Guild Wars 2

Hello peeps,
Is there a way you could play GW2 without installing it on your hard drive? Answers appreciated.

Nope. I could be snide and tell you to install it somewhere else, but without the installation and appropriate patches, no.

Patches are no problem. You said you could install it somewhere else?

I’m not a techie but the only way I could see this working is if you install it on an external drive and plug that in so your computer can get at that. I think that slows down the game somehow. You certainly have to install it on some drive and keep it patched.

Yes, no and maybe. It all depends on your definition of “installing”.
To play GW2 you need up to date copies of Gw2.exe and Gw2.dat.

I am looking for a way to play it easily on other PCs, so an external drive would be a no-go since that would require me to unscrew other PCs/notebooks.

noobgood.8762:

I am looking for a way to play it easily on other PCs, so an external drive would be a no-go since that would require me to unscrew other PCs/notebooks.

Not really. Systems capable of playing GW2 should have at least a USB2 port. Load times will be slow but it should still be playable.

On newer systems with USB3/eSATA ports it will be more or less the same as an internal drive.

Oh, sorry about the misunderstanding… I thought you meant another hard drive. So you say it would work with an USB drive?

It will work with an external hard drive.

Functionally they’re like a USB stick – a separate box that you just plug into a USB port (so no need to unscrew anything). But with a lot more memory. How much varies, but many of them are equal to the harddrives you’d get inside computers.

The important thing is that to run the game you have to have a copy of Gw2.exe and Gw2.dat somewhere in it’s memory. Whether that’s the main hard drive, a secondary hard drive, an external drive or whatever is up to you, but there is no way to log into the game without those two files.

Yes it will run off an external hard drive/USB (needs 20+GB of space though).
But you will see a drastic drop in performance because the game is limited to the read/write speed of the USB.

Can I suggest just copying the files from the USB onto the other computer you want to play on?

Like everyone has said, a USB hard drive will work, but the speed will be dependent on the quality of your USB connection since that’s where the data is passing through.

Allright, thanks for your answers!
I’ll try it tomorrow using a 32 GB USB stick. How long does it take to copy the game files from USB to the PC?

That’ll depend on the USB quality as Lindbur said. I know that I just did a backup of my .dat when I was reinstalling the game yesterday and simply copying the file into another folder on the same drive on the computer took several minutes.

Works without installation .. you just need the copy of the GW2 directory and start GW2.exe.

It is the patches which take the most time, however, though I don’t know if you could copy and paste the patched version of the game. For your sake I’d hope so, as it takes a few hours at least for a fresh patch.

Yes, you can put it all on a flash drive and play it from any computer on the planet. I have my main copy on a usb3 64gb flash drive (you’ll need a 32gb flash drive for gw2).

Bonus!
If you put gw2 on a flash drive and want to start gw2 when you plug it in to a computer do this:

1) Open your favourite plain text editor such as Notepad.
2) Cut and paste the text below into the plain text editor.

[AutoRun]
shellexecute=example.exe

3) Replace the text 'example.exe' with the file-name you want to AutoRun including appropriate file extension (e.g. index.html, slideshow.ppt, portfolio.pdf etc). If you file name contains spaces e.g. company presentaion.ppt, replace the spaces with underscores: e.g. company_presentaion.ppt.

The file you require to autorun may also be in a folder, in which case you can give the file path. You can therefore also AutoRun to a URL.
[AutoRun]
shellexecute=http://www.YourWebsiteAddress.com

4) Now save and name the file: Autorun.inf
5) Add this file to the root of the USB Flash Drive, with the file you want to AutoRun (and any other data).

So make a text file in the root of you flash drive called autorun.inf and put this in it:

[AutoRun]
shellexecute=gw2.exe

Only way to hold the dat file is copying as a NTSC not FAT32.

You can do what lil puppy said. I didnt catch that post but i second it. But still performance may differ vs just intalling on all comps. You can also start an installation, delete its dat file and paste in the 18Gb file into place. Takes maybe 20minutes. Change permissions in the dat file properties so all users and write the file and open GW. It will repair the dat and good to go. This method is to implant the entire file onto computers.

By chance if lil puppy’s method works like plug and play by all means.

It’s NTFS but that’s not the only file system, you can also format to exFat which will save you a little overhead in the file system and still work on all your computers. This works with Mac and should work with Linux as well so you can have all your gw2 needs on one flash drive. I recommend a usb3 stick and usb3 port as it is just as fast as a normal hard drive if you find a stick with at least 100mb/s read speed.