Guild Wars 2

DISCLAIMER: I apologize for beating a dead horse, but I think this game badly needs something like a new race.

A lot of GW2 players are hoping for a new playable race. From the discussions I’ve seen, it mostly boils down to tengu vs. largo. I’m going to be giving some reasons largos would make a good playable race, and some reasons there might be issues with that.

First, the positive:

1. So far, each of the five playable races has been paired with an elder dragon as a major antagonist (lorewise, not gameplay wise). Those pairs are as follows: Zhaitan and Humans, Mordremoth and Sylvari, Kralkatorrik and Charr, Jormag and Norn, Primordus and Asura. The last confirmed elder dragon (as far as I’m aware) is the deep sea dragon (whom I will hereafter refer to as Bubbles). I’m not aware of any unique connection between the largos and Bubbles, but both inhabit the Unending Ocean, so it would make sense to have them set up as enemies of each other. In fact, you could use the activities of Bubbles as a reason the largos are suddenly more common on the surface world. It would also be a good opportunity for Anet to give us more lore regarding Bubbles.

2. Building off the above, this would also give Anet the opportunity to focus on the underwater aspects of the game. Not only does underwater combat need rebalancing, but there also seems to be a lack of underwater content. That’s unfortunate, since the underwater gameplay is really fun and unique. Just imagine an entire underwater map to explore!

3. The largos are an interesting and original race. Now, I’m not saying Anet couldn’t do a good job with the tengu, but so far, tengu are just bird-people, while largos are dark elf-butterfly-merfolk-ninjas. I would say the latter is cooler.

4. Largos would be easier to convert the armor models for.

Now, unfortunately, there are also some problems with making the largos a playable race as opposed to other possible races. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

1. Making them playable would require getting rid of some of the mystery that makes them so intriguing, including both their culture and the appearance of their faces.

2. The scene in the Personal Story where you meet Sayeh, and the few scenes following that, would need to be rewritten to accommodate the possibility that the player is a largos. Also, NPCs would need to occasionally comment on the fact that you’re a largos to avoid breaking immersion.

If I think of anything else, I’ll add more.

I think the largos would work better as a playable race, but that’s just, like, uh, my opinion, man.

I agree, GW2 needs new races, among other things, and it needs them yesterday.

I feel we should have largos and tengu as playable races right now, today. If anet had been serious about the Living World giving us expansive content, that’s what it should have done: brought in these races with new stories, new zones, and new professions.

Alas.

Anyway, yeah, I would really, truly, aw heck yeah like to play a largos (and a tengu!).

Great points and a good reminder! Largos would make a lot of sense, I was actually wondering about Bubbles (sea dragon) and them, I feel they had been driven away from their home too. And of course we’ve been waiting for the tengu area forever

I think Tengu are the most likely race to be added by far. They are popular, they have a bit of backstory, they have four houses which are candiates of racial choice during character creation, they have a capital city close to the currently playable world, they already trade with the other races and they were considered as a playable race during GW2’s development. Although after tengu I think Largos and Kodan are roughly equal contenders.

Concerning your 1st positive point: Tengu can easily be linked to either Primordus (who’s minions are already attacking the Dominion of Winds) or Bubbles (due to proximity to the sea). Alternatively Tengu could be included if the story is developing towards Cantha (which I think is unlikely but still..).

Concerning your 2nd positive point: It seems like Arenanet is pulling back a bit from underwater combat. No new zone has had any underwater combat (excluding South Sun but that was very limited) and there won’t be extensive underwater areas in HoT, underwater combat was removed from WvW and it has no place in SPvP.

Concerning your 4th positive point: Tengu actually share character models with the charr so tengu shouldn’t be that difficult either.

In general though, Arenanet’s stance on adding races is the following:

Shacknews: You’ve added a new profession, however you did hold off on adding a new race. What led to this decision?

Johanson: For this one, we looked at what we would get out of adding a new race and what benefit it actually brings to the players from a gameplay standpoint. It’s very limited in Guild Wars 2. A new race adds a racial skill or two and a little bit of story, but it doesn’t give that much meaningful gameplay in the grand scheme of things. The race is more context for the early story that you experience. So we wanted to focus things that would provide a lot more gameplay and address parts of Guild Wars 2 that we felt like we really wanted to be able to make a better experience and grow. So right now, we didn’t feel that a new race was a key need for the game, whereas the other things that we’re adding really provide fundamental building blocks for the future.

Diovid.9506:

In general though, Arenanet’s stance on adding races is the following:

Shacknews: You’ve added a new profession, however you did hold off on adding a new race. What led to this decision?

Johanson: For this one, we looked at what we would get out of adding a new race and what benefit it actually brings to the players from a gameplay standpoint. It’s very limited in Guild Wars 2. A new race adds a racial skill or two and a little bit of story, but it doesn’t give that much meaningful gameplay in the grand scheme of things. The race is more context for the early story that you experience. So we wanted to focus things that would provide a lot more gameplay and address parts of Guild Wars 2 that we felt like we really wanted to be able to make a better experience and grow. So right now, we didn’t feel that a new race was a key need for the game, whereas the other things that we’re adding really provide fundamental building blocks for the future.

And there’s the GuildWars2ian Knot in all its glory.

What benefit would a new race bring to the players? Isn’t it obvious? Relief is what it would bring. Relief from the same old same old we’ve had for almost three years now. Something NEW. Something DIFFERENT. A much needed breath of fresh air.

Why does it have to be ‘a little bit of story’? Why not a big, heaping helping of story? What’s going on out there in the depths where the largos live? What’ happening behind those walls where the tengu have settled? What do they DO in there? Are they at all concerned about events at large?

A new race won’t give much ‘meaningful gameplay’? What is ‘meaningful gameplay’ anyway? Evidently entertaining cows is ‘meaningful gameplay’ in the ‘grand scheme of things’, as it was something they actually implemented, ostensibly to make a ‘better experience’ — but evidently a new race just isn’t worth even thinking about, as it won’t lead to ‘meaningful gameplay’. It won’t bring growth. No future in it.

Guys…

Eh, that relief is a minor and very temporary fix. Your race matters for the personal story until you officially choose your Order which means until level 30-40. Most players spend most of their time at level 80 so the vast majority of a new race will be spent running the same content with just a new character model. That’s why a new race is a shortsighted fix with no meaningful gameplay. No matter the race, the gameplay is all the same. Races are only some early quests and a different skin.

Will their new systems actually fix some of the problems? Hopefully but I’m definitely not going to hold my breath. That said, I also hope that once they do implement the HoT systems and, should it fix some underlying problems the game has, that they can then add new races.

As for the OP, I can definitely see them doing that eventually and I would love for underwater combat to get some fixes from it. However, I definitely think they’ll go Tengu or Kodan first. If they do go for largos, they need to introduce largos more and more to put them in the player’s mind. When I saw the thread, my immediate thought was “who the kitten are the largos?” They’re a ridiculously minor part of the story that I would bet very few players know/remember. To have them come from nowhere and take a spot before Tengu or Kodan would cause a severe player backlash.

Disclaimer: I love the Kodan and really hope they’re the first new playable race.

Dace.3985:

Eh, that relief is a minor and very temporary fix. Your race matters for the personal story until you officially choose your Order which means until level 30-40. Most players spend most of their time at level 80 so the vast majority of a new race will be spent running the same content with just a new character model. That’s why a new race is a shortsighted fix with no meaningful gameplay. No matter the race, the gameplay is all the same. Races are only some early quests and a different skin.

Then fix that. Fix the story. Make it so that your choice of race means something, from your first quest to your last, providing ‘meaningful gameplay’ in perpetuity, in the core game, in the next expansion, and in any future expansions that may come.

Charr characters assemble a warband — and promptly abandon them to run off and join an Order. Same with asura and their krewes. I think that’s pathetic. Fix that. Fix that and fix the rest of the personal story. Add to it. Bolster it. Make it better. Add new races, with new stories, new lands, new lives. Build. Grow. Expand.

But no.

What did anet add to the story with their last ‘new system’ upgrade? Nothing. Less than nothing. They subtracted. Instead of making the personal story better and more meaningful, they ripped an entire section out, turned the latter portions into a broken and confusing mess without any semblance of continuity. Why?

Who came up that idea? Who approved it? Who tested it? We know it was tested, and for over a year. They said so. And yet, they still got it all wrong. How did that happen? Why did it take so long for them to finally decide to get around to doing something about it?

I put it to you, and to the forums at large: new systems aren’t what this game needs. Nor does need a new foundation upon which to build its future. It had a good, solid foundation — before all the new systems implemented over the course of the past 2.75 or so years all but destroyed it.

I don’t know how many more ‘new systems’ this game can stand.

So you say their base system was good but at the same time, you want them to essentially destroy the current personal story and rebuild it from the ground up to be completely different than what it was… Got it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the PS was handled very well and it felt very mechanical (choice =/= organic) but what you are suggesting is completely a complete overhaul of the story and leveling which is a massive undertaking and is (almost certainly) never going to happen.

Also, completely disagree with not needing new systems. At launch, after the personal story was done, you had nothing but dungeon runs that became simple after a few runs, crafting legendaries, and PvP/WvW. The system at endgame was nonexistent so they’ve protracted things with living story. They need a system to build on for the future or they’re going to bleed users because, as I said before, endgame is where the user spend their time.

Getting back to races (so not to have this too off topic), they can’t have meaningful gameplay between them because they have to be balanced and, if they have meaningful differences in gameplay, they never never will be. That means players will be pushed to certain races for certain builds until balance fix and to fill what you were doing you need to switch to ______ race. That’s why they will always just be fluff. Different skins and slightly different quests.

As I said, I do hope they make new races eventually even if largos or some other new race become playable before kodan, but I make no qualms about Arena Net’s necessity of budgeting resources to the long term survival before adding shallow content like races.

Dace.3985:

So you say their base system was good but at the same time, you want them to essentially destroy the current personal story and rebuild it from the ground up to be completely different than what it was… Got it.

No, you don’t ‘got it’, but that’s all right. No point going any further with it.

Also. I didn’t think about this, and I apologize if someone else already mentioned this, but I think the Largos wings might also present a problem with some backpieces. Just a thought.

watergenji.5816:

Also. I didn’t think about this, and I apologize if someone else already mentioned this, but I think the Largos wings might also present a problem with some backpieces. Just a thought.

There’s a concept art image on the GW2 wiki that shows a female largos without wings, so maybe the wings are not permanently affixed.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Largos

Tachenon.5270:

watergenji.5816:

Also. I didn’t think about this, and I apologize if someone else already mentioned this, but I think the Largos wings might also present a problem with some backpieces. Just a thought.

There’s a concept art image on the GW2 wiki that shows a female largos without wings, so maybe the wings are not permanently affixed.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Largos

Well would you look at that? lol. That’s interesting. I would personally love to see the Largos as a playable race.

Or it’s just as likely that it was a concept from before they added the fins. Detachable appendages would just be… blech. My guess is it’d end up like the charr tail- clips through everything, but treated as the price of playing a less conventional race.

Personally, if it weren’t for the steps ANet has taken since launch to get away from underwater content, I’d totally agree that largos are the most viable of the prospective new races. That in mind, and seeing the story and player base inclinations (not to mention reports from the Art of Guild Wars 2) I think tengu do beat them out for next up.

Since I’m here already, to address the nastier debate brewing, I do think that the separation between race and gameplay is overall a positive thing, and it is regrettable that that’s led to the stance of treating new races as a low priority. The choice of race, for us story folks, never really stops being relevant- even if it doesn’t affect which stories we encounter after a while, it certainly does continue to flavor them, and for roleplayers or anyone who’s inclined to play with their character’s backstory in mind race is, in those regards, at least as important as profession. I do get, at the end of the day, that we’re a niche community, but if I were any less psyched for the revenant I probably would regret that ANet made the trade-off that they did.

Personally I feel that the largos are a relatively generic fantasy race (blue humans with wings attached) that doesn’t really fit into the world and has quite shallow lore compared to, for example, the tengu which have been around since prophecies. Their lore is, as the OP mentions, based mostly on not being known.
However, what actually matters in the end with new races is the appearance – and this is actually another area where i find them lacking. The wings, assuming they are can’t be taken off, would clip through almost every back item (which are the GW2 counterpart of TF2 hats).
So far we haven’t seen what they look like under the mask – would the mask act as their customizeable face in the character creation (meaning that players would have a tough time trying to find a matching armor) or would they get an actual face (thus removing some of what actually makes them largos rather than blue humans)?
Regarding the rest of the largos appearance I’m just wondering what exactly you could do with a largos, that you cannot currently do with a sylvari. To me it seems they’d just end up being sylvari locked to the gray-blue color spectrum when it comes to character customization and variation.
This combined with my personal initial uninterest for a race built entirely around murdering people honorably actually makes me hope that whatever playable race comes next wont be largos. I am honestly fine with the current five races, and might even have preferred if they had stuck with only humans like GW1 – and instead focusing on the various cultures within the race. But that’s just my opinion.

All hail Largos. (/o_o)/

I Like the largos, but I don’t think they would make for a good playable race. Why?

1: They are mostly armor, I am all for the Largos Armor and wing/fin-thingy to be implemented into the game, but the race itself looks mostly humanoid, therefore alone I am not to interested into them as playable race.

2: They are hunters, even more then the Norn they hunt alone and wouldn’t fit to much into the big alliance of other people.

I do agree with some other posts that the Tengu are most likely going to be the next playable race, they have lots of lore, there were tengu concept arts from the very beginning and their body shape might let them share some of there animations with the charr.

Aside from that, since my wish for Quaggan as a playable race is most likely never going to be fullfilled, right after the Tengu the race that is most likely going to be added in my oppinion are the undead. I am not talking about orrians(well kind of) but I am leaning myself more in the direction of elona here, with palawa joko still beeing a force down there. That and p3 of arah kind of hints at it as well, by creating the free willed orrian chicken it is proven that undead can be their own masters as well.

Still all this talk about Tengu…
Tengu are worth nothing more than the feathers on their bodies.
How do you expect your race to be useful the other worlds’ races when a single monk with 55hp can slaughter entire armies of you with ease?
If I could choose a GW1 trash mob to play, it’d be a Wind Rider – free to ride the breeze back and forth with eight or so of my Wind Rider buddies and hex everything that gets in our way.

Shiren.9532:

A new race seems unlikely for GW2.

Well, just because someone at anet says that adding new races wouldn’t add anything to gameplay doesn’t mean that it’s true. It just means that they’re wrong. Again. ;-)

Largos and Tengu (and Centaurs and more) can’t get here fast enough.

Tachenon.5270:

Shiren.9532:

A new race seems unlikely for GW2.

Well, just because someone at anet says that adding new races wouldn’t add anything to gameplay doesn’t mean that it’s true. It just means that they’re wrong. Again. ;-)

Largos and Tengu (and Centaurs and more) can’t get here fast enough.

agreed, the ultimate payoff for a class to be added to the game might be bigger then what you get from a race, but discarding the idea of races entirely because their overall impact would be smaller is wrong.

It’s the same with so many sets of armors having problem on Charr(tails, eyeplacement, horns, feet, glitches) or the feet of asura. Yes, both races are quite different to the normal human body, and they are not the most played race(which are the humans, followed by the norn if I recall correctly) but tossing the idea of fixing that out is wrong, same goes for the races.

I don’t have numbers, but from the people I know, while beeing exited for the new class, none of them actually wished for it, more playable races have always been more interesting, since GW is such a loreheavy game.

Since there seems to be an undercurrent of negativity starting to build here, I will point out that every interview I’ve seen says that the lack of gameplay additions caused ANet to forgo a new race for this expansion -the idea hasn’t been tossed out, it just wasn’t at the time their top priority. I know you guys know that, but I wouldn’t want someone who’s been out of the loop to read this thread and get the wrong idea.

Toroquin.3605:

Personally I feel that the largos are a relatively generic fantasy race (blue humans with wings attached) that doesn’t really fit into the world and has quite shallow lore compared to, for example, the tengu which have been around since prophecies. Their lore is, as the OP mentions, based mostly on not being known.

The lack of lore means that Anet has more freedom to develop them, and could more easily make them fit as a playable race. And they aren’t really any more generic than anthromorphic animals. Not that I’m hating on those races; the charr are my favorite playable race at the moment.

However, what actually matters in the end with new races is the appearance – and this is actually another area where i find them lacking. The wings, assuming they are can’t be taken off, would clip through almost every back item (which are the GW2 counterpart of TF2 hats).

There is a precedent for this. The charr have tails that clip through their lower armor. Though I will concede that the wings would be more of a problem.

This combined with my personal initial uninterest for a race built entirely around murdering people honorably actually makes me hope that whatever playable race comes next wont be largos. I am honestly fine with the current five races, and might even have preferred if they had stuck with only humans like GW1 – and instead focusing on the various cultures within the race. But that’s just my opinion.

As opposed to a race entirely built around being mad scientists, or a race built entirely around being in touch with nature, or a race entirely built around warmongering, or a race built around killing monsters with honor? And we haven’t seen enough of the largos to conclude that they’re nothing but Ye Olde Proude Warrior Race, in any case.

I think the largos are insanely interesting. Not only are they visually similar to dark elves (and who knows, maybe this is GW’s version) but they have a social structure that is based on their status being determined by how good they are in combat and the kinds of creatures they can bring down (reminds me of Predator actually) which are kind of like a trophy.
They’re like underwater ninja-assassin Predator dark elves! To me this is a lot more interesting than most of the other races, some of which come across as quite bland (humans, I’m looking at you).

I’d be happy just to see some more of them as NPCs. They are maddeningly, tantalizingly rare.

Kinda like the Wizard’s Castle, they seem designed to make us wonder, and try to hold onto hope without any evidence that it will some day pay off.

Dace.3985:

Eh, that relief is a minor and very temporary fix. Your race matters for the personal story until you officially choose your Order which means until level 30-40. Most players spend most of their time at level 80 so the vast majority of a new race will be spent running the same content with just a new character model. That’s why a new race is a shortsighted fix with no meaningful gameplay. No matter the race, the gameplay is all the same. Races are only some early quests and a different skin.

Just wanted to comment that, in the grande scheme of things, levels are irrelevant to content. So whether you spend most of your time at level 80, level 22, level 450 or whatever, it all is irrelevant since the game can scale you to the appropriate level and the fact that everything you do, from completing hearts to walking gives you experience to get closer to the level cap, makes the point about levels and how you spread content over them is inconsequential.

As for gameplay, that could have been varied in multitudes of ways. A new profession was far from necessary but they chose that route. Could they have foregone Revenant completely for this expansion and introduced 2 specializations for every profession? That likely would have been far more popular and probably easier to balance and vary current content far more not to mention the fact that all a profession is is a different skin to kill things as, as far as PvE goes…they can all boil down to 1111111>get xp, just with different flashing graphics.

But when people are asking for new races, it’s usually accompanied by various other flavors outside of just ‘skins’. Each character race also has a voice and personality that differs from race along with a multitude of lore and background flavor that advances the world as a whole.

Dace.3985:

So you say their base system was good but at the same time, you want them to essentially destroy the current personal story and rebuild it from the ground up to be completely different than what it was… Got it.

You don’t have to destroy anything. Just add. If anything, destroying is the completely WRONG path to take. Add onto personal story. Put more in the world to do than just run around in circles whacking moles (elder dragons). There’s so much more to the world, from politics to economics to romance and relationships and family. So many stories could be told, NPCs to learn and care about, challenges to face and overcome…

I think that’s one thing that feels shallow about GW2 so far and that is the world is lush and beautiful but it feels so small when the only thing you do is combat elder dragons and clean up messes. I mean, there’s a kitten crisis just outside the Tengu’s wall and we have little idea what they even think about that, much less their economic and social situation in the shadow of that fact. It makes things feel small because the scope of the game feels small.

Your reasoning of the Largo/Bubbles compatibility is sound, but wouldn’t that stick with the Quaggan as well? I think Quaggan would be a front runner between the two.

However, I believe Anet does care about their baby, no matter what the forums say, and with that in mind I think whatever race they provide us with, it will be one that stretches back to GW1 (i.e Centaur or Tengu).

I do not believe I ever saw a Largo in the original title.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Your reasoning of the Largo/Bubbles compatibility is sound, but wouldn’t that stick with the Quaggan as well? I think Quaggan would be a front runner between the two.

The main thing stopping the Quaggan from being playable is that they are considered a “minor race”. That is they are tribal, have no unified nation or major city of their own, and are a choice in the order’s minor race story arc of the personal story.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I think whatever race they provide us with, it will be one that stretches back to GW1 (i.e Centaur or Tengu).

I’m not so sure I agree, considering that they added an unprecedented new race in vanilla GW2.

This is Anets fault: Stop promoting Quaggan cuteness.

I’d prefer the birds anyways.

hmmm, I do think largos could be the next race because of bubles. One thing that tipped the scales for me is a largon at Mount Maelstrom. At the skill challenge of Irwin Isle you can talk to Master Sdias and he will tell you that the waters in the deep ocean have grown darker. So… bubles is apearing?

Bubbles has appeared. It is why we cannot travel to Cantha.
For every viable reason we argue Largos, we can argue Quaggan.
So its a coin flip.
Still think its down to birds or centaurs.

and the Pale Tree was planted by Ventari in GW1. So I include them in the old lore.

WoodenPotatoes has this nice video, speculating the possibility of different races to become playable at some point.
I love the Largos, but the entire race is based on being mysterious and withdrawn – I agree that making them playable would strip them off this, making them uninteresting.

Plus – that’s my opinion now – underwater combat mechanics are really nice in GW2, but I still don’t feel this could become equal to fighting on land in an underwater expansion. Each profession only has a choice of two weapons (engineers only have the speargun afaik), and making it generally good would require a ton of work.

There was a similar thread about Largos being playable, and someone pointed out many inconsistencies – for example, why would an aquatic race be so similar to humans, rather than fish? There was a speculation that they are connected to Orr being pushed into the ocean and while I agree that it opens up a lot of lore possibilities, I’d still rather have them as hidden assassins nobody knows much about.

Agreed. Keep them on the grassy knoll of mystery they currently sit on.

Seeing as this is the most recent thread on playable races, here’s a little fun video from the Crowfall developers on Centaurs and just why we won’t see them playable in GW2 either…

Zhed Shadowhoof trumps any reason against Centaurs lol

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Zhed Shadowhoof trumps any reason against Centaurs lol

Zhed’s dead, baby. Zhed’s dead.

He must have great grand-centaurs right? Zanex or Zooey?

By the way was the first Centaur, a shady dude that just had to sample humans, or was it a plow horse that had no boundaries? Food for thought…

I think Largos would make an excellent choice, especially since the few tidbits about their story and society is incredibly interesting. The first thing I thought of when they mentioned their houses and contracts was how it felt as if they were setting up for how their future character creation would work, haha.
Even though I played GW1, I was never crazy about the Tengu. I found them rather stoic and dull with little character (or maybe I didn’t find the character because I found them off-putting). Their xenophobia and aggressive tactics during Scarlet’s raid didn’t exactly pave the way for a change of heart in me, either.

I do hope that one day, maybe, we’ll get Kodans. Mostly because I am really, really curious as to how their entire society and religion works, and I want to go north to where their iceberg ships are naturally from!