The Asura
The Asura are one of Tyria’s most distinctive races, first introduced formally in Guild Wars: Eye of the North in 2007 as an underground, magically adept people whose emergence foreshadowed their later role as a playable race in Guild Wars 2. They are diminutive but long‑lived by human standards, with early lore sources indicating that an exceptional Asuran lifespan can approach 120 years, and their culture centres on a fusion of arcane research, engineering and an unshaken belief in their own intellectual superiority.
In Eye of the North, the Asura appear as a secretive civilisation pushed to the surface after their subterranean empire is catastrophically disrupted. For centuries, they had lived in the Depths of Tyria, maintaining a network of magically charged transportation hubs known as asura gates, which linked their cities and laboratories and allowed them to travel without exposing themselves to “surface‑dwellers”. This cloistered existence is shattered when the Great Destroyer, lieutenant of the Elder Dragon Primordus, leads destroyers against the Central Transfer Chamber, a key nexus in their gate network; the assault cripples their infrastructure and forces widespread evacuation to the surface along the Tarnished Coast, at the edge of the Maguuma Jungle.
Within Eye of the North’s story, the Asura are one of the factions the player can ally with in confronting the destroyer threat. They are depicted as fiercely intelligent, highly arrogant and accustomed to treating other races as tools to be directed towards Asuran goals. Their mastery of “arcane geometry” and kinematics is reflected in the design of their golems, modular stone architecture and gate technology, all of which recur in Guild Wars 2. The Asura companion Vekk serves as a key liaison between human heroes and his people, providing a personal lens on a culture that, as a whole, prefers to keep tight control over its secrets and devices.
The founding of Rata Sum marks a major turning point in the Asuran timeline as presented in Eye of the North and later elaborated in Guild Wars 2. After being driven from their underground centres, the Asura rapidly establish a new capital in the jungles of the Tarnished Coast, choosing a remote region where they can continue their work with limited interference. Rata Sum’s design reflects Asuran priorities: a levitating geometric superstructure composed of massive cube‑like segments, crowded with laboratories, colleges, golem foundries and gate hubs rather than conventional residential districts. By the time of Guild Wars 2, this city functions as their formal capital, primary university cluster and one of Tyria’s main hubs of magical technology.
Chronologically, Eye of the North’s events fall around 1078–1080 AE, while Guild Wars 2 is set roughly 250 years later, in the early 14th century AE. Over that interval, Asuran society shifts from a reclusive underground empire to an influential, if still somewhat aloof, surface power whose gates, golems and applied magic permeate much of Tyria’s infrastructure. The asura gate network expands to link major cities and distant regions, giving the race both economic leverage and a measure of informal control over strategic movement across the continent; this reach is a major reason Rata Sum stands alongside Divinity’s Reach, the Black Citadel and Hoelbrak as a central polity in Guild Wars 2.
When Guild Wars 2 launched in August 2012, the Asura joined humans, Charr, Norn and sylvari as one of the five playable races, marking a shift from their earlier status as a non‑playable faction. Their visual design underwent substantial iteration during development: early concept work portrayed them as more amphibious and hunched, with a cave‑dwelling, almost goblin‑like silhouette, before the team settled on the wide‑eyed, large‑eared, slightly rabbit‑like faces seen in the final game. This redesign favoured expressiveness and personality while preserving their small stature and slightly unsettling proportions, fitting their expanded narrative role and their presence in character creation.
As a playable race, the Asura are presented as inherently magical, folding sorcery into everything from engineering projects to everyday domestic devices. Their society is organised around research institutions known as colleges: the College of Statics focuses on enduring structures and stable constructs, the College of Dynamics favours experimental, transformative designs, and the College of Synergetics concentrates on theoretical and metaphysical questions. These colleges stand in for more traditional social divisions, acting as both academic affiliations and political blocs that shape Rata Sum’s governance and determine the priorities of Asuran research. In character creation, Asura players choose one of these colleges, which colours their early personal story, the mentors they meet, and the projects they become involved in during the opening chapters.
Asuran intellectual culture is characterised by an unapologetically hierarchical worldview. They commonly refer to other races as “bookah”, a mildly derisive term implying a lack of refined thought, and their interactions often carry a tone of condescension even when co‑operation is sincere. This attitude is rooted partly in history: for generations underground, the Asura regarded themselves as the pre‑eminent civilisation, and the shock of the destroyer invasion, followed by the need to negotiate with surface nations, reinforced their belief that strength without intellect is insufficient. Guild Wars 2 reflects this in dialogue and animations, with Asura speaking quickly and precisely, moving with brisk confidence and peppering their speech with jargon, acronyms, and sarcasm in response to perceived ignorance.
Lore sources describe Asuran magic as grounded in “arcane geometry” and the mathematical structuring of energy, treating spells and constructs as formula‑driven results rather than mysterious rites. This paradigm supports their golemancy, in which autonomous constructs undertake tasks ranging from mundane labour to frontline combat, and allows them to embed enchantments into tools and architecture. Asura gates apply similar principles on a large scale, creating stable wormholes between paired anchor points at considerable magical and material cost, which both explains their importance to other races and justifies the Asura’s insistence on controlling access and technical knowledge.
In Guild Wars 2’s starting experience, new Asura characters begin in Metrica Province, the low‑level zone surrounding Rata Sum. This area operates as both a laboratory complex and a proving ground, filled with field experiments, malfunctioning golems, rival research teams and constant Inquest interference. Early personal storylines revolve around college rivalries, dangerous prototypes, and the ethics of experimentation, and introduce key figures such as Zojja and the Inquest leaders. The Inquest, a major Asuran splinter faction, rejects the loose academic oversight of the colleges and pursues power without meaningful ethical constraint, frequently experimenting on sentient beings and attempting to harness Elder Dragon energies for their own ends; their schemes become an important thread in Living World episodes, raids, and map‑wide events.
The Asura play a central role in Destiny’s Edge and later multi‑racial alliances, contributing both personnel and technology to the fight against the Elder Dragons. Zojja, an Asuran elementalist and golemancer, is a core member of Destiny’s Edge in the personal story, and her past with the human inventor Snaff anchors much of the race’s modern mythos around genius, ambition and failure. Asura‑designed machines—ranging from devices used at Claw Island to the Pact’s airships and various dragon‑energy analysers and containment systems—recur throughout story missions and expansions, often bringing both breakthroughs and significant risks, and underlining the tendency of Asuran science to push boundaries faster than its practitioners can fully predict the consequences.
Across the broader Tyria timeline, key historical beats are closely tied to Asuran involvement. The attack on the Central Transfer Chamber and the subsequent evacuation to the Tarnished Coast mark the end of Asuran subterranean exclusivity and provide a narrative bridge into the surface‑focused politics of Guild Wars 2. By 1325 AE, at the start of Guild Wars 2, Rata Sum is firmly established, the colleges are entrenched, and asura gates link Lion’s Arch, Hoelbrak, the Black Citadel, the Grove and distant regions. Later story arcs—from the Pact’s campaigns against Zhaitan and Mordremoth through to subsequent dragon conflicts—lean heavily on this infrastructure, with Asura consistently providing frameworks for understanding dragon magic and tools for confronting it.
Development material and post‑launch commentary suggest that ArenaNet positioned the Asura deliberately as a counterpoint to traditional fantasy “small folk” such as halflings. Rather than rural communities, they embody an industrialised research culture and technologically saturated environments, with architecture marked by sharp angles, glowing blue‑green energy lines and floating platforms to convey mathematically precise construction and ever‑present magical currents. Their racial armour, weapons and cultural items likewise incorporate luminous cores, articulated metal and arcane lenses, reinforcing the link between Asuran identity and applied magitech.
Although the Asura are relatively young as a fantasy concept, their development from a late‑era Guild Wars faction into a fully realised playable race in Guild Wars 2 traces substantial shifts in art direction, narrative role and world‑building focus. Eye of the North introduces them as a hidden power grappling with the consequences of an Elder Dragon minion’s assault, while Guild Wars 2 expands this into a portrait of a society whose influence runs through trade, transport, warfare and research across Tyria. The combination of their underground origins, their surface‑era capital and their entanglement with dragon‑era events gives the Asura a continuous presence across both games’ timelines, from the Depths of Tyria and the Central Transfer Chamber to the floating cubes of Rata Sum and the airships and laboratories that accompany the Pact into the furthest reaches of the world.
