Doing animals right in Guild Wars 2

As much as I skip over the lore while I’m playing Guild Wars 2, I can’t help but admire what an imaginative world ArenaNet has made. Ever see a frog in heavy armor? Well, you have now. Pictured. Left.

I recall another MMO called Vanguard having various dog and cat people, and as near as I can recall, they were just human character models with dog and cat heads stuck on top. It’s just like how all the aliens on Star Trek are bipedal humanoids with prosthetic noses or ears or whatever. One of the things I really like about playing a charr in Guild Wars 2 is that it’s not just a human character model with a cat head. The charr have an entirely different posture, size, and movement animation. Similarly, the various non-human races around the world — I don’t just mean the monsters, but the NPC civilizations — have a distinct look. In addition to the frog people, there are polar bear people, platypus people, rat people, and bird people, and not a one of them uses the basic human character model. In fact, with all these NPC races, with all the charr, with all the diminutive asura, it sometimes seems that human character models are the exception rather than the rule.