That screenshot kinda looks like you’ve got ambient occlusion enabled in your Nvidia driver settings.
The effect tries to analyze the images produced by the game to detect small corners and cracks where ambient light doesn’t reach, then applies some extra dark shading there. It’s not smart enough to consider the in-game fog and often ends up drawing the extra shading on top of it.
My cpu doesnt seem to get taxed very hard. Although i have noticed in certain world boss areas with alot of people the gpu will drop down along with fps seems odd it should be at full.
This is exactly what happens when a game tries to draw lots of (unique) things with an API that is incapable of expressing the work efficiently. For each thing the game draws, setting up the drawing operation (textures, mesh data, positions, character poses, etc.) via D3D may cost its “main” thread considerable CPU time, and then the API implementation and driver must translate this setup into GPU state. This CPU cost is the same regardless of how many pixels on the screen the object covers (if any at all), how many polygons the object has and so on.
When rendering a frame mostly consists of many drawing tasks expensive to set up on the CPU side but absolutely trivial to execute on a modern GPU, the GPU may start running out of things to do and starts showing low load. When paired with the dreaded API state synchronization where the CPU-side driver code has to wait for the GPU to finish something before touching it again, both the CPU and GPU may show low load as the game performs poorly.
Some of the earlier posters in this thread talk about “offloading” operations to the GPU, but as far as I can tell, the game is mostly already making the GPU do the things the GPU should do. These performance problems are mostly in communicating these tasks to the GPU efficiently. Newer APIs make this faster by e.g. allowing more of the draw state to be expressed as simple parameters to shaders, which can be passed to the GPU as bulk memory transfers instead of tinkering with D3D state variables one-by-one.
Yes, the white lighting coming from the right has always been there with “high” shaders. It’s very … unphysical, but it’s probably a bit of an artstyle thing; without it there’d be almost no shading on characters who are standing in a shadow and are not affected by any other light source than ambient light (who does flat ambient lighting these days?).
It’s even more strange when one notices that the white light appears to cast shadows, suggesting that the game engine has to render an additional shadow map to produce the effect for each character. As if the game wasn’t spamming the graphics API with enough calls already.
The FXAA setting in Nvidia’s driver is there so you can tell the driver to force it on games with no antialiasing support. When enabled, it’s applied right before the image is presented to the user, potentially blurring the game UI and making e.g. small text hard to read.
I’d guess the driver FXAA is disabled for GW2 since the game is known to have its own FXAA implementation, which is generally the better way to enable it.
Isn’t 30 FPS basically standard on console-games? And yet people don’t have any real issues with that.
Console games often have some combination of fairly slow camera controls, slow gameplay and low resolution. When the camera can’t be turned so fast, things move relatively little between frames and the screen is not made of that many pixels anyway, 30 FPS can be “enough”; the stop-motion effect of objects jumping multiple pixels between frames is not that obvious.
This is also why very low resolution videos and GIFs can sometimes look smoothly animated even at low framerates. Just not enough spatial detail (resolution) to notice the lack of temporal detail (framerate). Many console games where you can move very fast try to cover the “jump” between frames with motion blur postprocessing, though that needs to be very accurately calculated to not look immediately wrong.
On sharper computer monitors, even 60 FPS rarely looks like perfectly smooth motion w/o some form of motion blur, though at least it’s comfortably above the 20-30 FPS absolute minimum threshold at which things look more like motion than a series of still images.
Broken? Always seemed to me that it was utterly controllable by the player, given it’s only as broken as how well you control the camera with your mouse. Never really had a problem. No more than any other MMO.
It is a little broken, because this still happens sometimes. My theory is that the camera’s “collision volume” that the game checks to see if there’s something between the character and the camera is set up a bit wrong and sometimes extends in front of the character, causing the camera to move in violently when your character touches some part of the scenery just right (or wrong) for a moment and the code tries to move the camera as close as possible before letting it go back again. Character size/height may be a factor here.
And then there’s the little shrubberies and stuff in some areas that should just be ignored by the camera as they aren’t large enough to block the view anyways; suddenly zooming in because one of them is in the way is more disruptive than not doing so.
This doesn’t seem very hard to fix but it’s probably like the forum software; the search has been broken for ages but isn’t getting fixed because whoever wrote it is no longer there and nobody else can find the time or courage to touch it.
I’ll believe all the other sites, which state that OpenGL is typically 1.3x faster code that DirectX, before I listen to the founder of a spyware company (WildTangent). It is also stated in various places that OpenGL is easier to code. IdSoftware (now owned by Bethesda) still used OpenGL in RAGE and it looked great (OpenGL had megatextures before DirectX).
I’ve used several versions of both APIs and if the year was 1997 I’d agree on the easier to code part; early versions of Direct3D were notoriously complicated for the simple 3D hardware of the time. But D3D has been redesigned several times by now, while OpenGL is still stuck with silly antipatterns like its global resource binding system that has been complicating libraries, middleware and assorted abstractions for almost 20 years (I think the whole bind-to-edit clusterkitten started with EXT_texture_object around 1995).
GL 3.0 was supposed to fix things in 2007, but the ambitionless review board couldn’t agree on a solution and it took until mid-2014 until many of these issues were solved in OpenGL 4.5. Right now only one vendor’s driver implements it, though.
It’s certainly possible to write GL code that runs with any OpenGL 3+ capable device (basically everything made in 5+ years) and uses certain newer features when available to absolutely destroy D3D9 and possibly even D3D11 in performance while being about equal in graphical quality, but nobody wants to do this because the API is such a pain to work with, a lot of middleware doesn’t support it and the coolest features are only well implemented by Nvidia.
(edited by tota.4893)
Crop Settings?? Sry, whats that?
It’s called overscan . Basically the TV cuts off 3-5% of the image being displayed at the edges because analog TV systems did so to hide lack of precision in their receivers and the CRTs used to display the images. Some later broadcasts also contained distracting non-image data like teletext in the edges.
There’s no reason to do this with pure digital signals, but many TVs will still behave like this for compatibility reasons, even when receiving images from a computer over HDMI. You might be able to turn this off from the TV’s settings if it doesn’t autodetect this.
This was very annoying, yes. Do this game’s development tools not have any sort of visualization for hitboxes?
With so many attacks not connecting (and little feedback even when they do) I managed to take off maybe about 20% of its HP during each “burn phase”. After losing focus to boredom and dying a few times I found a quiet spot to respec for better damage against glitchy dragon minions and finished it off almost instantly.
It wasn’t really fun at all, but I guess those great cutscenes were worth it.
I know the 5600K isn’t exactly “High end” but it is a Quad Core and should be equivalent to a Phenom II 955.
It’s actually even a bit faster than that, but in the per-core performance that largely limits this game, both are still in the league of Intel’s tablet chips and low power laptop parts. CPUs better suited for gaming can manage about twice that even before overclocking.
There are many games that run well on AMD’s parts, mostly those made for consoles with even weaker cores. GW2 is not one of them.
I was wondering if there is a setting I can change to make it.. well, not do this any more?
That setting’s almost certainly “Ambient Occlusion” in your Nvidia Control Panel. The effect doesn’t interact correctly with in-game fog, drawing its extra shading on top of it.
Those look like placeholders for missing mesh and texture files. Your game data file could be corrupted.
Have you tried a data file repair yet?
Isn’t that just normal perspective distortion from a very wide horizontal field of view?
In GW1, using a wider monitor gives a narrower vertical field of view, while in GW2 you get a larger horizontal field of view instead. In widescreen gaming forum terms, GW1 is Vert- and GW2 is Hor+. So in GW1 you actually see less with your setup, though there’s also very little perspective distortion.
The distortion probably looks worse on your monitors because the image being generated is a projection of the gameworld against a single flat plane, and your side monitors are at an angle.
“Tearing” is the screen showing slices of multiple successive frames at the same time because they got pushed to the monitor out of sync with its vertical refresh cycle. It doesn’t look like that (and tearing generally doesn’t show in screenshots anyway).
Your GPU must be malfunctioning somehow. This could be because of driver bugs, overheating, a bad power supply or just the GPU being broken.
You should probably check for driver updates first. Looking at the card’s temperatures might be a good idea if the glitches are more common after playing for a while.
Also, if you have a recent AMD Radeon card, it may be suffering from some quality issues like in this thread .
Some touchpad drivers have features to prevent accidental input (e.g. brushing the touchpad with your hand) while typing. Are you sure you don’t have one of these enabled? It could be assuming your keypresses are an attempt to type and blocking mouse input.
On the last laptop I ran Windows on, the touchpad driver was written so badly its settings affected regular mouse input, too (yes, even the acceleration/sensitivity settings, seriously…)
The conversation backgrounds look like they are rendered by layering lots of large images on top of each other; this may seem simple to do, but when most of the images are the size of the screen, it is actually a lot of work for the GPU. Lots of pixels to process, like when someone hits you in the face with siege and the screen gets filled with particle effects.
Sure, the GPU isn’t exactly idle when running the rest of the game, but in these situations it is not held back by the having the CPU process complex scenery, many player characters and their movements and whatever. It’s like a GPU fillrate benchmark.
My old GTX 560 Ti gets pretty loud whenever one of these conversations is going on, something the rest of the game can rarely manage since it’s so CPU bound. But no properly built computer should crash just because one of its parts got to show off its maximum performance. You could try lowering the graphics settings, limiting the framerate, playing in a small window when this happens or getting a cooling pad. If your laptop is a few seconds of maximum GPU load away from crashing, it sounds like it could use one anyway.
That “error” looks like Nvidia’s ambient occlusion postprocessing hack.
Try turning it off in the Nvidia control panel’s 3d settings?
It doesnt appear to be ambient occlusion. I checked the settings and its set to “disabled”
Just tested, the driver ambient occlusion looks exactly like that. Is it disabled in both the per-game and global settings?
If you can’t turn the effect off through the driver control panel, you may need to do a clean driver reinstall or something.
That “error” looks like Nvidia’s ambient occlusion postprocessing hack.
Try turning it off in the Nvidia control panel’s 3d settings?
Ive never seen a newer laptop/GPU/CPU that doesnt have thermal limits waaaay below what it takes to make smoke.
Yeah, it really should throttle before burning if the CPU or GPU was getting crazy hot.
I’d guess a bad capacitor, voltage regulator or something hit its limits and leaked some magic smoke. If the board was at least slightly overengineered (as it should be) it could still work with a small component or two burned. Not that I’d trust it to, but anyways.
Your highly technical tinkering probably has nothing to do with the strange symbols.
Looking at the screenshots, I think your interface size (in graphics options) is set to “large”. Try setting it back to “normal”; the setting has been bugged ever since it was added (think it was during one of the betas) and at least the “large” setting is known to cause broken character rendering like that.
This actually somehow got fixed by setting a 30 frame limit ingame. Will read over the advice given and look into whether there are any clear issues with my AC Charger.
It really sounds a lot like the charger isn’t delivering enough current.
I’ve seen this happen when using an underpowered car charger with a 12V solar system and a laptop doing something intense; the laptop was draining so much power just staying on that none could be spared to charge its battery. The battery was actually draining slowly, though it said something like “40 hours remaining”.
The frame limit is probably reducing the system’s power consumption just enough to allow charging.
I’ve never seen a laptop that couldn’t charge at least slowly while using a proper AC charger, however, so maybe it is faulty. Or the manufacturer just went with the cheapest Chinese brick they could find.
I’ve noticed the thing you’re looking at before. They’re probably decals being used to add detail and cover seams in texturing between the heightmap terrain and the other stuff pasted on top of it. It looks like they are rendered more like spell effects on the ground and receive lighting differently from other static objects.
Which is a bit odd since this game seems to be using a deferred shading-style renderer; it could just draw the decals before doing lighting and get full shading on them, assuming it can generate sane normal vectors. Might even render slightly faster, depending on how the game’s forward shading works.
What kind of speaker setup do you have exactly?
Check that your Windows mixer settings match that setup (“manage audio devices” in control panel, pick speakers device, click “configure”).
If Windows is trying to generate 5.1 audio but you only have stereo speakers connected, parts of positional audio will almost certainly be lost. Music and some ambient sounds might play ok since they don’t go through the same mixing.
OOM: Heap, bytes=4409968,
—> Process Memory <—
Private: 3231MB
WorkingSet: 3228MB
PeakWorkingSet: 3276MB
You’re crashing because the game is Out Of Memory. The Guild Wars 2 client is a 32-bit application, meaning its (virtual) memory address space is up to 4 GB in size. Some of this space is claimed by OS functionality, memory-mapped I/O, etc. leaving slightly over 3 GB for the game’s own memory allocation purposes.
This game’s really testing the limits of 32-bit applications.
Try lowering the graphics settings. If this is mostly happening in large battles, character model limit and quality might be a good place to start.
Dry Top has a lot of reflection data in the sand. I had to disable reflections while in dry top to get my normal frame rate. Not sure whats going on there, but with reflections on my FPS drops from 170~ down to 50 while there.
Happens on my system too. It’s probably drawing a large part of the zone upside down for the (invisible) water plane’s reflection texture :/
@Behe
Ofcourse I would agree with you if I would see the CPU being fully utilized. But the game doesn’t. As seen in the picture it doesn’t show the CPU usage as a whole, but the usage per CPU core. And even if only 3 cores are utilized, than I would at least expect them to be fully utilized in order to produce the maximum possible framerate.
If you could just arbitrarily decide to max out 3 cores, you could probably make it max out some other number of cores, too. Sadly, this is not how writing concurrency into programs works.
The game’s probably logically split into parts like “receive network datagrams”, “apply changes and run client-side world simulation”, “update audio”, “build lists of things to render” and “call Direct3D based on latest lists”, or something. Some of these can run at the same time, in multiple threads. Parts of them might be possible to split into even smaller tasks, with worker threads.
Obviously, you don’t want to add or remove stuff from the local gameworld while the rendering code is preparing to draw it. Same with the audio updates. So sometimes those tasks have to wait for each other, which leads to none of them being capable of loading a core to 100% by themselves unless the game’s badly bottlenecked by what they’re doing.
Right now I’m really wondering if it’s my system that is not powerfull enough, or if it’s the engine which doesn’t make good use of the availlable hardware.
In other words: if I were to upgrade my system (i7 920 + GTX 460) to i5 4670k + GTX 770, would the game even run better as it doesn’t even make full use of the calc power it now has?
Things might run slightly smoother due to the i5-4670K’s faster cores: if the individual tasks finish faster, the game loop will cycle faster even if the cores are not utilized any better or worse, relatively speaking.
Unless you’re obviously GPU bottlenecked (huge effect on FPS when changing resolution and/or render sampling) right now, I don’t think upgrading your GPU will help this much.
If by lag you mean bad framerates, there are no practical computer configurations that will run this game without any “lag” at maxed settings. The game should be quite playable on that most of the time, though.
* GeForce GT 640 2GB
This probably isn’t fast enough to handle lots of effects on the screen at once unless you’re playing at a low resolution. You’ll get “lag” when a large part of the screen is covered by effects, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the framerate hit single digits when certain badly designed ones (like smoke from some explosions) happen near you.
- Intel Core i3-4130, 3.4GHz, (Haswell)
The game would probably run faster on a quad-core CPU: I’ve seen it keep 3-4 cores busy (not 100% loaded, but working hard enough to benefit from all cores) on my i5-4670K. It runs “ok” on my i3 laptop, but the FPS drops easily regardless of GPU-specific settings like resolution and it seems quite slow at loading graphics, even considering the laptop’s slow hard drive.
The launcher/updater doesn’t seem very well written and sometimes causes more CPU load than the game itself. Its update speed was actually CPU limited on my previous system; it wasn’t waiting for network I/O, the network I/O was waiting for it. Maybe its crazy CPU load is hitting the limits of a slightly broken PSU, CPU, cooler or whatever.
Anyways, no matter how badly it behaves, a game (or any userspace application) really shouldn’t have the means to completely freeze or crash your system. Post some specs, temperatures, etc.
(edited by tota.4893)
This seems somewhat more likely to happen when the CPU is very busy. Like in WvW or when something else in the background is eating lots of CPU time.
I can produce a similar (though not as loud) sound by opening and rapidly clicking around in the game settings while a zone is loading. When the zone load finishes and the game finally finds time to load and play the UI sounds, they all play at the same time, making a loud noise.
Maybe the sound code needs some sort of timeout after which pending sounds are either dropped, or the sound code is just run right now even if it blocks everything else.
OOM: Heap, bytes=1276432,
This is the line that actually matters; your client’s crashing because it’s running Out Of Memory.
You seem to be running 32-bit Windows 7, so depending on certain system settings the game may be unable to address more than 2 GB of memory. This is clearly not enough. Getting 64-bit Windows would probably help, but since you’ve already familiarized yourself with the art of reinstalling Windows, you could try messing with the Windows userspace/kernel memory address split. See:
Basically doing that lets applications built with a certain flag set access 3 GB of memory in 32-bit Windows. As far as I know, GW2’s one of them.
The problem with this is that there’s barely anything to draw beyond the playable area’s boundaries. Even now it’s easy enough to find spots where you can peek just past the last cliffs and see nothing but foggy void.
Increasing the draw distance would only make this more obvious. The zones would have to be rebuilt for this to work.
The “shadow” stuff in your first image looks a lot like a badly applied ambient occlusion effect. Are you forcing ambient occlusion through the Nvidia control panel? It doesn’t work well in many games (and it looks fake as hell unless properly applied into a render pipeline anyways), so it shouldn’t be forced on for everything.
As for why it only appears with default sampling, the driver’s internal heuristics probably only assume a render target with the same resolution as the screen (or the inside of the window) would be something to apply the AO filter to.
I’ve experienced #2 a few times, often immediately after something that’s supposed to temporarily prevent character movement, like being immobilized or using supply to build/repair in WvW.
Getting downed or doing an emote like /dance almost always fixes it.
Maybe the server’s failing to tell the client that the character can move again or something.
So I run an AMD Phenom X2 1100T, which the current i7 processors are barely better, 8 gb ram, I run 100 FPS in BF4, faster than 80% of all machines on the 3d mark benchmark tests and the best I’m going to do is 30 FPS in Rata Sum at Max graphics?
The game’s using the Direct3D 9 API, which hasn’t seen significant updates since 2004, and it’s drawing way more stuff than the API was ever meant to do.
Your in-game performance depends heavily on how fast a single rendering thread can tinker with the D3D9 state, passing shader variables, configuring texture and vertex data sources and issuing draw calls, etc. The game’s probably doing like 20k+ calls per frame if there’s enough action going on.
When it comes to this kind of work, current top-of-the-line Intel i5 and i7 CPUs have a significant advantage due to their high instructions per clock rates.
Games like BF4 can run fast because they have limited variations in character art, relatively few (unique) visible objects in general and are generally built to take maximum advantage of newer graphics APIs with less overhead.
Try setting the “interface size” in graphics options back to “default”.
The other sizes cause some UI glitches like that. At least they seem to have finally fixed the trading post being unreadable at “small” size.
Best:
1. The combat feels great by MMO standards, even with the balancing and zerg issues.
2. The art is of high quality; good sound effects, music, character art and animation work everywhere.
3. The events are mostly an improvement over questing.
4. The community is still good by online game standards, helped by game design which rewards cooperation instead of punishing for it.
5. No subscription is probably why I’m still playing this, despite…
Worst:
1. The overall lack of direction is seriously harming this game. While a little experimentation is a good thing, the game’s post-release development has felt less like a cohesive effort and more like an undirected clusterkitten just drifting into random directions in an ocean of ideas, occasionally pushed around by storms of community feedback (and probably, hurricanes of publisher interest), randomly crashing into reefs made of dead Karkas and the remains of their disconnected victims.
2. Dungeons! Except for the few added since release, the dungeon experience is simply bad by 2010s’ standards. Not even the bosses stand out with any interesting mechanics, and the trash mobs are a chore at best; with barely any mechanics or dungeon-specific loot and fewer drops than event farming or something, avoiding the mobs — and possibly the dungeons — whenever possible is the only rational solution.
3. Poor ingame story content. Both the personal and living story had serious issues with presentation and story quality. Without quests and a GW1-style sequence of missions, the game has very few storytelling opportunities. The style and tone are inconsistent, probably caused to some degree by point #1. Some WoW quest NPCs made me care more than these characters could ever manage.
4. The casual zerg mentality. Maybe the game rewards anonymous cooperation a bit too much. Forget guilds, forget any organized efforts to meet challenges. You miss out on too much not running around in a blob.
5. The game engine is generally unimpressive, carried by the game design and art quality. Only the low view distance helps hide the fact there’s nothing beyond the maps’ rectangular boundaries (painfully apparent on the world map as axis-aligned lines of mountains). Effects are mostly limited to GPU-abusing particle spam and various deferred shading tricks, the camera is still buggy 2 years after the betas and there’s no way in the Mists anyone should have expected this D3D9 call stress test to run smooth.
I was not entirely sure where to put this, so I’m hoping tech support is the right place. I play GW2 pretty regularly and never have any problems, but after the patch today, I was in the game for (maybe) an hour, in PVE and then WvW, then I suddenly blue screened. When I tried to reboot, BIOS said my CPU was at 115 degrees celsius, so I shut down and waited a short bit, then I opened speccy before opening GW2 up and popping back into WvW again. I turned all my settings down to minimal, just in case. It was only a couple minutes before I was at 95 degrees and I closed the game.
Yes, this is a problem in your end; the game, or any userspace application really, has no business caring about hardware details like temperatures and shouldn’t be able to mess with them like that in any case.
I just can’t see an i5-2400 reaching 110 C even with Intel’s terrible stock cooler. Check that the heatsink is properly attached and the fan is working before you do anything else. Intel’s stock cooler is notorious for its cheap plastic pushpin mount. Maybe one of the corners is loose and it’s only touching the CPU from the opposite side, or something.
I don’t understand why it is only happening with GW2 and not with anything else, which is why I’m asking here!
GW2 is a rather CPU heavy game and will certainly demand more than Fallout 3, so if there’s a problem with the CPU it’s more likely to show in GW2.
You could just disable postprocessing to get rid of the bloom. This will also disable the color grading / tinting, but in some areas that’s just as overdone as the bloom is.
Makes it easier to see what the enemies are doing, too — in some fights the bloom burns out the spell effects into almost pure white, obscuring the thing that’s about to oneshot you.
A clean OpenGL 3.3 or 4.x rewrite would probably run faster even on Windows, but I don’t think it’s very likely to happen soon. Porting the game’s graphics code, shaders, etc. is enough work by itself, and there’s no telling how messy the various third party libraries’ Linux compatibility is.
Even many console games are probably easier to port between platforms — since they get released for two or three platforms anyway, they tend to have at least some effort to abstract platform details away and compile against different APIs. And they don’t usually have integrated web browsers and other weird stuff.
Huge respect for any company that takes the leap, though.
It’s true that the game doesn’t benefit much from more than 3 CPU cores, but it still requires a decent video card to run; you’re almost certainly more limited by GPU than CPU performance.
Does the game’s framerate change significantly when you lower the screen resolution and/or the “render sampling” setting?
If so, you’re probably limited by the 5570. It is getting a bit old; probably has about 10% of a top tier (single GPU) card’s performance at this point.
vid card- nvidia geforce gt 610 1gb (which isn’t a stellar card but it should be outperforming the old one)
Is this a typo? The GT 610 is an extremely weak card mostly meant to enable light office work and media playback on machines that lack an integrated GPU.
Seems far more likely that it’s just a listing of the terms and conditions under which ArenaNet used code from third party libraries. Many libraries’ licenses usually require anyone redistributing pieces of them to display the license and/or a copyright statement somewhere.
At a quick glance, a lot of them are probably just dependencies of the built-in Awesomium web browser.
The UI’s design was never good, but with the new changes it’s taken several steps back.
The hero panel’s design is a random clusterkitten of UI concepts from absolutely everything — from non-mouse UIs, old graphical desktops, Web 2.0 and whatever, the hero panel has it all, everything used optimally in a relentless assault on the user’s patience.
Also, and that green on brown is not a very accessible choice of colors.
They’re probably just the terms and conditions for various software libraries used in GW2.
Many such libraries come with a license that requires anyone distributing a program using the library to also distribute the license text, or show a copyright notice somewhere, or both.
A text file with all the licenses copypasted together seems like a legit enough way of doing this.
Have you tried zooming in the minimap?
i have this problem too. i assumed it was my “older” video card (nvidia 460gtx like the OP) but it looks like people with newer cards are having the issue too?
Some of the spammiest particle effects probably involve about as much pixel processing and render output as the rest of the scene combined, given the right camera angles.
Any GPU that was just enough for decent framerates in normal gameplay is going to choke when those start hitting the screen.
I have to agree with ProtoGunner’s post above.
In GW1, there always was this feeling that there’s something fresh on the horizon, whether it was a new campaign, balance updates or just trying out something new, like PvPing on a new character. It started out strong and innovative, and it just kept improving rapidly.
Guild Wars 2 is not delivering that at all right now.
GW2 seemed somewhat fresh, if riddled with problems, during the betas. After the game launched, my old guild broke up within a couple of months. There was barely any gameplay we didn’t already see during the first 20-30 levels, and the level of polish faded noticeably during the second half. The dungeons still feel unfinished, only made tolerable by zerker DPS and the occasional exploit. Core issues like condition caps remain unresolved. And improvements are coming in slowly if at all.
The living story plot and its presentation have been weak at times; the content offers next to nothing to present my character as a … character in it. Having a decent in-engine cutscene inside the Breachmaker was probably the high point of the living story’s storytelling, which isn’t saying much.
The focus on “epic” world changing events and massive battles just isn’t working for me. When the group event starts, you’re just another faceless zerker in the blob and the only obvious thing to do — deal damage and not die to the chaos — is all you can do. And then you do the same thing again in 1 hour. Even the GW1 henchmen were more interesting company than this mob of mutes running around, trying to “tag” as many mobs as possible.
Maybe I’m just burned out. But I know I never felt like this after completing something in the original game.
Are you absolutely sure the filename is actually missing the extension?
If your Windows is configured to hide certain file extensions and some program has registered the ‘dat’ extension, you could have actually renamed the gw2.dat to gw2.dat.dat, preventing the game from finding its datafile and forcing it to download everything.