensifying hiring for the expansion and new content..
Legendaries were not delivered most probably because the planning for the shipping was wrong and too positive about the timing. The though choice was about reallocating devs on things that they know they can do right and letting prople down about the decision…
Sure we could have had new legendaries in a year or so…or maybe with the release of the next expansion but MO took the right decision to cut with the lies.
But if you prefer to belive the “Anet has not enough money!” theory, you are welcome to do so… just don’t spread misinformation please…

You are also making assumptions, for example
Legendaries were not delivered most probably because the planning for the shipping was wrong and too positive about the timing.
An assumption, unless you can give us a quote.

I’m basing my assumption on

• The expansion didn’t sell as well as they expected so they didn’t make the expected profit (from the previous quarterly report)
• It wasn’t played as much as they expected (from them having to rework the new areas last April to make them more palatable to players).
• The last quarter brought in the least amount of income so far. (Current quarterly report)
• The very fact that we paid for something and it had to be “indefinitely suspended” and the people reassigned to making new content (instead of hiring more 6 people).
• Businesses don’t normally take people’s money and then don’t provide what was paid for unless there is a very good reason not to. Considering that they already knew that the Legendaries were a long term project, and that they were an advertised feature of an expansion that didn’t bring in the expected income, that says there was a money shortage.

Your assumption is that they are doing well financially. The last 2 quarterly reports say otherwise.

Since we are not going to convince each other and we’ll be rehashing the same ground after this, I’ll leave it at that.

Linken.6345:

Gehenna.3625:

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Well why should you play anything else then human when 90% of the armors are made for them then streched to kinda fit the other races.

There’s a lot of people who don’t really care about how MANY armors look good for a race.

If we’re making up statistics, I’d say at least 75% of the players care more that 90% of armor look like crappy buttcapes, trenchcoats and floaty shoulder castles than actual good-looking armor, and that goes for all the races.

Those that don’t play human characters likely gravitate to that 10% of armor that does look good on a given race.

Linken.6345:

Gehenna.3625:

I think that we can expect Anet to put resources into an expansion, but it’s not about cost, it’s about cost vs benefit. Now, I do not know the statistics for GW2 but chances are that just like in other games the vast majority of characters created are human (and in GW2 that might include the norn as they visually are just oversized humans). So that makes creating a new race that not that many people will make use of a bad choice for putting your resources, particularly if the resource cost is high.

I personally doubt that enough people play non humans to make it worth the investment.

Well why should you play anything else then human when 90% of the armors are made for them then streched to kinda fit the other races.

Well, we have humans, tiny humans with funny ears, big humans and leafy plant humans. The Charr are more bestial though walking on their rear legs. I suppose the Charr would represent the biggest challenge, but in essence it’s all built around the same basic model of a being that stands on two legs, has two arms and a head.

So really, they are all just variants of humans mostly.

Regarding the backpieces for Largos, I don’t think it’s really an issue. There’s plenty of space as you can see in these screenshots for a backpiece. As for wing backpieces, or different glider skins, they can use the existing toggle to choose between showing their skin or showing their natural wings. Not a hard decision.

I think it would be kinda neat to play a centaur.

The expansion can’t have any lasting content because Arenanet have;

• stated,
• a track record of,
  a lack of resources and willpower to
• produce content for, or,
• balance it.

Thus the expansion will be story mode only content with no new classes or races.

Leiloni.7951:

Regarding the backpieces for Largos, I don’t think it’s really an issue. There’s plenty of space as you can see in these screenshots for a backpiece. As for wing backpieces, or different glider skins, they can use the existing toggle to choose between showing their skin or showing their natural wings. Not a hard decision.

All largos encountered so far have been tall, humanoid creatures with pale blue skin, and white hair. They have wing-like appendages attached at the base of their neck, which are used for swimming. These “wings” are often brightly-coloured and resemble butterfly wings in design.

If it’s an appendage then it’s part of their body. You’re suggesting they toggle off body parts to avoid clipping. That’s not a good suggestion. You might as well suggest that Charr tails have a toggle on/off so they don’t clip with armor.