Guild Wars 2

I’m very mildly disappointed but not surprised about the lack of a new race in HoT (presumably). However, I wanted to ruminate on the challenges of adding a new race and discuss sensible ways of doing it in the future.

The major hurdle to adding a new race is the structure of the PS. Now, on the one hand they could significantly alter or remove the PS. Honestly, it wasn’t particularly well done so this may not be as out of the question as it seems, though I’m sure it would upset a lot of people.

Without doing that, attempting to shoehorn in new races into the existing lore within the current PS framework would not only be a huge hassle, but would threaten the immersiveness of the game world (here we go, retcons!). When you consider the current focus and trajectory of the story in addition to that, it starts to make a lot more sense why they (again, presumably) aren’t doing it for HoT.

However, we all want new race options – so what’s the solution? I’m guessing that it makes more sense to not release new races in a piecemeal way, but instead to have certain expansions (perhaps every other expansion) centered around new races and continents (like Cantha!). These expansions would release multiple new races simultaneously and introduce a completely new PS that each of the races’ backstories ties into. Perhaps elements of this PS could be related back to the LW and to the stories of the classic 5 races.

If they go that route, they’d probably want to overhaul the structure of the PS anyway to make it a much bigger selling point. This could be done by using GW1 style missions, NPC management, getting rid of those awful dialogue sequences, and various other features.

The solution for the PS problem is an easy one for tengu. If I’m not mistaken, there are a few tengu already a part of the Pact when they establish Fort Trinity. So the PC tengu could simply disagree with their leaders’ isolationist policies and strike out on their own to join the fight against the Elder Dragons.