Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I know someone who just got a new laptop that will handle GW2 and they’ve been wanting to play it forever. Issue: their internet is not such that downloading 20gb would be realistic (since can only be online a few hours a day, would take over a week to get.) Include all the patches they’d have to get, and yeah, no thanks.

My question is this:

Would it be possible for me to patch up my game, throw the files onto a USB flash drive, and then let them copy the files onto their laptop? Obviously they’d need their own account and thats not a problem, I’m just unsure if the game would run without it having been “properly” downloaded right to their laptop.

Yes. It works pretty well, actually.

they’ll still need to download a small file that is stored elsewhere on your computer (unless you found and copied that as well – can you do this?), but that’s fairly small.

Yes it works.

It’s a good thing to remember if you’re planning to change or upgrade computers as well. Shift the .dat file (or the whole folder) to an external drive, then copy it onto the new hard drive and you won’t have to download the game again.

Mystic.5934:

they’ll still need to download a small file that is stored elsewhere on your computer (unless you found and copied that as well – can you do this?), but that’s fairly small.

You can do, although you might need to set it to show hidden files/folders first and I think you need to be an administrator to do that.

But it’s a pretty small file so downloading it shouldn’t be a problem for anyone whose internet connection is able to play GW2.

It would be in your and your friend’s best interests if you didn’t include the settings file, just copy the stuff that’s in the gw2 main folder (gw2.exe and gw2.dat).
Your graphical settings may not be useful (wrong resolution) and you may not want your email/password given to your friend either if you use the checkboxes. That file isn’t downloaded, it’s created on the fly.

Also, you can run gw2 from the flash drive if you want and the drive/interface is usb3. It’s actually faster than a normal hard drive.

Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 are what we consider a partial ‘portable app’. You can run it on any Windows computer from any external rewritable device (hard drive, usb, etc.). It only gets a partial rating because it will still save your settings and screenshots to your user directory.
Original Guild Wars kept everything in one place, Guild Wars 2 partially followed Windows game conventions and placed stuff in your user directory.