The charr have fingers!! No more mitten-paws holding guns! Now every time they take a leap forward you get to see a gorgeous set of claws unfurl before them. That alone would have made this animator's heart happy, but there was so much more to be had.
Intra-Guild Cooperation
There will be mechanics in place to encourage and reward guildmates for playing together. Right now one such thing is that when members of the same guild are fighting together and cooperating they earn reputation with their guild. This reputation can then be spent on benefits for the guild.
They didn't specifically state guild hall upgrades, but they mentioned crafting / NPC upgrades for guilds, so one would assume there must be some sort of shared guild space for these to go in.
Another rewards they mentioned were exp buffs in the form of flags similar to a cross between GW1 exp scrolls and GW2 warrior banners. So you would buy the flag and plant it in an area for your guild members to get an exp boost in that area.
Guild Allegiances
Guild joining is per-account (not per-character as they'd said previously), and users can joint multiple guilds. However, they can only "represent" one guild at a time. You only have access to the guild chat of the guild you're currently representing, and your cape/bonuses will be that of the guild you're representing. Switching which guild you're currently representing is going to be super easy in something like the guild or chat menu. There won't be any penalties for switching representation.
I could see this working well with something like our alliances, as we could have several different SoF guilds to which everyone belongs, and you just represent the guild that happens to be doing the activities you're most interested in at that moment. Checking what's going on in the others would be a quick simple representation jump.
There's no formal alliance structures in the game yet, however ANet expressed interest in having inter-guild cooperation mechanics on top of the stuff I've already mentioned.
Guild Colors!
Dye sets will be able to be saved and sent to other players in what sounds like the way skill templates work currently. One aspect of this is that users can save their favorite dye configurations for later, or to send to their friends... but the application that caught my attention is that that guilds can create specific configurations as their guild colors! Sending around the guild's dye template would be a quick way for everyone in the guild to match for some special occasion (or you know, just for fun).
Sylvari Randomness
I played the demo once and didn't pick up a whole lot of new stuff, other than that among the Sylvari ranger's default pets is one of the most gorgeous little critters I've ever seen. They get a rainbow moa, which was cool, and a sort of ugly sabertooth cat with something like a clouded leopard pattern. But the third one... it was so gorgeous! It's a wolf model, but colored in green and gold somewhat similar to a nian from factions.
The ranger greatsword was fun, playing a bit like what I would expect from a warrior, but with ample bleed application in place of raw power.
Character Appearance Options
The charr have some amazing character customization options. I do believe I saw 14 different fur patterns (2 pages of 7). Leopards and tigers of various sorts are some obvious pattern options, but there were also more subtle shadings for solid colored charr, such as the top side of the char being a different color than the underside, or the paws/tail being different than the body. You set the base fur color and the pattern color separately, choosing from around a dozen different colors.
The facial structure itself varied a lot more than I expected. Pretty much all of the char we've seen in random screen shots so far are from the same few face models. There are definitely others to choose from, including a female face that has a ridge of tiny horns studding her cheek bones.
The most unexpected part for me, though, was the variation in the horns. There are some very bad-ass horns to be had for both the male and female charr, although the male are more over-the-top. It was fun to hang around the demo stations just to see the different charr characters people were creating.
While the charr didn't have any sliders, just a ton of selectable variations, the humans (and therefore I would assume the norn as well) definitely had quite a few facial feature sliders.
I didn't find the asura options as interesting, although that may be a personal taste thing since I'm not too fond of the asura. The Sylvari had extremely restricted appearances in this demo so there's no telling what sort of options they'll end up with yet. Right now it was just a tiny set of face / hair / ears.
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