Guild Wars 2

Im suprised that a race which has mechanical golems, lasers and all that highly advanced equipement is still using iron swords and bows for fighting. Shouldn’t they have like space travel by now? Also, seeing the Asura engineer in a leather coat with his wooden rifle turret or home-made looking missile launcher is just wierd for me.

asuras are kind of an oddball. they have very advanced “magitech”, for the lack of a better word, but they’re so obsessed with their own experiments, and those experiments are so risky, that they end up sabotaging themselves.

the most technologically advanced race would have to be the charr. they’ve actually hit the industrial revolution, and i’m pretty sure they’re responsible for anything involving gunpowder in the game.

Just to go further on what BrunoBRS said, the Charr has a firm grasp of machinery. It’s not surprising the engineer class borrows the style of that culture.

An Asrura engineer (game class-wise) would want something reliable rather and made with Charr iron than something Asura-made. Asura tech is always breaking down. Watch some of the events in Orr, half the time the Asura can’t get their fancy crap working long enough for the escort to progress fully before they’re repairing something.

think of it this way: asuras are all mad scientists (with plans to rule the world and everything), whereas charrs are engineers, not in the class sense, but as in the actual job: cold, calculated, efficient numbers.

In a way, they do have space travel. It’s because of recent developments on the asura gates that WvW is possible. Though this is more of dimension travel than space travel.

Also keep in mind that their lasers are a rather recent development, and all of their “technology” – from golem to gate to floating cubes – is solely reliant on magic. Which is a Tyria and Mists-bound thing as far as they know. In other words, go into space (if they even ever cared about it – they seem far more interested in expanding their influence across the world first, which they more or less haven’t done due to a reset button being pressed on their civilization by Primordus, and due to their lack of large organization cooperation outside 5 very rare cases, 4 of which being multi-racial groups.

And why go into space, when you have The Mists anyways?

I think it’s flawed reasoning to say that one or another is ‘more advanced’ – especially when you’re basing it on how similar it is to modern technology. That assumes an inevitable one-way development, and I just don’t think that’s how it works.

The charr are certainly more industrial, and masters of machinery and gunpowder tech. You don’t really see asura using that (player engineers aside). The asura are more magic-focused and their inventions often seem to grow out of that – think how much asura stuff is effectively useless, like the floating cubes. Charr would never go for that, they’re too practical. Asura are more likely to do stuff just because they can, or to show off :P

I agree with Konig, there’s not really any incentive for space travel in Tyria. They don’t seem to have discovered anything via astronomy that they would want to go and find or check out. The Mists are a much more intriging puzzle; investigating the place where (so-called) gods seem to come from? We’d have done that before Mars, if we could!

TL;DR: Technological development is not linear, and Western science is not the inevitable end point for all cultures.

From what I can tell, Asuran technological development isn’t as combat focused as the Charr, since the Charr went into their industrial revolution as a way to stay on the same level as humans after they abandoned deity worship entirely.

Not to mention that the Asura rely on their golems for physical labor and combat, so lorewise any Asura running about with conventional weaponry rather than using magic and golemancy would be an oddity.

Though I always found the way Asura in-game send golem messengers rather than using their “magitek” computer systems to send messages as odd. (I guess Anet felt the need to give the more curious players an NPC to follow to the next event location in an event chain.)

As for Asuran engineers utilizing Charr technology, it’s most likely a time-constraint issue since giving Asura proper weaponry for their race would be too time consuming due to the art design, modeling, animating, and coding necessary to give them an entirely separate variant simply for simple aesthetic reasons.

Just give the Inquest time…they’ll be in space. Then we’ll discover another Elder Dragon still in hibernation orbiting the planet.

Actually that sounds kinda cool.

Vahkris.6847:

Just give the Inquest time…they’ll be in space. Then we’ll discover another Elder Dragon still in hibernation orbiting the planet.

Actually that sounds kinda cool.

the moon is just a big fat elder dragon.

“Just give the Inquest time…they’ll be in space. Then we’ll discover another Elder Dragon still in hibernation orbiting the planet.

Actually that sounds kinda cool.”

I second that idea. I’ve always wanted to fight Ghroth the Harbinger! (Ghroth comes from the Call of Cthulhu mythos. He’s a planet-sized Great Old One who travels from world to world, destroying each one in fiery doom by opening his Eye.)

Anet did make a comment about “Asuran world domination.” However, they never said it had to be the good Asurans. I can see the Inquest achieving this as they actually compile information and monopolize on it.

^ remember when i said the asuras are all mad scientists?

it includes having plans to dominate the world. there’s even a quest on the asura personal story regarding that.