Randin.5701

As I'm currently beating my head against the LW S2 achievements in search of mastery points, I had this occur to me. Probably exceeds the scope of QoL, but screw it, I'm tossing it out there:

Each category of masteries has more mastery points available than it actually needs to unlock all the abilities. How about making so that, if you completely unlock all the masteries in a particular category, then any extra points you have left over go into a common pool that can be used on any other mastery category?

Realistically?

* Cantha

* New batch of elite specs

* The Sea Dragon to show up in some capacity, either as the primary focus, or setting the groundwork for it to be the focus of the story arc after the expansion, like PoF and Kralkatorik.

* If the dragon is a central focus, then a revamp of underwater content, possibly including an underwater mount.

* One, _maybe_ two, more big, back-of-the-box features (maybe a new race, maybe housing, someone in another thread brought up the idea of sailing, which could work)

Since we're going asian-themed by doing Cantha next, doing something with ghosts/ancestral spirits/something along those lines feels thematically appropriate. Could be done as the minion spec, giving us ghost pets to go along with all the flesh constructs we get as part of the base class. Alternatively, it could be a spec that lets you become a ghost, and serve as a more mobility-focused option. Just to toss a couple random ideas out there.

Well, let's go through the list of things that a new race would require, and see where there's potential workarounds:

**New character models (and associated customization):** No real getting around that.

**Making existing weapons and armor work on the new race:** The difficulty there depends on how much the new race differs from the existing races. Tengu would hopefully require minimal tweaking from the Charr skeleton; Largos and Kodan would likely be based on the Human and Norn skeletons, respectively, but they have differences in their head shape that helms would need to be changed to accommodate.

**New animations:** Probably not for every animation, but you would expect, for instance, the Largos to have a different swimming animation from other races. Overall, shouldn't require a lot there, assuming that any new race has the same skeleton as one of the existing races.

**New zones:** Assuming the new race was built to be able to do the full story, including the initial race-specific parts, we would probably be looking at a new city, and one or two new low-level zones for players to go through before being funneled into existing content. Having the new race skip the personal story would be one way to avoid having to do a lot of that; having some storyline that has them living as refugees in one of the existing cities would also work, although I feel like that would rob the race of some of its character.

**Voice acting:** The potential big one. Getting two new voice actors to record lines for the entire story up to this point is a big project. Again, having the new race start at the current point in the story would be an easy way to avoid that, although that would also mean that a lot of the game's content is 'useless' to the new race, which might be seen as a questionable design decision. Another possibility, which I've brought up before, would be for the new race to use the same voice actors as one of the existing races, ideally applying some effects to the voice recordings to make it sound somewhat different. If they were to do that, then the vast majority of the voice acting the new race would need would already be complete. They'd still need to record new lines for the first few chapters of the personal story, some new combat barks, and things like that, but a much smaller project than recording new lines for everything.

EDIT: **New quests:** Oh yeah, forgot one, although one I touched on in the other points. If we were going for full parity between the new race and the old ones, then we would need new quests for the first three chapters of the personal story, as those are all race-specific in nature. And ideally, you'd need to do multiple variations depending on the choices you made in character creation. Again, if they wanted to dodge doing that, the way to do it would be to have the new race start at the current point in the story.

I think that covers everything; I missing anything else that a new race would require?

I think I'd give the edge to Tengu, but honestly, the Tengu, Largos, and Kodan are all on my list of races I'd like to see.

Strange as it might sound, if Anet were to actually try to do a new race, I've come to the conclusion that Tengu might actually be the most doable of those particular races. Kodan have the problem that they've been pegged as not being 'bear people', but specifically 'polar bear people', which means that they're inherently very limited in character customization options, so as much as I like them, they are perhaps not an ideal choice for a player race.

Looking at Tengu and Largos, viability I'd say comes down to two factors: fitting armor to the character models, and voice acting. Tengu would use the same skeleton as the Charr, and would hopefully require relatively minimal tweaking to get Charr armor models to work on them. Largos would use the Human/Sylvari skeletons, but they would probably need more extensive work on their head armor; the whole thing with the Largos always wearing their masks means that any head equipment that doesn't completely cover their face would need to accommodate the mask.

I mentioned it the last time we had a 'new race' thread, but I'd realized that the most efficient way to handle voice acting for a new race might be to take the voice recordings for one of the existing player characters, and apply some effects to it to get it sounding just different enough from the original race (alter the pitch a little, something like that); they'd still need to do some new voice recording for parts of the game, but that would cover the vast majority of the necessary voice acting. Doing something like that should work just fine for the Tengu. Unfortunately, the Largos have a problem that I'd forgotten about until running the personal story with an alt and hitting a mission where you work with a Largos: they speak with an Arabic-sounding accent. Artificially altering the pitch on a voice recording is one thing, artificially altering the accent is another.

So yeah, Tengu seems like the most doable as a potential new race, and one I'd be happy to get.

The vague idea that immediately pops into my head is a mobility-based spec (it's certainly a gap in the current necro specs) where the necro assumes a ghostly or shadowy form and flits around the battlefield. Sword would probably be a fitting weapon for something like that.

More light armor hood options that look good on charr--mostly meaning: hoods that don't disable the charr's horns. There are currently a grand total of three, one of which has the hood sitting so far back on the charr's head, that it's more of an oversized turtleneck. Hell, I recently saw that the hood that thieves can start with looks good, just make a light armor version of that.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> It's not "less capable". It's the voice acting and armor. Both cause a situation where adding a new race would not only require adding/redoig a lot of already existing assets, but also significantly increase workload (and costs) on all future stuff.

>

True, but it can be worked around to a greater or lesser extent. How complicated armor ends up being depends on the hypothetical new race's physiology; for instance, if the new race was Largos, then the human/sylvari armor models would largely work as-is (maybe with some tweaking of helms).

As for voice, the question does need to be asked whether the new race actually needs new voice actors. The developers are capable of altering voice recordings (pitching the voice higher or lower, adding weird effects to it, etc.), so they should, theoretically, be able to take the recordings from one of the existing player-character voice actors and shift the sound enough to not immediately sound the same as the existing race, while still sounding good. They'd still need to record some new lines (the first three chapters of the personal story being by far the largest chunk of it), but a comparatively modest amount compared to what they'd need to do if they were starting from scratch. Of course, I'm not sure how the time and effort needed to alter existing voice lines compares to just using a new voice actor, but I have to imagine that it would be noticeably less.