Guild Wars 2: Is it too Late for New Races?

SBFord

Guild Wars 2: Is it too Late for New Races?

When dragons first reared their heads, the first responders of Tyria were the Asura, the Charr, the Humans, the Norn, and the Sylvari. With their powers combined, they created an alliance which culminated in a slew of playable races with semi-important perspectives and mostly forgotten racial abilities. After days of cavorting with Hylek, and meeting the Mursaat, one might think the possibility of another playable race is right around the corner. Unfortunately, my friendly Tyrians, I fear you are wrong.

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exile01

The core gameplay sucks. You can add as many dolls to dress as barby as you want-itwont change.

jj7009

Is it to late to ask for a 3rd game or another expansion to gw1?

Aeander

I really want to play a Tengu. Like, really badly, and it is a crime that they were scrapped due to time constraints before launch. There are a lot of concerns when making a new race:

New animations for every skill in the game.

A new set of (pointless) racial skills.

Retro-fitting every single non-cultural armor piece and outfit.

VA for every line of dialogue spoken by the player character.

The need for a racial city, and likely a starting zone.

Entire branching Personal Story acts up to level 30. 

Commitment to increasing the workload on all future armor sets, voiced dialogue, skills, and outfits.




It's not going to happen.

Scellow

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

ScottJeslis

jj7009 said:

Is it to late to ask for a 3rd game or another expansion to gw1?

Never know on that second part. They've been giving some love/attention to GW1 lately LOL

foxgirl

If they do a GW3, let's hope they get devs that know how to do combat mechanics better than the zerg rush in there now.

Aeander

ScottJeslis said:

jj7009 said:

Is it to late to ask for a 3rd game or another expansion to gw1?

Never know on that second part. They've been giving some love/attention to GW1 lately LOL

Even so, the only plausible way I can see a full GW1 expansion or campaign happening is a successful f2p relaunch.

The only real future for Guild Wars 1's (amazing) design philosophies would be through a spiritual successor.

Sovrath

Scellow said:

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

Didn't the first Guild Wars rely upon more horizontal progression? And it has a huge fanbase, some wanting Guild Wars 2 to be similar.

Aeander

Sovrath said:

Scellow said:

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

Didn't the first Guild Wars rely upon more horizontal progression? And it has a huge fanbase, some wanting Guild Wars 2 to be similar.

Right. Guild Wars 1 demonstrated that horizontal progression is not only good, but outright better than vertical progression when done correctly.

Trouble is, the dumbed down skill system in GW2 killed one of the major pillars of horizontal progression in the first game - skill capping. 

maskedweasel

Aeander said:

Sovrath said:

Scellow said:

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

Didn't the first Guild Wars rely upon more horizontal progression? And it has a huge fanbase, some wanting Guild Wars 2 to be similar.

Right. Guild Wars 1 demonstrated that horizontal progression is not only good, but outright better than vertical progression when done correctly.

Trouble is, the dumbed down skill system in GW2 killed one of the major pillars of horizontal progression in the first game - skill capping. 

I think the feel of combat is better in GW2 but the skills are much worse.  Especially for the Revenant.  My goodness what a horrible class premise.  They literally took away just about every skill choice.  


I think the only possible way to do a new race at this point for GW2 is to have an expansion with a new race, where the race is both introduced and where the story explains their entrance into the fray.  Granted they would have to fit the mold of current characters, which could be possible for some races... but not many of them.  It really just wouldn't work though... people would miss out on the story aspects revolving around the commander.

Celcius

Too much work for very little payoff, so I seriously doubt this would ever happen. 

Celcius

Scellow said:

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

I would hardly consider a game with a very high population and a new map every 3-4 months as well as other new content "dead". Claiming "x game is dead" because you don't play it, is pretty ignorant. 

Aeander

The only way a new race could happen is if it is introduced like the Death Knight in WoW. Unlock it after you reach level 80 and this race can't do the vanilla personal story. Such might actually help immersion by not retconning a new race into a personal story that wasn't written with it in mind.

That would cut down on the work load substantially, but wouldn't help the single largest cost - armor/outfit retrofitting. 

I think the most likely candidate would be the Tengu. They are a race with a large heritage in this franchise. They have an unexplorable racial city on the map. They were intended to be playable before launch. They are a very popular and unique race. 

If we get the Tengu, I think that they would combine their racial city - The City of Winds, with a level 1-15 zone within the city itself, primarily dealing with Destroyers. They would then send you to Kessex Hills as the level 15-25 zone and so on.

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maskedweasel

Aeander said:

The only way a new race could happen is if it is introduced like the Death Knight in WoW. Unlock it after you reach level 80 and this race can't do the vanilla personal story. Such might actually help immersion by not retconning a new race into a personal story that wasn't written with it in mind.

That would cut down on the work load substantially, but wouldn't help the single largest cost - armor/outfit retrofitting. 

I think the most likely candidate would be the Tengu. They are a race with a large heritage in this franchise. They have an unexplorable racial city on the map. They were intended to be playable before launch. They are a very popular and unique race. 

If we get the Tengu, I think that they would combine their racial city - The City of Winds, with a level 1-15 zone within the city itself, primarily dealing with Destroyers. They would then send you to Kessex Hills as the level 15-25 zone and so on.

I think they could totally do the Largos, if they are going to allow an unlock at level 80, and then have a race start at level 80.  By starting a race at level 80 you already skip the early story content. And the Largos aren't very well entrenched in mainstream lore, they are kind of outliers, and they are super cool.

Aeander

blueturtle13 said:

Torval said:

For me it's probably too late for GW2 at all, but I would check out a GW3 if they made it. I'm more interested in a GW1 successor with hubs and zones. In my GW3 world you could play single player with your heroes, like GW1, or with friends. Before GW2 I thought the franchise would be great as a full blown MMORPG. I was wrong. It was better as a coop/single player RPG. So, I don't want Tengu in GW2. I want Tengu, humans, charr, centaur, dwarves, and others in GW3.

100% agreed.  I feel GW3 set up the same way as GW1 would be a massive success in today's market. 

It would be a success. But I also think that the potential for such is never going to be seen by its publisher or developer.

If GW1 is to see a proper successor, it's going to be a crowdfunded spiritual successor project in the vein of Divinity Original Sin. Hell, Divinity Original Sin 2 is the closest thing the modern gaming industry has to a GW1 style game, and its success on both Kickstarter and in sales has shown that these types of knowledge-based CRPGs have a lot of potential.

Straegen

They put in mounts which was a pretty huge challenge so while I think a new race isn't going to happen outside of maybe a limited end-game type system, a new race is doable.

As for the game being dead or boring, to each his/her own. Nobody has a better RvR/WvW system. With the trait system, the classes are expansive for an MMO. Besides lets look at what AAA MMOs have released since GW2 that are objectively better:

TheDarkrayne

Koden please

Aeander

If we do ever get a Guild Wars 3, I would actually want them to only have humans and human-like races (Sylvari) that can use the same frame, animations, and armor sets.

So many of Guild Wars 2's shortcomings are the result of multiple races. Multiple races means fewer armor sets, slower development of armor sets, less voiced dialogue per race, fewer or lower quality story missions per race, fewer skills due to multiplied animation work, and a general shorter pace of development.

Yes, I know that some people love playing as Charr and Asura, but humans (and Norn females) are overwhelmingly the most popular races to play, and ensuring that these players have the best possible experience with the most armor sets, the fewest clipping issues, the tightest storytelling, and the most/highest quality animations is more important.

k61977

The premise that you can't add a new race because it will not work with the original story is flawed. I say that because you could add a new race that starts with a new expansion where the original main story is not part of their story. Not hard to do at all and they could even go do all the side quest, events, ect...of the original without missing on anything other than the main story line in reality. The Tengu would be a prefect race to add doing just that as for most of the original story they where behind there borders mostly.

Celcius

k61977 said:

The premise that you can't add a new race because it will not work with the original story is flawed. I say that because you could add a new race that starts with a new expansion where the original main story is not part of their story. Not hard to do at all and they could even go do all the side quest, events, ect...of the original without missing on anything other than the main story line in reality. The Tengu would be a prefect race to add doing just that as for most of the original story they where behind there borders mostly.

The issue with a new race is less because of the origin story and more because they would have to refit every armor set in the entire game to work on that race. The whole reason we rarely see armor sets in GW2 is because of how difficult it is and how much work it is for them to put one in, this would effectively mean they are creating dozens of armor sets for one patch / expansion. Being as they created maybe less then a dozen in each expansion so far, I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high. If we saw them redo the entire armor system and how they design them from a technical level, sure; but that is even less likely. Any new race would have to basically look like one of the current races (and have the same rig) so armors would all fit. 

TheDarkrayne

Celcius said:

k61977 said:

The premise that you can't add a new race because it will not work with the original story is flawed. I say that because you could add a new race that starts with a new expansion where the original main story is not part of their story. Not hard to do at all and they could even go do all the side quest, events, ect...of the original without missing on anything other than the main story line in reality. The Tengu would be a prefect race to add doing just that as for most of the original story they where behind there borders mostly.

The issue with a new race is less because of the origin story and more because they would have to refit every armor set in the entire game to work on that race. The whole reason we rarely see armor sets in GW2 is because of how difficult it is and how much work it is for them to put one in, this would effectively mean they are creating dozens of armor sets for one patch / expansion. Being as they created maybe less then a dozen in each expansion so far, I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high. If we saw them redo the entire armor system and how they design them from a technical level, sure; but that is even less likely. Any new race would have to basically look like one of the current races (and have the same rig) so armors would all fit. 

Along with Koden, I'd really like to see ascalon ghosts become a playable race. I'm sure they could make it work in the story somehow and they'd just use the human body models so they wouldn't need to adjust any armor or anything like that. Also, maybe the first MMO to have ghosts as a playable race?

Aeander

Celcius said:

k61977 said:

The premise that you can't add a new race because it will not work with the original story is flawed. I say that because you could add a new race that starts with a new expansion where the original main story is not part of their story. Not hard to do at all and they could even go do all the side quest, events, ect...of the original without missing on anything other than the main story line in reality. The Tengu would be a prefect race to add doing just that as for most of the original story they where behind there borders mostly.

The issue with a new race is less because of the origin story and more because they would have to refit every armor set in the entire game to work on that race. The whole reason we rarely see armor sets in GW2 is because of how difficult it is and how much work it is for them to put one in, this would effectively mean they are creating dozens of armor sets for one patch / expansion. Being as they created maybe less then a dozen in each expansion so far, I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high. If we saw them redo the entire armor system and how they design them from a technical level, sure; but that is even less likely. Any new race would have to basically look like one of the current races (and have the same rig) so armors would all fit. 

It should also be noted that even races that should have the same rig (humans and Sylvari namely) do not. There are so many armor pieces that look comically oversized on Sylvari or float/puff out at the skirt/coat as if the Sylvari character was wearing a leaf blower in their pants. It's baffling.

Samhael

While they could certainly add a new race, it wouldn't entice me to return. I just prefer games with roles rather than the hodge-podge of GW2. Rift's classes allowed options for the same characters to fill just about any role so that was a great game for a long time for me. (not going near it now since the Trion sell-out)

alkarionlog

Scellow said:

I hope for them they started development of GW 3 few years ago already, investing more in this dead and boring game would be their biggest mistake ever

Horizontal progression is boring af

what really killed it was the nerfs and the weird thing they are doing, after they "simplify" the skills I kewn I was done, I was getting tired of being forced to use the meta the devs wanted you to use

but also we have a new problem, would they really make something good now? they already show us they are lacking on creativity and want to control the player behavior, what I can take from this is IF they make a new GW, it will be worse then the way gw2 is now