DEMO: non-human first contact reactions?
Seeker’s Village folks are less “well howdie stranger!” and more “I don’t know who you are BUT PLEASE HELP US WE’RE BEING MURDERED.” whether human or not – and in Amnoon, we already have Priory of multiple races (including sylvari, norn, and charr I saw), and Rytlock was there before us as well.
Plus, it’s not like Elonians are foreign to the concept of talking, sapient non-humans. There are centaurs in Elona (or were), ogres in Amnoon, and Elonians seem to still have history books with knowledge of distant lands (not one goes “Lion’s Arch? What’s that?” and rightfully so I’d imagine given how many Priests of Kormir there are in the little area we see).
Besides, when you live next to a nation of literal plathora of sapient undead races (Awakened are known in the past to include: centaurs, giants, humans, and what seem to be charr), you probably become used to seeing odd sapient creatures.
It seems to me that the Priory excursions into the desert (the only known excursions to exist) has blunted the folks of Crystal Oasis to norn, asura, charr, and even sylvari.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
There’s also the Zephyrites to consider. The achievements say that they’ll have a village on that first map, and if the Sanctum stopped in between trips, the folk of Amnoon might know a good deal more about us than we do about them.
I suppose the elonians know what a Charr and Norn are, since they didnt live quite in seclusion. Asura might’ve bedn known on writing? But the first sylvari didnt wake until after Ebonhawke closed the gates, right?
It has been established since GW2 began, that Priory teams have been going into the Crystal Desert to study the ruins for years even before GW2 Zhaitan Arc began. The Priory teams would include all playable races in the game so this is not the first contact with the other races.
The Ebonhawke gates were closed on Jennah’s orders, which means it couldn’t have been earlier than 1316… and more likely, it was done after Kralkatorrik awoke in 1320, since Snaff had been gathering materials from the desert not long before that. That’s 18 years after the sylvari awoke. And closed gates wouldn’t have kept the Zephyrites out anyway.
I wondered this myself. My conclusion on looking around the demo city is this: the humans there are used to other intelligent species. There were a number of local Ogres and Skritt at the bar. Also, most of Elona is ruled by Joko’s undead followers. The undead vendor in the city looked pretty horrific, with blood and rot dripping off its naked body—and while the humans who oppose Joko’s rule don’t like him being there, they’re used to that kind of thing. Based on the armies of Joko in GW1, there are undead of multiple races within it.
Even if the Elonian humans have never seen a charr, sylvari, asura, or norn—they’re used to interacting with all sorts of odd-looking species. Thus, they are bound to react less, and get used to new species more easily, then—say—a human who has lived with nothing but humans, like us in real life.