The Kodan and Guild Wars Artwork

I've been following the GW2 Twitter for a couple of weeks now and today it popped up with an update letting me know of a new blog post on the ArenaNet blog: http://www.arena.net/blog/the-wisdom-and-power-of-the-kodan. The post concerns the non-playable race of the Kodan in Guild Wars 2. Now, in a time when most of the GW community is clamoring for any information regarding the upcoming game - a whole blog post on a NPC race seems to suggest that the Kodan will play an integral role in the story of GW2 and probably more specifically, the lore of the playable race; Norn. 

 I came across the Kodan a few months ago whilst browsing through the Guild Wars 2 wiki, and I was immediately intrigued. Up until that point I had not heard even a sniff about them, and considering I've been playing the game for upwards of 5 years now and have read just about all there is to read regarding lore and literature on the game, I found them fascinating. This new blog post has only strengthened my curiousity, The Kodan are not at all what I expected them to be.

From the pictures I have seen up until now I characterised them similar to the Norn - as a proud warrior race, much more barbaric than the spiritual and altogether more conservative group that they have turned out to be. Instead they are arbitors of balance in nature, and ruthless in the protection of that balance. Far more calculated and mystical than I had imagined. Thats not to say they aren't awesome, who wouldn't love a 10ft tall polar bear wielding a sword?

I won't go into too much detail about what is revealed in the blog post - if you'd like to read about them then click the link at the top. What I will say, however, is that this new post is a brilliant example of the incredibly high standard of art that the Guild Wars 2 team is producing at a breakneck speed. The level of skill required is just immense, and their talent has not gone unnoticed, several of their artists winning a number of prestigious awards.
Finally, I'd like to congratulate the Guild Wars team on their mopping up of the competition in the recent end of year awards. Again, full details of the awards the team managed to take away can be found on the ANet blog here: http://www.arena.net/blog/fans-support-arenanet-in-year-end-awards


Here are come of the fantastic art pieces created for Guild Wars 2, many more can be found at http://www.arena.net/