Guild Wars 2

Has anyone tried running GW2 with crossover?

I am getting annoyed with the game turning my MacBook Pro into an instant hand warmer under osx while if I bootcamp into windows and play the game doesn’t heat the computer up as much. I am wondering if this issue occurs with crossover or if “temperature wise” it behaves more like the game does in windows on the same machine.

GW2 has never been supported in Crossover.
At launch the Crossover community was really good at trying to get the game to work well and managed to smooth out a lot of glitches, they had to release versions of Crossover specific to GW2 that addressed some issues though – versions that were accessible only from the crossover forums (as in, they didn’t push the GW2 fixes as a new Crossover release).

Once the mac beta dropped they stopped trying to get it to work in Crossover, I guess it became pretty obvious that they would struggle to get new purchasers from GW2 since they would more likely use the free OSX Beta. So I think there were a lot of things that didn’t work, or didn’t work well in Crossover that never got fixed.

A quick look on the forums indicates that there are still some things that don’t work (especially if you have an NVIDIA graphics card, ATI and Intel usually worked pretty well from personal experience). It’s also important to note that it is still a Wine port and so suffers from some of the exact same issues and limitations as this Cider port. (e.g. it is 32 bit only and issues with the trading post and the mouse aren’t uncommon.)

My support for Crossover has expired, so I don’t have access to the latest version, otherwise I’d test it for you. But the key thing to take away – it isn’t supported officially on Crossover (as in the Crossover team doesn’t support the game), so if it doesn’t work you might not be able to do anything to fix it.

Temperature wise Crossover is about the same as the OSX port if I remember correctly. The reason the fans go up so much is because your computer is running both Crossover/Cider and GW2, and on top of that it is running them in 32 bit.
- If you can play in bootcamp then do it, I gave in a long time ago. It’s worth taking the time to restart your computer since the performance is so much better.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

- If you can play in bootcamp then do it, I gave in a long time ago. It’s worth taking the time to restart your computer since the performance is so much better.

Sigh… I guess I should cave in, since my performance is not that spectacular (4 year-old MacBook and little wiggle room for upgrade, financially speaking, to a new gaming PC). I upgraded my MacBook’s hard drive to a relatively small SSD (due to the cost) so it’ll be painful to carve out a fairly substantial chunk just to stick on Windows + a bit extra only to be able to play GW2. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do…

I have to say, it is remarkable seeing the contrast between ArenaNet (wrapping the game in a Windows emulator and marketing it as a “native client” with a straight face) and companies such as Blizzard, which make it a priority to develop actual native ports for OS X – and have them available on release. I’ll keep Diablo 3 on OS X since it’ll be nice to alt-tab to browsers and such. If as a result of sticking GW2 onto a separate partition I don’t end up booting into it as much since otherwise my entire environment is in OS X, so be it.

alccode.1297:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

- If you can play in bootcamp then do it, I gave in a long time ago. It’s worth taking the time to restart your computer since the performance is so much better.

Sigh… I guess I should cave in, since my performance is not that spectacular (4 year-old MacBook and little wiggle room for upgrade, financially speaking, to a new gaming PC). I upgraded my MacBook’s hard drive to a relatively small SSD (due to the cost) so it’ll be painful to carve out a fairly substantial chunk just to stick on Windows + a bit extra only to be able to play GW2. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do…

I have to say, it is remarkable seeing the contrast between ArenaNet (wrapping the game in a Windows emulator and marketing it as a “native client” with a straight face) and companies such as Blizzard, which make it a priority to develop actual native ports for OS X – and have them available on release. I’ll keep Diablo 3 on OS X since it’ll be nice to alt-tab to browsers and such. If as a result of sticking GW2 onto a separate partition I don’t end up booting into it as much since otherwise my entire environment is in OS X, so be it.

Yeah, you’ll need a decent amount of space on your SSD to get GW2 and the OS installed. I bought an SSD, 250gb, and although I was willing to bootcamp with it, I couldn’t. Wasn’t a space issue, but compatibility. I also play Diablo 3 on my mac and it works great

alccode.1297:

I have to say, it is remarkable seeing the contrast between ArenaNet (wrapping the game in a Windows emulator and marketing it as a “native client” with a straight face) and companies such as Blizzard, which make it a priority to develop actual native ports for OS X – and have them available on release. I’ll keep Diablo 3 on OS X since it’ll be nice to alt-tab to browsers and such. If as a result of sticking GW2 onto a separate partition I don’t end up booting into it as much since otherwise my entire environment is in OS X, so be it.

Unfortunately, Blizzard is the exception, not the rule. The majority of recent OSX releases of big PC-titles is done with a Cider port or other similar wrapper solutions, and the associated performance hits.

Unless the Mac-gaming market grows enough to provide a real monetary incentive for companies to invest into a native OpenGL port, that’s what we’re stuck with. That’s one of the reasons why Mac gamers should root for SteamOS to actually take hold. Another OpenGL plattform will make native development for OSX a much easier decision for developers.