This week's article of The Scrying Pool continues expansion talks with new races!

In each article of The Scrying Pool, I look at what is and what could be. After taking a look at what is present in Guild Wars 2 now, be that lore or game mechanics, I then ask What If? What if this happened in the lore or this feature was added in a future patch.

Last week The Scrying Pool checked out what an expansion might look like in Guild Wars 2 as well as some of the core features that would potentially change in an expansion sized content drop. This week’s article will continue this expansion view by looking at potential new races.

Players will probably not see many playable races added to Guild Wars 2. If we see a new race every other “expansion”, then I think we would be getting a lot of new race love. A lot of work would be needed to add a new race to the game.

The first concern would be armor. There has been a noticeable disparity between the releases of new weapon sets to the game compared to armor sets. A big part of this is how much work is needed to add a single item. A sword for example can be created once and used on any character regardless of race or gender. An armor piece, however, must be created to fit each race and if necessary made to fit each gender within a race separately. Now it isn’t just creating one sword, but creating 10 different coats. Then factor in the three different armor classes and all the pieces needed to create a full set and you are looking at up to 180 pieces of gear to create a single armor set compared to the 19 weapons needed to create a weapon set.

The number of armor pieces would only increase with additional races. With each additional race the total number would increase by another 36 pieces of gear: Light, Medium, Heavy armor types for both Male and Female for the six armor pieces that make up a set.

Adding a race wouldn’t just mean more work for future armor sets, but also adapting the current armor sets to fit this new race as well. Currently there are in the neighborhood of 35 armor sets in the game. Multiply that by the six pieces in those sets, again by two for the male and female variations and finally by three to include the light, medium and heavy armor type variations and a new race would require a staggering 1,260 armor pieces to be adapted.

There are some additional considerations with this number. I mentioned that huge number for its shock value. If you had to change everything to fit the new race, that huge number is what you would be looking at. Not everything would need to be adapted and, depending on how the race is set up, it might not require variations between male and female. Shoulders for example might not need any adjustment to fit a race. Likewise new, very humanoid races might require little adaptation from one of the current humanoid’s armor assets.

The next concern is the Personal Story and by extensive of that voice acting. If a new race follows the same path as the current races, then, by my count, there would need to be 44 new personal story quests for the 1-30 racial specific storylines and voice acting for the player’s character for another 93 story quests. Then if any of the other character had voice dialogue dependent on the race of the new race’s character, that voice actor would need to reread those lines for this new race. Then as we are talking about this being part of an expansion, all of the new quest voiceovers would be added on top of this.

Do new races need to do all of these quests? In the current timeframe of GW2, Zhaitan (the end-boss of the current personal storyline) is already defeated. All of the story updates added to the game since launch have been added under the impression that these are post the Zhaitan story released at launch. Is it really necessary then for a future race to have the Zhaitan story retconned to include them?

No Zhaitan for future Races? -->