Guild Wars 2

I can see from a technical perspective why Arenanet decides not to keep the living story content permanent.

Think about it. Every two weeks, we get a certain amount of data added to our GW2.DAT file. If the addition was permanent, that data would not go away. Currently the client takes up 20 GB. It was about 16 GB at launch. If all the living story content was permanent, the client size would baloon up to the point where it’s completely taking over our hard drives. The calls to make “everything permanent” don’t make sense for this reason alone.

I am not defending the Living Story and its format, because I still think we need a proper permanent expansion. I’m just saying that there is a legitimate technical reason why they don’t keep the content from week to week.

Mine is only 19GB and someone posted somewhere that a “fresh” .dat is just 17GB so that doesn’t really seem to be an issue. Storage technology will probably develop faster than GW2 and it’s only SSDs that would be a concern since you can get conventional drives that aare multiple terabytes. At around 1GB per year most current players should die of old age before space becomes an issue.

Khisanth.2948:

Mine is only 19GB and someone posted somewhere that a “fresh” .dat is just 17GB so that doesn’t really seem to be an issue. Storage technology will probably develop faster than GW2 and it’s only SSDs that would be a concern since you can get conventional drives that aare multiple terabytes. At around 1GB per year most current players should die of old age before space becomes an issue.

Seems like you didn’t read my whole post. My point was that the current rate of growth is sustainable, but if EVERY update was permanent content, it would not be.

MMO’s are space-hogs. That’s just the nature of the beast. The game box even says that due to the nature of the game you may be required to upgrade your system due to new system requirements (which includes harddrive space) over time to continue playing, as requirements grow.

And IF they released a full expansion, you can bet it’d be huge as well. So if LS is meant to take the place of expansions, then I see no reason to remove everything to “preserve space”.

My computer has 1 TB… with 4 TB on addition hard drives. Most computers people buy in normal commercial stores in the last few years has at least 200 GB. Unless you use SSD, I don’t think disk space is a problem. But then if you know about SSDs and CARE to use SSDs in a new computer for gaming you might as well get one with 512 GB minimum.

Dear OP, None of the files you download from the Living story are never removed from the .dat files . My friend logged in the other day after a few months playing and ended up in the Bazaar of the Four Winds map and was quickly booted to Lions Arch. Everything is in the client, we are just cut off from actually seeing it. So no it’s not actually taking up as much space as you think
/thread

Current PS4 and Xbox One games released take up pretty much all of the 50Gb dual layer Blu ray Disk. Even early PS3 games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII did the same thing, taking up every last bit of space available. Guildwars 2 has good graphics, but if GW2’s original release and the Living World updates came with ‘That’ kind of graphical and sound fidelity, then the original release would have been atleast as big, if not bigger, and every Living world update after would have been 2-3 gigabytes each.

Even then, we wouldn’t have to worry about the game ever being ‘too’ big.

I never actually got rid of WoW after I stopped playing it and I have a good number of games from Steam (some quite large, over 20Gb) including some I really should uninstall since they were FTP and I never played them and 50Gb of just Tom Baker era Doctor Who and my 1Tb HDD is only half full (slightly under). It only cost $50.

My GW2.dat which I have never deleted or anything since launch is only 17.2Gb. There are more than 30 maps so each map must take up less than .5Gb – most likely quite a bit less since there are many files that are needed apart from maps. So even if they added 2 maps per year the file would only grow by about 1Gb per YEAR. So you’d only gain 10Gb in ten whole years – and that’s a very unreasonably high estimate.

I am indifferent to if content is permanent or not, I just don’t think it’s a technical issue involving our HDD’s storage space.

Novum.2395:

Dear OP, None of the files you download from the Living story are never removed from the .dat files . My friend logged in the other day after a few months playing and ended up in the Bazaar of the Four Winds map and was quickly booted to Lions Arch. Everything is in the client, we are just cut off from actually seeing it. So no it’s not actually taking up as much space as you think
/thread

You’ve gotta be kidding me…

So the 4 GB they’ve added to our clients in the past year is mostly temporary content that we just aren’t allowed to revisit.

That’s… Wow. Ridiculous.

Fine, scratch that theory. And to the devs: Instead of filling our hard drives with useless inaccessible content, please give us a proper expansion already.

I have 50 GB of HDD partition dedicated only for GW2.

I say expand away.

Am I alone in the belief that 20GB isn’t so much?

Regardless, I’m sure anet would come up with some way of managing the size of the .dat if gobs of perm-content inflated it far beyond what it is now. They’d really need to in order to abate fall-out, don’t you think?