Guild Wars 2

Do we know anything yet about the specs required from our PCs to make HoT playable? I have an older PC, can’t justify buying a new one, but I’m worried about buying HoT only to find my machine can’t handle it.

Has anyone who has done the beta tests struggled with game performance compared to the current world? What are your PC specs, if so?

I have a 5-6 year old PC. The 2 things I noticed in the beta were that the heavy smoke effects made it chug extremely badly. Comparable to the dredge area in FG. I will be upgrading my PC within the year, but I’ll bring that forward if the beta weekends show my PC to have more issues with the effects (I play on medium settings btw)

Also, new LA is indicative of the gfx improvements. If neither the smoke effects, haze effects or new LA cause you any issues, then you are likely going to be fine.

Gaile said a while ago she believed no official raise in specs, but would check. I don;t think she remembered to get back to us though.

Well if the videos in the cut scenes of living story 2 was anything to go buy i think there will be a bump in it. The new rendering of facial animations is new and a slightly modified engine would have been required to do that.

But on the other end of the spectrum the beta ran on the same files you have for the current gw2 base game. So that means the change isn’t going to be THAT much.

Thank you both for the info. I’ll do some pressure tests with ‘busy’ areas in the current world.

The lat part of the specifications should worry you some what.

Game Specifications :

Windows XP Service Pack 3 or better
Intel CoreTM 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3, AMD AthlonTM 64 X2 or better
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800, ATI RadeonTM X1800, Intel HD 3000 or better (256MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)
35 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse
Due to potential changes, system requirements may change over time, and you may be required to upgrade your current system (or obtain a new system) to continue to play the game.
Publisher: NC Soft
16752

I don’t anticipate any huge performance bumps, with exception to heavy smoke/particle effect scenes that some older cards have always struggled with. As far as I’m aware Anet are aiming to not increase the system requirements to let as many people as possible continue playing. To my knowledge this has always been one of their core aims with how wide the quality settings (from 2002 early PS2 graphics on low to the beautiful screenshots and videos you can get on everything maxed on everything maxed) to make the game as available as possible to people across a wide variety of system specs.

GuzziHero.5104:

Do we know anything yet about the specs required from our PCs to make HoT playable? I have an older PC, can’t justify buying a new one, but I’m worried about buying HoT only to find my machine can’t handle it.

Has anyone who has done the beta tests struggled with game performance compared to the current world? What are your PC specs, if so?

I actually anticipate a huge performance issue for older pcs. In general the engine in this game performs TERRIBLE, add to it that they mentioned nothing about direct12 or reworking the engine, add to it that it is actually pretty expensive to do which implies they didnt, add to it that the game does actually need a face lift and the only way to do it if you did not change the engine is to up the polygon count and particle effects which works directly into the first issue and yeah older computers are going to have several performance issues come the expac.
The only consolation is that it is likely to be confined to expansion areas/reworked areas.

Unless the betas are far from what will be released, I didn’t see any special performance issues on my ‘toaster’.

Low fps in large crowds and lovely graphics otherwise.

Good luck.

I’d settle for the DX10 as promised! :P

I’m surprised they have Windows XP listed as it’s no longer supported by Microsoft. If you are currently using Windows XP I would suggest upgrading to at least Windows as the performance on that OS will degrade over time and not only that, it’s a huge security risk as well.

Don’t know for the rest of you, but my laptop (I’m working abroad atm and only have a non-gaming laptop) can run GW2 in Medium Quality with no problems at all (Low is best when it comes to World Bosses). But on the two new maps, Dry Tops and Silver Wastes, and even during the beta, my laptop had a hardtime running the game in Very Low settings.
I think most of the casual players who don’t own a decent Gaming PC will have to upgrade to a better one.

With exception of requiring service pack 3 on Windows XP (rather than service pack 2), and requiring 35GB of space instead of 25GB, the minimum requirements for HoT are identical to those of GW2 when it was released.

GW2 minimum requirements have always carried the warning that they might change over time, but they have not done so yet, and so I’d not worry, at least for now.

Kaz.5430:

With exception of requiring service pack 3 on Windows XP (rather than service pack 2), and requiring 35GB of space instead of 25GB, the minimum requirements for HoT are identical to those of GW2 when it was released.

GW2 minimum requirements have always carried the warning that they might change over time, but they have not done so yet, and so I’d not worry, at least for now.

Its been a long time since minimum and recommended requirements meant anything in this industry.