Guild Wars 2

I haven’t seen any information regarding adjusting settings so far like you can do in WvW. So does that mean that my PC will officially blow up the next time I want to do a World Boss or something similar that gathers a trillion players in one spot?

I’m already shivering in terror as we speak as my PC isn’t the most super hardcore one and it already struggles in places like Pavillion farm and world bosses.
With PvE culling gone, I fear the game will be unplayable for me in several places in the game.

There will be an option to reduce your graphics settings so that you can only view the entire game through a two-dimensional top view. Furthermore, all environmental elements will be removed and all players will be reduced to single-dot representations floating in free space. That should do the trick.

I’d be interested to know what technical improvemnts have been made. Obv wvw needed culling removed, but that shut me out of wvw during peak time completely. I’d hate to see it happen in pve as well.

I am also concerned about this. My Computer is not even all that old. I am just cheap and did not buy the best of the best. That and I am stuck on Wi-Fi

Hopefully we’ll see CPU’s doing a bit more work. It pains me to see it use only 40% of its full capacity.

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Hopefully we’ll see CPU’s doing a bit more work. It pains me to see it use only 40% of its full capacity.

Seriously. It’s 2013.

Though, to be fair, they started working on GW2 in 2007.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The setting adjustments you can make currently will expand beyond just WvW, and simply be a game wide setting you apply for culling rules. For most folks, this means you can adjust the settings to actually improve your performance over current performance if you wish, since fallback models and name-tags are cheaper than full model renders.

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Colin,

This sounds great. Thank you!

But will we see cpu performance improvements going into 2014?

Thanks for that confirmation, Colin.

You should probably update the patch preview notes to include that.

Lucky.9421:

Seriously. It’s 2013.

Though, to be fair, they started working on GW2 in 2007.

Based on an engine from 2004ish.

lordkrall.7241:

Lucky.9421:

Seriously. It’s 2013.

Though, to be fair, they started working on GW2 in 2007.

Based on an engine from 2004ish.

all of which is irrelevant and my pc goes cpu nuts

Blackwyn.8127:

I haven’t seen any information regarding adjusting settings so far like you can do in WvW. So does that mean that my PC will officially blow up the next time I want to do a World Boss or something similar that gathers a trillion players in one spot?

I’m already shivering in terror as we speak as my PC isn’t the most super hardcore one and it already struggles in places like Pavillion farm and world bosses.
With PvE culling gone, I fear the game will be unplayable for me in several places in the game.

What CPU/GPU/HDD/ram you got ? this game is really good on mediocre machines tbh . However An i5 ivy bridge + GTX 670 + SSD + 8gb of ram will chew throught GW2 everything turned up , and its not expensive at all

ColinJohanson.2394:

The setting adjustments you can make currently will expand beyond just WvW, and simply be a game wide setting you apply for culling rules. For most folks, this means you can adjust the settings to actually improve your performance over current performance if you wish, since fallback models and name-tags are cheaper than full model renders.

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Coooooooooooolin…. can we have a setting that that pejoratively renders bookahs?

My problem with culling is that it seems to cull wrong things from my point of view. I seem to be often get hit by invisible effects (though this may be a graphics card issue since it happened before culling too). I can’t see the skill animation but I can see the hit FX. I.e. someone throws a fireball at me and I can’t see the fireball trailing at me but I can see the flame burst FX once it actually hits me.

Actually would it be possible for a culling option that removed only the hit FX from any attack that is not targetting me or where originator is not me? Big boss fights are mostly problematic because of those hit FX effects. Not because of the skill animations themselves.

I.e. you fight the statue of dwayna and it’s constantly covered in massive hit FX soup. I’d rather them be toned down than the meteors, projectile trails etc that are part of the skill animation itself and help me to judge what my allies are doing. I don’t need to know if they actually hit the target. I mean identifying a single effect in large scale battles is pretty much impossible now anyway. Also seeing when enemy is about to execute power attack is very hard now as well. This is all because of the hit FX not because of any skill animation.

This would also be very helpful in WvW… which I promised never to touch again but seems I’m there. I blame my friend who asked me to give me real WvW another try after I loudly complained about the stupid jumping puzzle kite hunt (which I never wish to see again).

Summary:

Split skill effects to 3 parts:

• cast visual (basically the animation your character uses when they cast)
• effect animation (fireball projectile, meteors falling etc)
• hit fx (effect tha plays on target) —> allow disabling this when the caster is not me or when I am not the FX target

ColinJohanson.2394:

The setting adjustments you can make currently will expand beyond just WvW, and simply be a game wide setting you apply for culling rules. For most folks, this means you can adjust the settings to actually improve your performance over current performance if you wish, since fallback models and name-tags are cheaper than full model renders.

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Would it be possible to look into getting them separated into two options early on? I’m pretty sure lots of people will want city, open world, and dungeon settings to be on full while they’re content with seeing zergs in WvW with just basic armor.

milo.6942:

lordkrall.7241:

Lucky.9421:

Seriously. It’s 2013.

Though, to be fair, they started working on GW2 in 2007.

Based on an engine from 2004ish.

all of which is irrelevant and my pc goes cpu nuts

Well yes and no. The CPU may not be getting overwhelmed but the way the engine is written tells your machine how to allocate memory, bandwidth, and processing power.

This is exemplified in games now being written specifically for multi-core processors; which didn’t happen in the past since processors were only one individual chip. Older games will not make use of your 8-core Intel chip even if it means eating 100% processing power on only one core and slowing the game down.

@OP

Basically, you can choose between Slide Show Wars 2 or Name Tag Wars 2 or a bit of both.

ColinJohanson.2394:

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Challenge Accepted!
- My 5Ghz i7 and Dual 780s

Is there going to be a difference for enemy and ally culling? It’d be helpful to cull allies, but keep all enemies. Failing an event because there’s too many people and the enemies are culled blows.

Dreamslayer.7659:

ColinJohanson.2394:

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Challenge Accepted!
- My 5Ghz i7 and Dual 780s

Dont forget 32gb of ddr5 ram and a 1tb SSD + 1 tb fibre optic lol :P

Again this is a bandaid for a game engine that can’t handle its intended function…multi player content. What we need is the game engine updated to actually do its intended job rather than bodge fixes to hide the shortcomings in the current one. It amazes me that the game was released on an engine that was obviously, even from beta, not up to the job…especially for the touted highlight of the game…freestyle WvW and large PvP.

Oldbugga.7029:

Again this is a bandaid for a game engine that can’t handle its intended function…multi player content. What we need is the game engine updated to actually do its intended job rather than bodge fixes to hide the shortcomings in the current one. It amazes me that the game was released on an engine that was obviously, even from beta, not up to the job…especially for the touted highlight of the game…freestyle WvW and large PvP.

Sorry but the game runs decent so i disagree if you want to run max get a decent PC , Blaming the game when you prolly running a p4 , 512mb ram and On board graphics is youre problem lol :P

Cool, hopefully it doesn’t kill your fps when the slider is maxed

skullkid.6875:

Is there going to be a difference for enemy and ally culling? It’d be helpful to cull allies, but keep all enemies. Failing an event because there’s too many people and the enemies are culled blows.

This is exactly my concern. I never really cared too much for culling allies (and I pretty much have to do it to have acceptable FPS), but culling potentially dangerous or lootable corpses of enemy monsters is a huge design flaw and makes the game completely unfun in some places (Temple of Grenth, Gates of Arah, I’m looking at you).
I hope they just disable culling completely in regards to enemies, or make a different option for them than the player limits. The PvE monsters should not be as bandwidth-heavy as enemy players are, anyway (they use less skills, they have mostly pre-defined models, they move in simple patterns, or not at all if they’re corpses).

Decrypter.1785:

Oldbugga.7029:

Again this is a bandaid for a game engine that can’t handle its intended function…multi player content. What we need is the game engine updated to actually do its intended job rather than bodge fixes to hide the shortcomings in the current one. It amazes me that the game was released on an engine that was obviously, even from beta, not up to the job…especially for the touted highlight of the game…freestyle WvW and large PvP.

Sorry but the game runs decent so i disagree if you want to run max get a decent PC , Blaming the game when you prolly running a p4 , 512mb ram and On board graphics is youre problem lol :P

That it runs “decent” for you does not mean, that it runs “decent” for most of the community.

The problem is, it does not run decent for many people even though it should.
I don´t exactly have a high-end PC, but it´s above the recommended requirements
and the game´s auto detect function sets me to “high”.

That, however, still means that my frame rate can go from 30-60 down to
below 20-30 in most situations (big pve events, wvw, sometimes even spvp and some weird areas where nothing is going on and even standing still won´t let my frame rate go above 30 for some reason).

Some very extreme situations even put me down to measly 7 frames per second, which stays the same even when I set EVERYTHING to the LOWEST settings possible.

Some with worse hardware than mine report better performance, while some people with better hardware report similar problems with the game, which is weird, to say the least.

There also are many threads in the tech support subforum concerning performance problems.

I´m no expert on this but I´d say this hints a problem with the game´s engine utilizing the hardware correctly. At some point the extra power of high end systems compensates for this, but that does not mean there is no problem with the performance most of us currently experience.

This drags on since before launch and was recognised by the developers at first but
they kept silent about this ever since.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The setting adjustments you can make currently will expand beyond just WvW, and simply be a game wide setting you apply for culling rules. For most folks, this means you can adjust the settings to actually improve your performance over current performance if you wish, since fallback models and name-tags are cheaper than full model renders.

If you do want to turn everything up to insane, you also now have that option to see an extremely large number of people in all their graphics glory. The choice is entirely yours!

Can’t wait for the update.! I’d rather have a few fallback models and nameplates than <30fps in large Zergs.

I’m so stoked for this update. Culling in towns has been one of the biggest immersion breaking things for me.

So pumped!

Glad to see this removed. Hopefully ANET will do something about CPU performance at some point.

Arkanis Drako.5169:

Decrypter.1785:

Oldbugga.7029:

Again this is a bandaid for a game engine that can’t handle its intended function…multi player content. What we need is the game engine updated to actually do its intended job rather than bodge fixes to hide the shortcomings in the current one. It amazes me that the game was released on an engine that was obviously, even from beta, not up to the job…especially for the touted highlight of the game…freestyle WvW and large PvP.

Sorry but the game runs decent so i disagree if you want to run max get a decent PC , Blaming the game when you prolly running a p4 , 512mb ram and On board graphics is youre problem lol :P

That it runs “decent” for you does not mean, that it runs “decent” for most of the community.

The problem is, it does not run decent for many people even though it should.
I don´t exactly have a high-end PC, but it´s above the recommended requirements
and the game´s auto detect function sets me to “high”.

That, however, still means that my frame rate can go from 30-60 down to
below 20-30 in most situations (big pve events, wvw, sometimes even spvp and some weird areas where nothing is going on and even standing still won´t let my frame rate go above 30 for some reason).

Some very extreme situations even put me down to measly 7 frames per second, which stays the same even when I set EVERYTHING to the LOWEST settings possible.

Some with worse hardware than mine report better performance, while some people with better hardware report similar problems with the game, which is weird, to say the least.

There also are many threads in the tech support subforum concerning performance problems.

I´m no expert on this but I´d say this hints a problem with the game´s engine utilizing the hardware correctly. At some point the extra power of high end systems compensates for this, but that does not mean there is no problem with the performance most of us currently experience.

This drags on since before launch and was recognised by the developers at first but
they kept silent about this ever since.

I agree with some of youre points but , I also only have a mediocre PC and the game runs fine i have first gen i5 @ 3.2ghz GTX 460 o.c and 4 gb of ram , these days this rig is nothing . That said it seems a lot of people expect TO much From mediocre PC,S ….

Decrypter.1785:

Oldbugga.7029:

Again this is a bandaid for a game engine that can’t handle its intended function…multi player content. What we need is the game engine updated to actually do its intended job rather than bodge fixes to hide the shortcomings in the current one. It amazes me that the game was released on an engine that was obviously, even from beta, not up to the job…especially for the touted highlight of the game…freestyle WvW and large PvP.

Sorry but the game runs decent so i disagree if you want to run max get a decent PC , Blaming the game when you prolly running a p4 , 512mb ram and On board graphics is youre problem lol :P

Very very judgemental and totally wrong little man. I build PCs as a hobby and mine is quite up to date (quad core 8 gig ram, AMD 7850 OC with 2g). Please keep your half kitten assumptions to yourself…it just makes you look silly.

Obviously you don’t know a lot about client/server architectures/systems and the sharing of the load between the user and the server. User side is fine..get 40-60fps…but it sits there waiting for the server to respond like a slide show and rubberbanding…it is the server capability where we are having the issues…it just can’t handle the load it is intended to handle..and that is both hardware and software related.