Elf in key art gallery shared by anet

[Crystal Paladin.3871]

Elves

And I also noticed a wallpaper that says "commando"

Is this some kind of teaser?

[Zera.9435]

Those aren't elves. Those are the outdated and since replaced concepts for Sylvari.

The commando was a joke profession announced on April Fools some time before GW2 release.

Edited February 28 by Zera.9435

[TheQuickFox.3826]

 

[QueenKeriti.5176]

3 minutes ago, Crystal Paladin.3871 said:

Elves

And I also noticed a wallpaper that says "commando"

Is this some kind of teaser?

The "Commando" class reveal was an April Fool's prank.

The Commandos do make an appearance in Jahai, though, lol.

[Crystal Paladin.3871]

7 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

 

Wow.... This is something... Nice one

[Linken.6345]

13 minutes ago, QueenKeriti.5176 said:

The "Commando" class reveal was an April Fool's prank.

The Commandos do make an appearance in Jahai, though, lol.

An apparently one of the SotO maps too.

[KindredPhoenyx.8976]

OG sylvari were elves with leaf hair but they updated them since then.

Which thank the Pale Tree we got what we did instead.

[Ashantara.8731]

5 hours ago, QueenKeriti.5176 said:

The Commandos do make an appearance in Jahai, though, lol.

In quite a few more locations, actually, including SotO maps.

[Danikat.8537]

The Commandos are still one of the best April Fools jokes they've done, and the one time I genuinely fell off my chair laughing. I read the announcement about a Commando preview mission in GW1 and went to Embark Beach to see how many people were confused looking for the helicopter, then discovered there actually was a helicopter, and a commando, and a real mission to do, although of course it wasn't a preview of a GW2 profession.

The background is that every time they reveleaed a GW2 profession, including the very first one and all the ones that were just updated versions of GW1 professions they had people raging about how obviously over-powered they were and how they'd dominate the entire game and no one would ever play anything else. I think partially because the preview clips always ended with the enemies dying, and some people thought it was accurately showing a real battle instead of just showing off how the skills worked, so they thought you'd actually be able to one-shot multiple enemies with every skill. (I suspect a lot of them were using fake versions of enemies with 1 hit point.) So then they announced the Commando profession, which actually would be stupidly over-powered.

And yeah, sylvari started off looking a lot more like humans, or elves. There's a really interesting blog by Kristen Perry about re-designing them from scratch because all the existing fantasy concepts basically fell into two camps - 'human/elf wearing leaf themed clothes and/or body paint' and 'bipedal tree monster' whereas they wanted something genuinely in the middle, unmistakably a plant but looking human.

You can still make a sylvari with long, pointed ears like an elf (although not as extreme as some versions of elves), you can even make one that sort-of looks almost human by picking a brown or beige skin colour and the least leafy face and hair options, although for me that always falls more into the uncanny valley than making them look more plant-like.