Guild Wars 2

Alright, time for me to leave my utterly scathing review…

So I tried the demo a small while ago and quite frankly I’m not impressed. The problems are found in gameplay, story and in the new features.

Lets start with the gameplay/features. You’ve added mounts to the game, a game that was already offering speedboosts and mushroom jumps. And now we’ve managed to enter a story arc where we don’t get mushrooms/laylines but instead we have to climb a raptor to make some weird jumps. Why not just give us a portable ladder instead?

Then there’s the story… When you create a human character you are told that Kryta is pretty much the last human kingdom in existence. So you play through the game, which is pretty boring, leveling to l80 and beating Zhaitan. Then you enter what I think should’ve been GW2 to begin with: the HoT area. It gave you access to all sorts of fun with mushroom jumps, gliding, some special features like learning languages and all that. The environment was pretty unique too with the Itzel, Nuhoch and Exalted inhabitants. Now we enter this expansion, where we not only find a human civilization that goes completely unexplained…. in the political climate we have today you’ve decided to go with the sandkitten variant.

And so we have a story arc that tries to justify having a mount and feels like a cheap point scoring exercise on all fronts. If we take the map position, we would expect more humans north of Kryta, not south of Ascalon. South of Ascalon we’d be expecting Charr or Charr-like creatures. Or maybe another variant of what is already living in Ascalon. And I personally believe that with some imagination you could come up with something far better than something that has to refer back to reality. I’m saying this also because in my opinion, this game is supposed to escape reality, not drag us back into it.

loseridoit.2756:

reaVer.4056:

You’re comparing queensdale farmland with no events nor a decent amount of players to the situations I have problems with which are Lion’s Arch, every world boss event, verdant brink night bosses and octovine. At which several of these events DO NOT RENDER KEY INFORMATION.

that sounds more like a driver bug then actual issue with gw2 or wine.

Except other games don’t have this.

reaVer.4056:

reaVer.4056:

My point in requesting a vulkan renderer was to avoid the wined3d problem altogether, I am aware that direct translations tend to work faster. Though for example, WoW still had about 1/3rd fps less in wine than in windows, even when comparing OpenGL with OpenGL.

A few things

First, 60-80% of expected dx9 performance is achievable with gallium nine, since MESA does have an actual implementation of Dx9. btw, tweak wine to use win XP since it seems to have better performance.

But as it is now: my WineD3D performance > your MESA Dx9 performance

Second, Opengl renderer has been unmaintained in Wow for quite some time.

That is irrelevant, I was comparing OpenGL performance with OpenGL performance.

Third, I already ask for vulkan a long time ago. Meh, I guess Anet do not have a good business reason because Apple adopted Metal instead. Opengl is not exactly a cohesive standard.

And now I’m asking for a Vulkan renderer again, because we (as wine users) are taking significant performance hits where we shouldn’t. We’re looking at one core used on the CPU and a mere 50% GPU utilization.

And while OpenGL used to be extension reliant to compete, modern OpenGL implementations (3.0 and higher) contain all features that are found in D3D 12. Since the Khronos group took over they’ve been making great strides on that department.

You’re comparing queensdale farmland with no events nor a decent amount of players to the situations I have problems with which are Lion’s Arch, every world boss event, verdant brink night bosses and octovine. At which several of these events DO NOT RENDER KEY INFORMATION.

My point in requesting a vulkan renderer was to avoid the wined3d problem altogether, I am aware that direct translations tend to work faster. Though for example, WoW still had about 1/3rd fps less in wine than in windows, even when comparing OpenGL with OpenGL.

While I don’t mind people putting forth a contradictory argument, I would highly prefer that you read what I write before responding. I am using wine staging, it is too slow. There is no bug with the patching for me (and I think it was fixed long ago with wine).

Objects are not rendering. I do not know what “making compatible with wine” means to you, but if the game doesn’t render properly, I’d consider that a serious failure.

I also didn’t ask for a Linux client in just one go, I recommended to rewrite the renderer using Vulkan (that’s not OpenGL) so that the migration to more platform independent libaries and tools may be done in phases. If there are any performance issues that also occur on windows, this would be one of the ways to go about solving them, since as a library, Vulkan is significantly faster than DX9.

Now to compare wine performance with windows performance. We’re not talking about a small dip, we’re talking about streamers with hardware slower than mine getting decent framerate while streaming while my game turns into a slideshow. A friend of mine playing on Mac is avoiding areas due to the performance issues associated with them.

I’m also pretty sure that of all the middleware they use, directx9 is the only one not supporting Linux. Even then, you could use valve’s directx9 wrapper to produce a Linux version or even a mac version that is actually a mac version. So there’s that.

As for what I’ve tried: all the recommended things on the arch wiki, wine wiki, gw2 forums/wiki and several command line parameters trying to get some performance out of it. The game when it initially loads recommends high quality settings suggesting that my system is well above specs and should run the game flawlessly in most cases. It is simply admitting that the performance produced through wine is not good enough.

Additionally, it seems that the golem world boss’s hints are not rendering properly either. When the screen gets too busy it may completely omit any point about what attack is coming and that means my character finds itself within the static field without warning.

I’ll necro this thread for a bit since it popped up on google and I play a necromancer.

Anyway, wine simply won’t do. I have GW2 maxing out one core, barely having any presence on any other core and leaving my GPU at 50% utilization while producing a measily 20fps. Even poorly optimized Linux binaries give better results and since the wine has such a major influence, it means that the Mac client is subpar as well. (This is with CSMT and none of the command line arguments that gw2 has to offer fix the performance issue).

With modern hardware it should not be difficult for GW2 to render 50 character models, yet the game ends up choking at a mere 20. It is so bad that terrain and enemy models are not being rendered at all.

There’s a new graphics library on the rise that is supported at least by Windows and Linux (and perhaps Mac support will have made it as well) so switching to that would greatly benefit any future development. It should also make it easier to improve performance across all three platform even if wine were still to be used. Preferably of course, I would really like to see a Linux version that is properly optimized so that it can be obvious to all that when performance is involved, Linux blows Windows out of the water.