Guild Wars 2

Although I don’t enjoy PvP already, I found that in order to continue to work on the achievement of 100% exploration I began from level 1, I am forced to go into them. You know what I find? One server controls every single point on every single battlefield save for 3. That being shocking enough, I try to go ahead and work on reaching those points in order to quickly realize that the winning server outnumbers my allies at least 3:1. No matter where I go, no matter how fast I move, I find myself running into them absolutely everywhere. They also receive massive boons for controlling all the points.

I accept that my goal will require that I die a lot. I figure I’ll just dash to my goals and hope for the best. But I quickly find that even making suicide runs, I still can’t reach some of those points of interest— and vistas that require I not be in combat? Yeah— not going to happen. But, hey— I figure this is PvP, right? So death should be no big deal. My illusion of that wkittentered when I found my chest armor disappear for the first time ever in this game.

Of course, I realize what the “solution” to this dilemma is— log out, switch to the winning server, log back in and then enter the WvW queue. But… is that what the designers want? Somehow I don’t think so.

Here are my suggestions on what to do to make this aspect a bit more palatable.
1) Engagement in the battlegrounds should not be a requirement for world exploration. Don’t put people who don’t care for PvP through this ringer to get the reward they have been doing PvE from level 1 to achieve.
2) Players on losing teams need to receive boons in order to keep them active. Whether it is triggered by being outnumbered, whether is is triggered by having very points left to defend… I don’t know the system that should be used. But once one server is absolutely curb-stomping the other two, something needs to kick in so that all players on the losing servers don’t just throw up their hands and log out of it.
3) PCs should do no damage to armor when they kill other players. Since the only place players will be killing other players is in battlegrounds, there really isn’t a way this will be abused outside of it. This is a massive disincentive to continue to even make an effort in the battlegrounds when your team is losing. It also does not affect all classes equally, as some classes have very little trouble killing enemies without putting themselves in any direct harm while others need to get up close and draw a lot of fire on themselves in order to participate at all.
4) Similar with #2, give good PvP players a decent incentive to join servers with weak PvP teams— other than just a short queue to join a battleground where they’ll get repeatedly killed without having any chance of recourse. There should be some sort of achievement or reward or special item, gear or other bonus that one can receive (or receive faster) for continually fighting against larger numbers of better equipped players. It needs to be good enough to get players from worlds with very strong PvP teams to want to jump onto servers with weaker ones to be the best players on those servers.

Maybe pets just don’t have enough hit points period. It seems to me the main purposes of having the pet are to be a distraction and to inflict conditions on the enemy. I have a Beastmaster build so short of being mobbed by a bunch of creatures for pulling them off me as a race through an area to get to a vista or while I am gathering resources, it tends not to die very often.
But, if others are finding that their pets are just outright useless glass objects, perhaps this should be accounted for. It just seems to me that if the AOE is so deadly that the pet doesn’t last for more than a couple seconds, wouldn’t it kill you nearly as quickly?

I think a better choice would be to balance out the abilities available to players in down states. All players should be allowed to heal themselves back into battle if ignored or be able to continue to do damage to enemies within a reasonable range so that the enemy would be encouraged to finish them off rather than trying to hold them in an inescapable state of limbo.

When making the Skritt into a player race, either ignore that part of the fluff, assume that their lack of intelligence when not in the presence of other Skritt has been somewhat exaggerated, or make a weak excuse for it— even if it is simply that the PC Skritt have been experimented on or are slowly learning to communicate better with non-Skritt.

I really don’t think the implication of that text was meant to be that they were a hive-mind. In fact, in context it simply seems to mean that because they can communicate with one another at a very high speed, they can quickly ask and learn all the information all of the Skritt in the vicinity know about a particular topic. And with this ability, they might only bother to learn disjointed pieces of information themselves since they can usually rely on the “network” to give them the answer.

So, it’s not so much that they have a hive-mind and are less functional than a dog without the presence of others of their kind…. and more like giving someone with an IQ score of 80 a smartphone that can only access one chatroom on the internet.

This is a simple one. When in combat, if one runs out of hitpoints they have a chance to revive. So long as they don’t take too much damage, if they can either take out an enemy or their healing skill is high enough to revive themselves before they take a certain amount of damage or run out of time. So if one gets shot, stabbed, clubbed, stomped, torn, scratched, bitten, etc. too much they still have a chance to continue without having to go back to a waypoint.

Why is falling damage handled so differently? You fall down, suddenly its game over— straight back to the way point with you. Why not let the player revive themselves just like in combat?

Maybe one could rationalize this if players had no business engaging in activities that would cause them to regularly and repeatedly take falling damage. However, that’s just not the case. Instead, the game is filled with vista points, skill challenges and so forth that REQUIRE players to leap around in the air above deep chasms. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that between 30-40% of the times I have died in the game, it has been the result of falling damage.

If one was worried that players would perhaps… fall into a chasm without a way out, revive and then be stuck… that just doesn’t seem to be a realistic problem. Actually, I have gotten stuck in the scenery several times— the teleport to a waypoint system easily solves this issue.

So, I don’t see why falling should mean death should be more… deadly than death in combat. Is there a defensible reason for this? I’d like to know.

What’s this thing people have about if something existed in Japan then it isn’t normal or natural and must be treated as a very distinct and different than if it came from any other country.

You apparently don’t feel the need to differentiate between knights, cavaliers, paladins, bogatyrs, youxia… to your mind they are all exactly the same thing. But you have JAPANESE nobles who wear armor, ride horses and fight with swords and bows and then suddenly you treat it as a different animal and ignore how the majority acted and instead look at the most extreme actions of a few individuals of that caste then extrapolate that all had that particular trait.

Samurai are NOTHING more than knights. Not a lick of difference more than there was between the kinds I listed above. If you could get past your insane, unfounded bias of Japanese people not really quite being normal, regular human beings then you might become clear-headed enough to see that. Or, at least if you read up on what real samurai did and read up a bit more on the knights as well instead of basing everything on really bad racist American stereotypes, you might see how the similarities vastly outnumber the differences which are primarily only superficial at that.

I’ve actually found myself terribly disappointed with MMORPGs when they decide to expand their race list. Actually, it is true of P&P RPGs as well.

It’s like companies that design these games feel it is necessary to go well outside their initial world concept and adopt something completely new, often that doesn’t quite fit, into their world. And if not that, they take the most powerful, most evil, most intimidating end-boss races and turn them into PCs.

I have to believe that they feel there is absolutely no novelty in playing the unplayable races they already have well incorporated into the world and no one would be interested, so there is no point in using them.

EverQuest is a good example. From the very start of the game they had Orcs and Goblins in the world that were clearly aligned with some of the evil PC races. But rather than incorporating a tribe of them to fight alongside the other evil races….
First, they made up a new lizardman tribe to live on the newly incorporated continent which was mostly high-level content anyway. I suppose it wasn’t so bad.
Then they added Catpeople who absolutely never existed in the game.
Then Ratpeople which also never existed before, Frogpeople (didn’t have a problem with them though, they were a good add), and then they just went looney— as though the Lizardmen weren’t Draconic enough, they dropped Dragonpeople… and then Fairies. Nix that, TWO kinds of Fairies.
Orcs and Goblins? Never given a second glance.

World of WarCraft was perhaps not as bad. There were numerous races that seemed to belong in the Horde. Ogres stand out as one that was never utilized. And the Alliance didn’t have many allies, but the High Elves had been given an overhaul. It seemed like there were Gnolls everywhere working as pirates, lumberjacks and various other odd jobs. Why not reform a group of them?
Instead, the Horde was given the sworn blood enemy of one of its primary races and the Alliance was given the most powerful and feared race in the entire game’s story, the feared noble class of the Demonic Legion— which were merged together with what would have made sense (the Orcs rival race they “wiped out” on their homeland) despite it really not working and altering the entire history given in all their previous games.
Oh… and then later they were given Werewolves.

And DDO? They added elves with a different skin color and half-human elves. Oh… and robots which previously did not exist. No love for the orcs or hobgoblins there either.

I just hate seeing the general tendency towards expansion races either being entirely new concepts to the world or making them conceptually vastly more powerful then the PC races while ignoring the commonly encountered races in the world that plenty of people would be happy to play and would be less jarring to see among your peer group than a demonic paladin, a robot or a werewolf.

Reize.2176:

Marginal races like Skritt, Quaggan, Harpies, Grawl, Hylek and so on and so forth are not probable because they are no where near the level of civilized sophistication as the rest and lack the above mentioned traits to be able to work as independent adventurers of a non-basic needs cause, nor do they have the tendency or ability to be diplomatic if need be, as is usually required.

Have you been playing a different game than I have? In virtually no quests at this point have I felt as though my character was expected to be particularly independent or diplomatic. The quest gameplay generally revolves around “hey, you! Go kill that thing or collect this item or revive our allies for me.” Any race that can be citizens in Lions Arch hasn’t any reason they can’t be an adventurer. And Skritt, Quaggon, Hylek, Grawl and Tengu all exist there as citizens.

mnguyen.5142:

There will no doubt be new professions, like the ones you mentioned. These will definitely come in future expansions but no time soon. New races though? I don’t think that would happen just because of the complexity of it all. I can see old professions making a debut in GW2 but not until we get new maps like Elona and Cantha (which would not be coming anytime soon).

Why would you think this? Races are easy to incorporate! Just need to create the model (including animation and armor set models, the last takes the longest), set the starting location for the race and maybe program in some storyline missions for the race using elements already in the game. Oh, and a few high-level subpar skills for the race. It is only if you want the new race to come along with a city and low-level zones that things become complicated. Oh, and you might want to add a few NPCs of that race around the world using your new player model— or replace the enemy ones in the game with your new PC model one.

New profession involves creating a large number of new skills (unless they mimic other skills in the game) and balancing them against the other professions in the game. Getting the balance right is what takes all the real work.

Nurvus.2891:

Admiring culture and diversity has nothing to do with fetichizing things.
It’s just variety.
Guild Wars 2 could have just humans, but it doesn’t. It has 5 different races.

Cantha is inspired by asian culture, not just japanese – actually mostly chinese.
Dadao Swords are chinese style. Katanas are Japanese.
Katanas (Cantha), Scimitars (Elona) and Longswords (Tyria) have different fighting styles associated with them, I don’t see why it would be bad to give the game variety along with flavor.

Admiration of difference is one thing.
Massive exaggeration of those differences to make another group of people seem more “exotic” is not the same as admiration.
Ignoring aspects of your own family’s culture because they seem negative and then finding the counterpart in another’s culture and greatly exaggerating it is not admiration.
Claiming that the culture of your own people is so varied with so many different layers and dynamics that no words could properly describe all members of your culture while quickly rushing to judgement and painting all members of a region of the world as having traits X, Y and Z is not admiration.

Yes, the general martial techniques used with swords from China and Japan are not the same as the typical English sword. On the other hand, the difference between an English longsword and a Chinese longsword (“Jinn”) is not all that different. And when you aren’t differentiating between longswords, sabers, rapiers, scimitars, and falchions, it is silly to bother calling a Chinese longsword or a Chinese broadsword (dao) something different.

And the techniques used in Japan with spears are not significantly different from those used in European armies. Labeling it as something different, but pretending spears, pikes, glaives and halberds are all the same thing demonstrates behavior that has moved past “admiration” and into very negative territory.

And focusing on weapons that were creative little oddities but virtually never utilized such as the Sai is also quite silly. Europe and India will give you a dozen similar odd little inventive weapons.

I have to agree that a lot of the voice acting in this game is rather bad and often the voices attached to creatures really doesn’t support themes that the race is trying to project.

Well, the Char, Skritt and Ogre are pretty good, but a lot of the rest of them… they go from making animal sounds to having all too dignified and proper voices. I don’t know one can necessarily make them sound less human, but they should sound a bit more like the kind of voices one would expect from humans who lived the way those races live with the kind of cultures those races have.

The Grawl, Hylek, and the Asura really stand out in my mind as some of the better examples of “I don’t believe that voice is coming from the thing I see on screen.”

Well, you know… if you go to a zone lower than your level… even a bit lower, you get deleveled to equal level. If it seems too easy, it is because your gear is too good. You really want the battles to be harder? Equip yourself with crappy gear much lower than your level and your problems will be solved.

I guess it does stand out a bit that of the professions in Guild Wars 1, there are three that have no equivalents.

Assassin became Rogue and Paragon became Guardian, but there is no equivalent for the Monk, Ritualist or Dervish. Although the Engineer may be meant to be the effective replacement of the Ritualist.

I feel like there is a certain “the gods have happened us” theme running through Guild Wars 2 which explains the removal of Monks and Dervishes. The advancing steam punk culture explains the Ritualist being turned from a magical class to a technology one. It also helps differentiate it better from Mesmers, Elementalists and Necromancers.

Maybe they will release the new versions of the Monk and Dervish in a future expansion set.

I suggested this before a few times, but the best way to incorporate the common marginalized races (Grawl, Hylek, Skritt, Quaggon, etc.) would be not in a grand expansion with their own cities and a focus on their civilization.

Instead, it would be to create their model, copy the quests from another race that would play their “host” and alter some of the dialogue and then start them off in the host city of a particular race. If the designers feel they would LIKE to create personal racial story quests for them (really, there doesn’t see to be all that many to make) then they could do that too.
In fact, they don’t even need to start in the city of a specific race. If they are unlockable and you kind of expect players playing them to be somewhat familiar with the game already, one could even start them off in Lion’s Arch where members of all those races already live. Of course, since any racial quest storylines they do are going to be in some race’s low-level zone, there’d be limited value derived from starting them in Lion’s Arch.

The point is that I really don’t see those races as something that would require a grand expansion. Instead, offer them to players who have completed the racial empathy storyline for the race in exchange for gems. The account would then have permanent access to that race.

I have already played more than halfway through the level tiers and completed more than half the game and it doesn’t even seem as though the armor models in the game are varied and dynamic enough to seem like creating player models for those races would require making the hundreds of different body parts I initially thought it would.

Anyone who would complain too much about it being strange to have Skritts, Hylek or Grawl fighting alongside the other races either hasn’t paid much attention to their quests where it seems to happen often enough or is taking the wrong things way too seriously. I for one would be very happy to see more variety in the size and shape of my fellow players in the game even if I wouldn’t play most of these. (Though a Skritt Engineer would probably become my main character immediately)

I expect Tengus will be coming with their own city and their own low-level zones and so forth. But, really, I would really like them to consider the possibility of creating the tribal race PC models and making them available for use without creating new low-level zones to support a more in-depth story around them beyond “they are members of these races that are with a friendly tribe/pack that has taken refuge in another race’s city and are at war with the other tribes/packs of their race”.

Because, honestly, I would be very surprised if the creation of zones requires less work than the creation of PC models. I really think the later requires considerable less work and testing. And given that the mechanics of the race would be derived entirely from the class save for a few racial specials that the playerbase has accepted will be subpar, there is virtually no balance issues involved with incorporating new races.

I really don’t think there is anything wrong with the “holy trinity” if every class can perform each task in some manner. I’d like my ranger to be focused primarily on group healing. I actually have made the “mistake” of focusing my buffs on healing… of course, as a ranger, even if I am not in a group, I still get to heal a pet as well as myself and a helper if my pet can summon a helper. That means that even when soloing I am healing “myself” for 2-3x the healing amount— not really so bad.

But clearly conditional damage and healing builds were two things not particularly carefully considered. And one can absolutely spec their character to be a “tank” or focus on DPS anyway. So 2/3rds of the “holy trinity” are already in the mix. They may as well let all classes spec to being good healers too.

There must be a glitch. There are two sorts of skill point fights I have seen.

1) The mob you fight fights until they are ALMOST dead and then gives up, becomes invulnerable and friendly and gives you the skill point.
2) There is an object you click on and use in order to cause the mob to appear. You kill it, and then it disappears.

Actually, there is a third category, but it is rare.
3) The skill point mob was killed by enemy mobs. Revive it like any friendly NPC, talk to it and then do the fight.

If it isn’t one of these three things, then it is broken. It isn’t the only broken skill point in the game. Report it like everyone else and maybe someone will eventually fix it.

Well, as someone who lives in Japan— pretending and implementing Japanese weapons, particularly ones that were NOT significantly different from their western counterparts or weren’t ever utilized despite how popular they seem to have become in American pop culture, seems off-putting.

A spear is a spear, a dagger is a dagger. You don’t need to make them something different just because they happen to be from a country you have fetishized.

If you haven’t figured out by now, a LOT of elements of this game have been designed to favor casual gameplay and ease of use over immersion and realism. It is precisely those elements that have made this game a lot more fun to play than previous MMORPGs who saw to it that players would waste a LOT of their gameplay on unrewarding menial tasks in order to be “immersive” and “realistic”.

If you want to spend fifteen minutes trekking across a massive map, praying you can get past the enemies on the road in one piece and having to try again all the way from the start when you fail to do so all in order to just get to the other side of the map….
If you want to be utterly useless for 15 minutes after you died and having to spend most of it traveling back to where you were when you died and possibly having to get through the mobs that just killed you when you were fully equipped now with no gear and trying to desperately grab it from your body or having to respawn in a weaker state directly against those enemies that just killed you….
If you want to spend a good third of your time running halfway across the zone back to the NPC who gave you a quest in order to get your reward…
— well, there are other games you can do that in. You can feel all cozy “immersed” in that world. The rest of us would like to move on from those dull, frustrating, time-killing tasks.

I haven’t had any trouble with waypoint fees, but I am not very high level yet. However, I do use them all the time and teleport half-way across the world. You are complaining about the work to make 6 silver? I think perhaps you need new strategies for collecting money. If you just dig up a few resource points or, when farming, sell off the crafting items on the black lion market, you’ll make 6 silver back before you know it— even in the lowest level zones.

This does bring up an interesting issue. Is there any good reason other than style to use 2×1-handed weapons rather than a single 1-handed weapon? Does one derive any actual benefit from doing so? Because it does cost twice as much regardless of whether you buy them or craft them. I think the cost is just sort of… negligible enough that not many people care.

Don’t put “Japanized” versions of existing weapons. It is entirely unnecessary.

However, I do like the idea of claw weapons and spears that are usable on land. I am surprised that spear is an aquatic-only weapon, it seems very strange. Spear is one of the most commonly utilized weapons throughout history and the armies using it were not underwater.

New weapon skills would be good. Honestly, I mastered all weapons for my class way too quickly. It is kind of a let-down that one cannot continue to train in their weapon and truly specialize in it.

Mounts seem unnecessary. With instant travel being Waypoints and the zone maps themselves being so small, I cannot see any use whatsoever for mounts. In fact, that your suggestion revolves around removing the functionality of waypoints just so that mounts would have some sort of use cuts to the heard of the issue— no one needs them.

Does the same really need a birdman race that is almost inevitably going to end up packaged as a wrong-headed, misguided mockery of Japanese culture? I think everyone can just recognize that anything that is going to be designed as “culturally Japanese” is going to inevitably focus on how Japanese people are “different” from “normal” and “not quite the same as real humans”.

I can already hear the heavily mockingly accented voices using r’s as l’s and talking about “honor” in every sentences and calling everyone and everything as “honorable ______”. They’ll inevitable have “katanas” which will be clearly defined as something different (and possibly superior) to “swords” and their thieves will be “ninja” who live be “ninja code” with “ninja honor” and their fighters will be “samurai” who kill themselves the moment they fail at anything… ever.

The world just doesn’t need any more of that sort of garbage as much as western Japanaphiles may lust and call for it.

But, maybe I am wrong. Maybe that was never part of the plan. Or maybe someone just needs to point out just how painfully misinformed these common ideas are when the west hijacks and utilizes Japanese culture as window-dressing and once it is pointed out, those things can be avoided.

Virtually always when American or European designers decide to create something fictional “inspired” by culture X or culture Y, the result is virtually always distasteful.

If the Hylek or Skritt were turned into a player race, obviously a new model would be made that would resemble the old model, but would show armor. I really don’t see any problems that would arise with implementing these races in any other way though. They can using the existing starting cities with no problems, just give them an excuse that they are a refugee or something. They have been integrated into the culture of one of the starting playable races as servants or something.

Skritt can start in Rata Sum, Grawl can start in the Black Citadel, Hylek could start in the Grove, etc.
Of course, there may be some question as to how many people would actually play any of these races. Although some people hate them and would never play them, I can imagine the Skritt being popular. The Grawl are kind of reminiscent of orcs or goblins, I think it says something that EverQuest made up some really wonky races rather than ever making playable orcs or goblins, but then again— they are popular in WoW. The Hylek would be popular among those who like Frogloks in EverQuest (which means… not many).
Then there are the Ogres who are even larger than the Norn which may cause some issues and the Quaggon who… well, at first blukitteneems like a cute idea, but I wonder how many people would really stick with them rather than playing it for just one day.

The Tengu are a lot more civilized, but that is a double-edged sword. With refugees from tribal races, it makes sense for them to be harbored in other race’s cities and they can even use other race’s quests with some basic dialogue alterations. For the most part, all the new content for the tribal, savage ones can be focused entirely on building the character model.

The Tengu almost seem to demand their own city and perhaps their own level 1-15 zone. Given the rather low functional utility of cities (being able to access the marketplace from anywhere and not having to collect quests or report back to quests givers means that cities have almost no purpose in this game) and that more than 40% of the games content already is below level 25 would mean that the implementation of the Tengu would seem to go along with the implementation of a not inconsiderable amount of content that would go unused.

But— who knows. Maybe their plan is to put in the Tengu, Kodan and Largos and implement the vast amount of new content that will go almost entirely unused along with them. That is what I have come to find is common in the MMORPG market.

But, I still think putting in the Skritt, Hylek, Grawl, Ogre and/or Quaggon could be done significantly easier, people would still pay to play them and they could be implemented without creating new cities, new quests and at the most just dropping several new NPCs within existing cities to make them seem more integrated into these new homes (much like the Troll or Gnome in WarCraft or a number of races in EverQuest 2) and those who want to play them will be quite happy.

And those who would get their panties into a bunch over there being an allied Skritt running around in their PC mobs in the high level PvE and the WvW zones and fighting with equal effectiveness as them? Well, their complaining will die down and they’ll get over it. After finishing all the low-level zones I can say I wouldn’t see it one bit out-of-theme for a Skritt to be running with my party (in fact, it seems quite common!) and helping me out and only slightly more odd for a Hylek or Grawl to do so.

It would seem significantly more odd to me for there to be Quaggons fighting alongside me because… as far as I have seen, they don’t fight. But I have rescued enough of them for me to think one or two ought to be backing me. Ogres would seem strange though as I have encountered them only as enemies and they haven’t shown any habit of teaming up with PCs.

In fact, up to those point I would find it significantly more odd to see Tengu or Kodan allies suddenly appear in mass— because I’ve barely encountered them at all as friend or foe. Yes, I got some Kodan help in my storyline quests, but for the most part they seem rare, seem to exist in a very small region and don’t seem to be particularly integrated into the world— none of which is true of Skritt, Grawl or Hylek. But then, I haven’t completed 100% yet. Maybe by the end of this week I’ll get used to seeing so many friend and enemy Tengu across the world that they’ll no longer seem like a rare oddity.

It does seem to me that the respawn timer, at least in certain zones, is really cranked through the roof. I go into some areas, slaughter everything and then the moment the last body hits the floor they are immediately all respawning.

It really makes no sense— is this for the benefit of farmers? If you clear an area, especially doing it quickly, it should stay cleared for a few minutes. I have a feeling that some areas of the game were not playtested with the respawn speed as high as it is. Today while playing I saw literally a pile of 15 dead NPC bodies standing in the middle of ghosts and their siege weapons. I did my best to kill as many as I could and start reviving, but it was utterly hopeless. Part of the problem might be the painfully long time it takes to revive someone in the game, but part of it was that the siege weapons and ghosts seemed to pop up in about 15-30 seconds of being taken out making the whole thing an exercise in futility.

It just doesn’t strike me that challenge need mean an infinite swarm of never-dying enemies.

On my server the chests on the market place go for less than 3 copper. I have sold all the chests I have gotten. The few times I have gotten a key, I bought one of the dirt-cheap chests from the marketplace and been utterly disappointed by the contents.
People are actually buying keys for these chests? Why?

I would also think it would be unnecessary to do a Halloween event this year. Save it for next year, focus on getting the game 100% working. A special event can wait until Christmas.

Could there be some sort of reward system for collecting many different varieties of pets? So even if there are pets one will never use, perhaps having a large collection (not requiring a COMPLETE collection) could give a stat boost to any pet you are currently using. Something like each pet you have gives a +1 to a particular stat of all pets. Or, it could just be an achievement point thing.

I don’t know if any of you actually play Norn Rangers, but two things…

First, the shapeshifting ability… not so terribly useful. For an ultimate skill, I would have hoped for something that would make my character better, not worse.
Second, there really isn’t much difference between all the various pets. I have collected them all by now, but truthfully— they all have one of two sets of stats, with but a few exceptions their skills are hardly battle-swinging (I use the hyena mostly because summoning another ally seems more useful than anything else), and whatever they might do to the mobs in the world… well, frankittenhey all seem to kill everything at about the same rate unless you do a mismatch (use something that relies on poison against something immune to poison for instance).

There are a few pets whose attacks have elemental properties, but those are only their special skills. Assuming mobs have elemental weaknesses (again, haven’t really tried it out much) then maybe there is a strategic reason to use one over another, but the elemental properties are tied to their special skills with long recharges only.

What I am trying to get at here is simply this— even if you went around and collected all these different animal forms, there wouldn’t be any good reason to ever choose one over another. There wouldn’t be enough actual functionality difference between these different forms. Now, I would assume the idea of this class would be that it would still draw your stats from your armor and tokens, maybe even your weapons even though their functionality would be ignored. If that were the case then, just like with the pets, there wouldn’t even be that much difference between the forms.

If one wanted to add some sort of shape-shifting functionality to the game, I would think it would be better off for it to be an expansion of the elementalist (stone form, water form, fire form and wind form one would imagine would all have very different stats) than based on basic animals.

I have completed all of the level 1-25 zones on my server and the cities. But two of the maps on my server, interestingly in the two Char areas, have one point broken. One has a broken skill point, one has a broken vista.

I may be accused of rushing through content— then again, after doing all the quests and visiting all the vistas in my original areas and finding my level too low to do my personal story, I resolved to do all the maps of the same level tier one at a time (and collect all the hunter pets).

Given the way this particular game awards collectionist behavior (my personal gameplay style) in a way no other MMORPG I have played before ever has (I am used to losing out on doing quests because I leveled too fast), it is particular annoying for there to be just one last small thing to do in order to get the rewards for completing the map. The fact that it seems fixing these issues is very low on the priority list of the support staff is a bit demoralizing as well. It just doesn’t bode well for there to be a skill point NPC that is missing for over a week. Is it really such a difficult thing to fix?

I don’t buy that lore should be seen as the major hurdle to implementing races as some believe.

So Skritt aren’t particularly individually intelligent in the ways that one would generally judge (although, given their universal ability to learn a language far different from their natural language and learn the general workings of other’s technology, their “lack of intelligence” might be overstated), however they are good at communicating with each other quickly (so their language can impart large amounts of information in a condensed manner— again, not so dumb)? Okay, fine. That is the typical Skritt for you.

On the other hand, over there by Rata Sum the Asura have been experimenting on the Skritt. They intend to make use of the Skritt. Say they have some success and gather a group of Skritt to help them carry out their tasks. Well, that’s your PC Skritt group right there— it explains why they start in Rata Sum, why their story quests seem to heavily involve the Asura and so forth.

Meanwhile, the Charr heavily influenced the Grawl centuries ago and on some Grawl that hold has never been relinquished. Sure, they don’t appear in the Black Citadel right now, but the NPCs walking around don’t represent every resident of the city. So while most Grawls are dangerous and tribal and don’t work well with others, the ones that serve the Charr are an exception to this generality and can be put to tasks by the Charr who have a history of intrusting tasks to the Grawl anyhow.

The same basic sort of rationals could work for any number of races one could include as options. Though I’d try to limit it to one extra per city. Its kind of the same thing World of Warcraft did with their Trolls and Gnomes. Not every race needs its own starting city and even if the majority of the members of the race in the world are enemies or neutral, one could still have a small group of a race that is an exception to the rule that utilizes the same starting zone and quests as another race.

From a mechanical perspective, it wouldn’t be hard to do. From a story perspective, it could still work.

The racial sympathy storyline quests posit five races that one’s character can make friends with (at least a particular group) and each of them has tribes that tend to be friendly to all players anyway.

Grawl, Hylek, Ogre, Quaggan and Skritt.

Now, if one were to say that the Kodan, Tengu or even Krait would make better options than some of these as potential PC races, I wouldn’t disagree. And if one were to say it isn’t clear why Norns need to be a separate race from humans and the techno-midgets, plant-elves and psycho catmen with horns make one think that perhaps not having non-human races would have been a better option, I wouldn’t disagree anyway.

In that group of five there is the Ogre who seems to be simply too large to be workable (especially since doing platforming and crawling through tunnels seems a major part of the game) and the Quaggon’s whole concept is based on being hyper-pacifists which would make PC ones quite odd (though it might also make them particularly cool to play). Though, on the whole, I can’t see much problem with Grawl, Hylek or Skritt.

But, the races one can become sympathetic with seem like the best start the thought experiment at. Now— taking out the process of graphically creating them, I could see a pretty straight-forward method of adding them.

The PC race cities all seem larger and more sprawling than they absolutely need to be. So, you take those 5 races, choose a current race’s city to host a single tribe of each of them and players who choose to use that race would be a member of that particular tribe. This wouldn’t seem to be the least bit out-of-story as the current PC races do seem protective of those of these races they can manage to ally with. Furthermore, these tribes would be understandable more influenced by their hosts than others of their species allowing for them to adopt culturally different attitudes and mannerisms than most of their species. The storyline quest points would be the same as those of the host city’s race with some of the dialogue altered in order to emphasize the difference in race.

In terms of sales— well, selling the additional races for gems could be a way for the company to pick up extra cash through micro-transactions. I suspect that would be quite popular items— certainly far more so than anything else available right now. If a player has to complete the racial sympathy quest and then pay $10-20 to use the race… then loyal players might even use them as a status symbol.

But this all ignores the core problem— which is the armor modeling. See, in all games like this (and I suspect this one too) player models are made much different than enemy models. Because players can switch out different armor parts, PC race models are designed as several different interlocking pieces that can be switched out. NPC race and creature models are designed as single piece models.

More over, every different glove type in the game, every different boot, every mask or helm, every pants, every shirt— each and every one of these needs to be designed for each and every race. This means to make the race there needs to be (I would estimate) between 100-300 different armor pieces for each body part. I don’t know how much time a staff dedicated to doing the job would need to spend on it, but it would be a fairly massive undertaking. I don’t know if it would be worth it or not— again, I imagine they could sell it for even a third of the cost of the game itself and item would still be very popular.

I also found myself disappointed by the actual lack of variety of body types. I think the real problem is the armor models. If the character is allowed to be too skinny or too bulky at any given height, the stretching of the armor models might start to look quite funky.

Its sort of a side-effect of having more detailed graphics— the stretching will show up a lot more than if they were less detailed. Although, somehow, Elder Scrolls seems to be able to handle it reasonably well.