Guild Wars 2

If I remember correctly, way back in the past the devs said Cantha and Elona would not be available in GW2 because NCSoft demanded the game to be kind of “culture neutral”, that’s why we had the big sinkhole in Divinity’s Reach, cause it was originally a Canthan disctrict, but they had to scrap it at the last moment, thus making the great collapse, which represented how ArenaNet felt with such decision.

Now we are going to Elona and we clearly have African features available for our characters.

Does this mean that NCSoft has taken back this decision, and maybe we’ll see Cantha as well in the future?

I do remember the thing with Cantha being a no fly zone, but I don’t believe we were ever told Elona was off the table.

That being said, time can bring change, and it is possible the person/people who were stopping the devs and story writers from creating content of specific ethnic backgrounds might be gone, and they might be able to move in those directions now.

Of course, this is all speculation. I have not heard anything official to say Cantha is open to being a thing again. Then again…they never tell us much until it’s about to happen, so it is likely if Cantha is on the table again, we will not know until it’s happening.

Players came to those conclusions, never came from the company.

Your memory is a bit off.

First, the “devs” never said much about Cantha or Elona other than they weren’t part of immediate plans at launch or after HoT. Second, we only know about what happened before the sinkhole from a single developer; it wasn’t about “culture neutrality”. The issue was specific to the Canthan district.

Here’s what the dev said in an interview with fans:

We had a Cantha district. It was built out. It was polished. It was beautiful. We kept getting feedback about the Asian market. And everyone was having a problem with it because the Chinese don’t like having their architecture mixed with Koreans and the Koreans don’t like having their architecture with the Chinese. And of course it’s fantasy smorgosbord. It’s gothic mixed with Nordic mixed with … that’s just the way fantasy works. But not over there apparently. So it got to the point where we were like … well, what do we do with this spot? We don’t have time to rebuild from scratch, so we just nuked it.

He didn’t explain who “everyone” was that had “a big problem” and the reason he gave … has some issues. There’s all sorts of games with mixed Asian influences and this is a game produced in the US, originally for US & EU markets (primarily).

Regardless, whatever it was … was clearly specific to how that particular section of a single city was handled; it wasn’t about avoiding influences beyond Europe, North America, or the Middle East.

In short, we don’t have any information about why we didn’t visit Cantha or Elona before 2017; all we know is that we went to the Prophecies areas of the game first and the Nightfall areas second.