Guild Wars 2

Just curious. I just bought the game on-line, plan to possibly download it later when on my home machine. I’ve never really played mmos before but everything I see regarding the game has blown me away so finally decided to plunge in!

The issue I have is my machine is a bit low on hard drive space. Only got about 60 gigs left and I don’t really want to lose another 20/25 gigs to the install as I know Windows likes about 10% hard drive space free to do some of it’s stuff. What I do have is a couple of large NAS drives on my network, both show up under Network and I also have each one mapped locally as X and Z. Can I install Guild Wars 2 directly to a NAS? I know many games don’t like this and insist a local installation. Will the game give me a choice to select these drives? I plan on downloading the GW2setup.exe and placing it on my NAS drive X within a folder I’ll create for the game. Maybe by placing the GW2setup.exe in here it will ensure that it installs in this location?

My other question is a little strange so forgive me. But as it’s a huge download and at the moment free time is at a premium I may delay downloading the full game a short while. In the interim because I am stickler for how my machine looks regarding games/shortcuts/icons I plan to maybe just download and place the GW2setup.exe shortcut onto the desktop ready for later use (just because I like to see my games on the desktop neatly arranged towards the top grouped in genres). I wouldn’t want to see some kind of generic icon sitting there though. So does the GW2setup.exe actually have a ‘Guild Wars 2’ icon/look to it? If that makes sense.

Cheers,
Wayne

The game files are all kept in a single data archive where you install the program, so I think it should work installing to a network drive.

If you have multiple people playing the game in your household it will not work on the other computers on the same time however as the file will be locked. You will also have more latency.

anzenketh.3759:

You will also have more latency.

What do you mean by latency? The only thing this should affect is resource load times, and the difference should be pretty negligible since the drive is on the local network.

Thanks chaps. Sounds like it will be ok then on the NAS drive. I don’t think I’ll have problems as such latency wise as I am the only person in the household who does any PC gaming. I just wanted to be able to store and run the game from the NAS. My laptop is high end, or at least it was cutting edge 3 years ago (Alienware 6970m, Sandybridge CPU) so I think it’ll run ok. Trouble is I can’t expand the storage as my drive bay slots are both taken which is why I have the NAS drives dotted about. It’s unfortunately the way it is now but every game nowadays seems to be huge ranging from 25 – 50 gigs making it hard to keep more than a handful of games installed.

I know it’s nowhere near as quick as a local drive but the NAS is running across gigabit. It’s write access when I send large video files to it over the network is around 35 – 50 mbytes/sec which isn’t too bad. I guess when reading files off it’s even faster but I haven’t timed that.

Andred.1087:

anzenketh.3759:

You will also have more latency.

What do you mean by latency? The only thing this should affect is resource load times, and the difference should be pretty negligible since the drive is on the local network.

I was talking about resource load times. Depending on his network connection wired vs wireless you are correct.