Guild Wars 2

The GW2 folder for a beta-updated-to-retail client is 16.4 GB in size. For a retail DVD purchase, the installation is only 14.1 GB in size, which is quite a bit smaller. Both of these installations are fully patched up.

Why the significant size difference? Is something missing (higher resolution textures, for example) from one install compared to the other? Or is that just bulk in the beta client that is obsolete and no longer being used? If so, why not trim it through the updates?

My guess is it’s things that were used for data gathering in the beta that are no longer used. As for why not trimming it it may require the redownload of several large files and they don’t want to make you wait that long.

I noticed this as well, all I did was rename the gw2.dat and redownload the smaller version. Deleted the old beta package afterwards, save yourself 2GB of disk space. As Drintar said it’s likely old components or assets that were part of beta updates etc that didn’t get stripped out.

PaulMarden.4619:

There’s a certain amount of fragmentation that can happen within the .dat file. If you’ve played all of the beta weekends, you’ve probably updated most of the individual files inside of Gw2.dat many times as we’ve made changes to those files.

The data stored on the DVDs was downloaded internally from scratch, so it’s free of fragmentation (and thus is smaller). At this time we do not have any mechanism for defragmenting Gw2.dat.

What about the command line argument to copy files from one dat to another (or new) dat? Just finish implementing that and you can do this. Copy from one to the other, and replace the old with the new.

Just do what I did, rename the existing gw2.dat to something like gw2.dat.bak, run the launcher and let it redownload the game. Ends up about 2GB smaller than the original one from the beta. Can then just delete the old one.

Keeping in mind all the time and bandwidth you’ll waste doing that.

draeath.8536:

Keeping in mind all the time and bandwidth you’ll waste doing that.

I can only think of maybe 3 or 4 places in this world where that may actually be a problem?

Tradewind.6913:

draeath.8536:

Keeping in mind all the time and bandwidth you’ll waste doing that.

I can only think of maybe 3 or 4 places in this world where that may actually be a problem?

The United States being one of those places.

Thanks for clearing that up, PaulMarden!