Guild Wars 2

Beating a dead horse, I know. I’m sure this’ll get picked apart pretty quickly, but was trying to brainstorm through the typical issues associated with adding new races.

Xpan exclusive content:

Have them either start at level 80, or give them a starting area that quickly vaults them up to 80. This could be done by an accelerated story arc in which completed chapters offer 10-15 levels per segment (for a total of 6-8 total instances) The racial content could be heavily tied to the xpan, maybe Kodan as they realize the fight with Jormagg is finally upon them (as an example). So you get a smaller, quicker version of the core campaign’s 1-80 story leading up to the fight with Zhaitan. Once they’re at level 80, they’re good to participate in the xpan content at large, and perhaps have little race-specific bits for them like Sylvari in HoTs.

(Not) Retro-ing race into old content:

Either this race will not be able to participate in the story bits from past content, or they will have to “pick a race” to play as an simply have their avatar subbed into a race’s story using that race’s voice acting/etc. Would break continuity a bit and feel rough/awkward, but would provide a way to do past content without making the Devs/Anet do a huge amount of retroactive work.

Issues:

I know making a new, non-humanoid race would be a lot of work for reskinning/shaping armors to fit their models, so that might kill the idea in the end. Unless they were very humanoid in shape to require minimal adjustments, I doubt we’d get a new race.

Introductory ideas:

Essentially races that would have strong ties to a dragon, who have been very affected by their presence. Kodan could come with Jormagg, Largos with Bubbles, maybe Dwarves with Primordius, and Forgotten or Elonan Centaurs with Kral? Tengu could maybe fit into a Cantha-related xpan, but I don’t know if there’s a corresponding dragon for their area (maybe Bubbles).

Moot point with auto scaling of levels. My HoT purchased gave me my guardian. She was still level nothing in new player areas. Personnaly I love the story too much to pass it by. New races? Dwarves! And if you don`t want to read thier story stop now.

When physical reality can into being choas reigned. The hand of creation created the stone dwarves to give structure to a newly forming reality. At this time they weren`t what you would call sentient beings merely existing to counter and give structure to choas. This is the where the early reference of the Builders comes from. Chaos contained; it was also concentrated. And from this arose the first dragon. Sentient and born of creation itself the dragon was jealous of the stone dwarves. Born from the same hand they where beyond it`s control and this dragon held the full power of creation. So came into being, the dragons own creation, the titans (ancestors to the giant races and their ancestors too. The Ettin, Norn etc). Consumed by the power of creation the dragon lacked wisdom. In making the Titans sentient it created it`s equal. And they outnumbered it. Where are they now? Where are the great trees that reached into the heavens to give breath to this new reality? Where are the dragon`s second creation? Small sentient beings to small in statue to be a threat. And their descendants. Still feeling the desire to have, to create “stuff”.

And so the story goes…

Macnor.4832:

Moot point with auto scaling of levels. My HoT purchased gave me my guardian. She was still level nothing in new player areas. Personnaly I love the story too much to pass it by. New races? Dwarves! And if you don`t want to read thier story stop now.

Except that we met the dwarves back in GW1, and they were flesh-and-blood. When Primordus was first starting to rise, the dwarves sought out a ritual to turn themselves into stone, but realized that would be the death of their race. Dwarves cannot reproduce, and the few dwarves that remain existed 250 years ago. So your entire story is wrong.

To the original topic, I really wouldn’t be interested in having another quick leveling zone like they did in Factions or Nightfall. I much preferred how things were in Prophecies, where the zones slowly got higher, rather than a quick-leveling system so the existing characters could play through most of the story without retreading old ground. So if, for instance, the Tengu were made playable, I’d want their starting zone to be tied to Caledon Forest and they leveled just like other characters towards a main goal. There was the tengu blacksmith, Izu, so it’s not as if they were entirely removed from the assault on Zhaitan. Fighting tengu in the jungle might be weird, though, unless they were a villainous faction.

Also, I sadly don’t feel like the kodan will be a playable race. I was in favour of the idea up until they added the endless kodan potion. That was pretty much the death of them as a playable race.

Kodan had never ever a chance to become a playable race from begin on, therefore they are way too much lorewise linked to the Norn, they also look all the same, have no beginner town, unlike the Tengu for example, which are a customizable race, have had from begin on an locked away town.

They were even conceptionally planned as playable race, so if a race has th biggest chances to become ever added as new playable race first – then its the Tengu and they are basically aside of the Largos (hopefully redesigned) the only race, that makes sense to to be added later, which is alonside the Largos unique enough in themself besides the other playable races.

However, so far ANet hasn#t been able to show us even, that they are just able to implement new weapon types like polearms into the game, which also were partwise concepted to be part of the game, but got then removed before release of GW2 for whatever for non understandable reasons.
Makes it hard to believe, that we will ever see a new race being added, if they can’t yet add even something more simple, like new weapon types yet and anet having found their likings for now first more onto Elite Specializations – which is also fine, but disappoiunting when you know, that this way a new playable race mostly has no chance to ever see the light of the day in GW2.

I’m all for new playable races, but with all due respect to Dwarves…..been there, done that in other games. What makes GW2 unique are playing races you can’t play in other fantasy MMORPS… Sylvari, Norn, Charr, Asura So if we were going to add a playable race, my first pick would be the Tengu (there is already a potential starting area waiting for them between Lions Arch and Kessex Hills/Caledon Forest). Other ideas would be the Quaggan, Skritt or even Centaurs (Hey, Centaurs can’t all be evil, just ask Ventari).. But my first choice would be the Tengu.

I think the OP, like many others, has grossly underestimated the effort needed to set up a new race. I think they have also misunderstood ANet’s attitude about new content: they don’t like to do anything half-way; if they introduce new races, they are going to have strong stories, something more than just being a slightly different skin.

How much should a company over-simplify a new race just for the sake of saying that there’s a new race in the game? If you can’t play it sub-80, if there’s no personal story, if it re-uses gear skins, if it doesn’t have a unique set of voices… is it still a new race?

Regardless, the question isn’t really, “how much work is it?” It’s a matter of, “if we have that amount of resources to work on new content, what’s the best thing for the community for us to do?” So far, the answer has always been: there are still plenty of other things that players want to see more than a new race, plus plenty of combinations of 3-4 things we could do instead.

Or in other words, do we — as a community — prefer to slow down the pace of the Living Story to fewer times a year? or would we rather have a new race? Do we want new zones and new stories for the 2nd expac? Or a new race?

(Of course, it’s not as linear a question as I’ve made it sound; assigning resources is much more complicated.)

tl;dr lots of people want to see races; that’s not the issue. The problem is: we also want to see lot of other new things, and a new race consumes a lot of the same resources. There are too many other things competing for the dev’s attention.

oh yes, new races
with new voice actors
and new racial armor
and a whole capital with a 1-15 levelling zone
and all new armors
and 20% extra work on all planned armors
and new animations and skill movements

..

I think you get my point

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the OP, like many others, has grossly underestimated the effort needed to set up a new race. I think they have also misunderstood ANet’s attitude about new content: they don’t like to do anything half-way; if they introduce new races, they are going to have strong stories, something more than just being a slightly different skin.

How much should a company over-simplify a new race just for the sake of saying that there’s a new race in the game? If you can’t play it sub-80, if there’s no personal story, if it re-uses gear skins, if it doesn’t have a unique set of voices… is it still a new race?

Regardless, the question isn’t really, “how much work is it?” It’s a matter of, “if we have that amount of resources to work on new content, what’s the best thing for the community for us to do?” So far, the answer has always been: there are still plenty of other things that players want to see more than a new race, plus plenty of combinations of 3-4 things we could do instead.

Or in other words, do we — as a community — prefer to slow down the pace of the Living Story to fewer times a year? or would we rather have a new race? Do we want new zones and new stories for the 2nd expac? Or a new race?

(Of course, it’s not as linear a question as I’ve made it sound; assigning resources is much more complicated.)

tl;dr lots of people want to see races; that’s not the issue. The problem is: we also want to see lot of other new things, and a new race consumes a lot of the same resources. There are too many other things competing for the dev’s attention.

This.^ No offense to you at all OP, but at this point I just don’t see it as an undertaking that Anet would want to involve themselves in. I understand your wanting it, however.

After all, people clamor for new content on a second by second basis. A new race would not entail actual new content except for the personal story which many people want nothing to do with. Especially those dedicated PvP and WvW players. Most players would rather have new maps, map content, armor, weapons, villains, etc.

In GW2 and to a lesser degree in GW, people as a whole seemed to want more content than playable races.

It would be nice, just not feasible I think.

One thing that bothers me: look at core Tiria tengu and then look at HoT Quetzal tengu .
Core Tiria ones use charr skeleton and animations. Quetzal tengu use new skeleton and animations.
Why bother and make a unique skeleton, animations and model for an enemy that is barely used in expansion? They just sit in hard to get corners of AB, not tied to meta or personal story (like new hylek). So, maybe (I hope) Anet was not wasting resorses that way? Maybe new tengu were made for a future expansion? They gave us revenant in HoT, I don’t expact a new profession. But a new playable race can fill that gap.
WoW brings new class or race every expansion (exept Warlords of Draenor, which just blew in all the ways). People like something like that to be added into game.

I prefer new classes and skills. I’m gonna make humans anyway since the other races are ugly. But I do find their skill animations and dances are so much funnier than Humans.

Lol y’all are too much. This was a hypothetical paradigm for introducing new races, though I knew I’d get replies from people with no chill.

I may be completely off my mark here, and if so I apologize.

I personally believe the most likely scenario for a new playable race is with the introduction of an entirely new region, similar to HoT but on a bigger scale. If done this way the personal story and leveling zones can all be tied into the story up to that point, integrating the new character into the current story without having to backtrack through multiple expansions for the story to make sense like other mmo’s.

As far as how to treat existing story with the new races, I think the best solution would be to bite the bullet and voice everything over. However, more cost effective options exist – the most immersive being to write in an excuse to send the race back through the old story, you will see your character but the world will see you as another race. Could be explained as “you are late to the party, you should know how we got here” or something. I believe this would cut down on the voice acting significantly. Another option would be to simply not have any pre-xpac story be voiced for the new race, or even release pre-xpac story episodically for the new race.

As for the work involved in retroactively fitting all old skins to the new race, I think the work actually depends a lot on the race chosen. Dwarves wouldn’t be too much work relative to another anthro race like the Charr, but I think the overall work of implementing a race that was never at any stage of development that we know of is too great. Tengu are the most likely imho, and I think there’d be far less work involved than people might believe – looking at their model types they share a lot of similarities with Charr models: an elongated facial structure, reverse leg joints, a sort of hunched posture, etc… But more importantly, let’s not forget that the Tengu were planned, so we don’t know how much vanilla work is actually done; they could be practically ready to launch but Anet decided to keep them as part of a more cohesive grand plan.

To summarize:
- Dwarves and Tengu are my top 2 choices for likely race.
- Would probably come with a large map expansion, including new leveling zones
- Would integrate into current story at the time
- Would have a creative mechanism for experiencing old story as an optional endeavor ( optional = immersion not #1 priority)
- Dwarves skin modeling might be the easiest from a labor perspective
- But Tengu may have most of their work done already

Overall chance of seeing a new race in my mind: 70%, a lot depends on the success of the gem store prior to announcement of next expansion. They seem to have entered a sort of cruise mode on the gem store with a lot fewer variety of new items and more re-introductions. I believe they’ve figured out a good system for gem store items that can sustain them while only dedicating the bare minimum development team to it, freeing up labor for other projects. If we start to see a bigger push of new items then I’ll lower my chances.

just popping something of my mind here, the Naga from Cantha were sociable traders (only becoming hostile after the Jade Wind). I know they’ll never be a playable race because they’re not bipedal, but personally, I think it would be very cool to play as a Naga.

(note, Tyria makes a clear distinction between Naga and Krait)