Originally Posted by
Eric Flannum
First, we did not add new armor to make the game look more asian. All we did was make our lower level characters wear some higher level armor because our research has shown us that in Asian markets, character appearance is extremely important (more so than in the west) and we wanted players in the demo to see some of the fancier armor. If you go back and look at concepts we've previously released you can find almost every single armor that we are showing at G-Star. These armors have always been planned to be in the game and none of them are replacing armors that you've previously seen.
Second, We added a lot of detail to our character faces, added some new faces to the character creator, temporarily removed others (those that we didn't have time to touch up for the demo or simply didn't like) and kept some of them the same but touched them up to match the new faces. The addition of these new faces will not mean the removal of any faces that we may have otherwise had. Tyria is a pretty diverse place and always has been. We have always wanted to allow players the option to have their humans look Ascalonian, Canthan, Krytan, and Elonan. Until now we mostly had Ascalonian with a few Krytan style faces here and there. It seemed like a good idea to add some of our Canthan style faces for the G-Star demo. Once again, the addition of Canthan and eventually Elonan style facial features has always been the plan.
We also changed the appearance of some of our NPC's. This happens all the time as we gain more options with our composite system which uses all the art that we use for our players. NPC's have changed appearance between demos before and you can continue to expect them to change appearance as we continue development. Again, as we add more Canthan and Elonan style faces into the game you can expect to see more characters with these features appear both PC and NPC. I hope this clears things up.