Guild Wars 3 Introduces the Asura

ArenaNet published its third blog post introducing the playable races of MMORPG Guild Wars 3. The latest post, from senior narrative designer Liz Baker, follows previous introductions to the humans and kodan and introduces the asura.

The asura are a small race, known for their scholarly nature, with Guild Wars 3′s version looking rather different to those in the others of the series. In the previous two games, the asura had been fully pushed underground and adapted to their new environment, losing their fur and some of their height as well as having larger eyes. However, with Guild Wars 3 set over a thousand years earlier, players experience them in a more balanced relationship with the surface.

The asura have come to the magical land of Orr after decades of expansion through underground tunnels from their home in the Maguuma Jungle. Their initial forays met with problems, first with the breaching of seawater into the tunnels, and then by large tremors coming from deep below. While most of the asura deemed the effort to reach Orr to be too great, Zouelle the Archengineer and her granddaughter Niommi bore witness to the great magic emanating from it and founded the asura’s greatest above-ground expedition.

The Rata Pten lab found many volunteers, especially after news of competition from the humans and kodan. However, its efforts met with great challenges as land surveys failed to return, machines malfunctioned, and planning faced various argumentative delays. Eventually, Niommi, later dubbed “the Trailblazer”, and the surviving half of the Rata Pten Expeditionary Krewe made it to Orr. Upon arrival, the asura found themselves in a region with great resources and challenges, and the Vael spirits with strong connections to the land.

The asura’s enthusiasm for their new discovery and assertive investigations put them at odds with the native creatures and the Vaelwardens that act as their protectors. The Vaelwardens considered the asura to be intrusive and reckless (if well intentioned), while the asura conversely considered the Vaelwardens to be too dogmatic. When the Vaelwardens open their ranks to the new races on Orr, few asura sign up to join. At the time of Guild Wars 3, the asura have spread across Orr, and reestablished a long-distance contact with the main asuran civilization on Tyria via the now small outpost of Rata Pten. Their vast scholarly connections have been able to determine that something is coming that will change life for the asura, even if they can’t yet identify it.