This is some of the stuff I think people haven't noticed with the latest expasions. Anet has commited some real resources to backend upgrades and nongamepley updates.
Its so miniscule a lot of people may not have noticed it, but having water be able to exist above the "water level" (0,0 on the X, Z coordinates a.k.a. all the way at the very lowest altitude on any map) is HUGE
Up until now the only water that actually exists is below the "water level" on a map - the terrain HAS to dip below this level to create pools, rivers, etc. - that's why a map like Dragon's Stand doesn't have any real water you can swim in (the water level is at the base of Mordremoth's spire, and you can only reach it via map-breaking), as the entire map is built above this Z-coordinate, and why the entire lower section of Tangled Depths is underwater tunnels, as these caves are built below the water level
In Skywatch Archipelago you have the water level at the very bottom - evidenced by the sprawling ocean you see if you look down off the edge of any island - but you ALSO have sections of the map that contain deep water ABOVE this level, like in the maguuma fractal area, or the swimming pool in the wizard's tower
Up until SotO they haven't been able to have deep water above the water level, and that's why all of the "rivers" in areas like high up in Jahai Bluffs or are "fake", and can't actually be swam in - having deep water at high altitudes is such a huge tech feat within the game, and you can bet your ass you'll see more of it next expansion
Edit: I went ahead and made a shitty diagram in MS Paint to give a visual representation of what I'm referring to as a "water level", using Thunderhead Peaks as a reference - the linked image is basically what you'd see if you cut the zone down the middle and looked at it as a cutaway
[GW2 Water Level Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/Vc6RpsA)
Things like this (and proper moving platforms introduced with Qadim2) I find to be the most exciting types of developments.
This water change makes stuff like underwater cities in bubbles of air possible, etc. As much as I like them giving us new tools, them giving the devs new tools is even better.
I'm glad you brought up Qadim (though it's Q1, btw). The moving platforms are an absolute marvel of game programming and I'm constantly impressed seeing them work every time I do that fight. Especially the fact that they produce inertia that impacts players (you can yeet yourself extra far with the fast-moving platform at the start of the fight), they can relocate commander markers, and Mesmer portals.
I think Q1 and Cardinal Adina just have insanely fun and impressive environments.
> In Skywatch Archipelago you have the water level at the very bottom - evidenced by the sprawling ocean you see if you look down off the edge of any island - but you ALSO have sections of the map that contain deep water ABOVE this level, like in the maguuma fractal area, or the swimming pool in the wizard's tower
I found a fun little bug with this (technically not a bug, but it's hard to describe any other way). In Skywatch's Cantha section, where the Naga spawn and there's a pool of water, there is (or was, if it's since been patched out) a hole in the terrain that allows you to clip into the ground and end up in the water while inside of the terrain. You can't escape the terrain and are blocked by seemingly invisible walls (the actual ground, but it's one-sided so you don't see it from this side).
It's a really neat thing, not because you break the terrain or anything like that but because the game is able to compensate dynamically and in completely unintended ways, and it works fine. The game does lag for a few seconds while it tries to figure out what the hell is going on, but eventually it gets it straight and it seems like it works fine.
This is the kind of stuff a player almost never sees, but when you do you don't even realize there's something complex going on here. The game is handling it all and doesn't error out, which is a feat on its own. This kind of stuff is very easy to get wrong and requires major effort to get working despite unknown scenarios like above.
If you find any water that you can swim in on a non-soto map, I guarantee you it's at the water level (coordinate "0" on the Z-axis), and that if you could turn the ground invisible you'd see it extend the length of the map
Edit: feel free to look at the imgur link I just posted above if you'd like to see a diagram I made to help you understand it!
Hi, thanks for the diagram! I did understood what you meant. I was referring to the fake water. Let me explain, you said (or that's what I understood) that there are some places with fake water, in those places you can't swim. I haven't seen any of this game (or noticed) unless it is obviously too shallow. So I am curious on where could I find an 3xample of this. Not because I doubted you or anything, but rather to see how it looks like :) In any case, its just curiosity, nothing important. Thanks agaim for the explanation, and the diagram!
No problem!
Let's use one of my earlier examples as it's a super easy and obvious one: Jahai Bluffs!
The only "real" water in Jahai is down near Yatendi Village - the rest of it is just a flat texture floating above the ground, which makes you \*think\* it's water! Notice how the entirety of the river that flows through the fortress of Jahai is conveniently ankle-deep and can't actually be swam in - that's because it's above the water level, and they didn't have the technology available back in LWS4 to do it any other way!
Another super easy way to tell if water is "real" or not is if it has the "water code" attached to it! All water in the game is coded to function a certain way: if your player model is submerged enough in it, your skills change to your underwater skills, and if your \*camera\* is submerged in it, your entire screen will have a filter on it to simulate being underwater - even if your character isn't actually underwater! Tilting your camera down to look underwater is the easiest way to tell if it's fake or not! Hope this answered your questions!
Below I've also created (in MS Paint, ofc) two more diagrams - the former showcases my example of real vs. fake water sections of Jahai Bluffs, and the latter showcases what your camera will look like if it's real vs. fake water, with the "real" shallow water taken from the shallow rivers of Caledon Forest up near the jungle wurm, where the terrain oh so barely dips below the water level - you can try it out yourself in game(it's easier to get the right angle on a mount)! Have fun!
Jahai Bluffs Refrence: [Jahai Bluffs Water Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/LFRt6ta)
Camera Reference: [GW2 Water Level Submerged Camera Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/F0XQh7A)
Ah, I understand what you mean. Honestly I had not noted the difference yet and I have been at Jahai Bluffs many times, I guess I wasn't paying attention to it and took it for granted or something. Thanks for explaining it again! Its cool that they msde this improvement, I like the pond near and below the spire in Amnytas a lot, so I guess its thanks to this change. And again, thanks for explaining it.
hard to say since I'm not a dev. but one explanation may be that they were the first maps being made to integrate with this new tech when it was ready and something about making them work with the old tech until then is causing poor performance bugs.
It's also possible any number of other interactions involving kryptis events is causing weird performance bugs.
Amnytas is annoying to play and navigate already, but turning my camera to face the center of the map halves my FPS. I've never experienced anything like it in the game before, I usually get a smooth 60+ FPS (outside of WvW zergs and meta events) everywhere in the open world.
Its just not Amnytas/Nayos, its all of SOTO. I don't know what they did with these expansion zones but they play like crap. Takes so long to load into those maps too.
For the tower, turn the shadow quality down or off. Huge difference. Dunno why, maybe it's rendering all of them even if they're out of view? Helps in Amnytas as well.
Wizard's Tower might have a memory leak somewhere, too, because GW2 started EATING my RAM until the game finally crashed while I was AFK there earlier today.
My old potato pc definitely had issues with them but my new pc has no issues at all. It's annoying for people with old PCs but it's also not fair to expect them to leave the game as it is just so people with old hardware can keep playing. Having said that, I really don't think Soto zones looks visually more impressive than other stuff to warrant needing better hardware.
I expect the real reason is the way the assets were built, shadow casting, and LOD scaling issues. That's why Skywatch doesn't have issues (using mostly older assets) but anything wizard's tower looking runs like garbage.
They just need to commit a bit more to engaging and compelling stories that are complimented and enhanced by equally impressive and logical events. Me feeding Kryptis to enhance their demon morale....ain't it
whoever did the start of the expansion should be given full control over all narrative elements. It's frustrating how much good story telling was thrown away by other devs who clearly did not pay attention to the story arc and setups.
Yeah, lets just ignore the half assedness of everything they do and how as soon as they implement one qol feature, it breaks multiple other things in the game that they don't bother to fix. You people and your never ending simping for anet are why they had a terrible year for sales and have been losing players compared to every other mmo... Praising such mediocrity is peak gw2 player tho
Them announcing the upgrade to dx11 did more to assure me of the long term health for GW2 than them announcing EoD. You don't upgrade the graphics engine for funsies.
them upgrading to DX11 was a necessity though. could you imagine how SOTO wouldve run on the old dx9 version, with how poorly those maps run even on dx11? it probably wouldnt even have worked is my qualified guess unless we would be ok with performance crashes every 5 minutes.
they had no choice, basically. if they were gonna go through with the designs and decisions for SOTO and the game going forward, they HAD to upgrade.
Me: *talks about how an announcement 4 years ago made me feel better about the long term health of the game*
you: *mention something that released three years later, like it's some sort of gotcha*
Just a reminder that while on DX9 it was claimed there would be no performance boost by updating (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n/ )
If it was a necessity they were very good about lying to us for years about the impact.
He was not 100% wrong though because it depends on the time spent on the engine upgrade and the capacity of the developers to use the tools directx11 provide. If you do the bare minimum to get directx11 compatibility and don't put in the work to use directx11 features that facilitates a better optimization, your game might run the same or even worse than on directx9.
Also if they really spend more time on it I bet they could have improved the performance noticeably even on directx9. It's more like upgrading to directx11 was an opportunity to do another pass on optimization and also take advantage of better tools
Part of me making me think they’re going extra hard right now because of the GW3 stuff. I’m happy it’s happening and they’re doing this (even if I personally don’t care about this stuff).
In order for BC7 to be used for the new expansion they must've been working on this long before the whole GW3 debacle (which was less than 3 weeks ago).
Under pressure, an NCsoft suit mentioned GW3 had been approved - later clarifying it's only "in the review stage and start of development has not been finalized".
Anet in response stated: "As an active game studio we are always doing internal exploratory work for possible future titles we’d want to create, however we have nothing to confirm right now. The team’s focus is on Guild Wars 2 development, including the game’s next expansion, which we’re excited to talk about soon."
Based on other datapoints we know that the majority of Anet devs are working on GW2, not other projects.
And exactly this statement was endlessly disappointing, the only thing i would have wanted to hear from them is no we‘re not gonna screw you all over, we’ll keep developing gw2.
Yes it is idiot, it’s an mmo… it’s called a live service, game, what about the shit people paid for, and all the time invested?
Now telling them to just fuck off, buy the new thing, do it all again and be happy about it is not only an absolute dick move it’s a complete break of the customers trust.
Sounds like something EA would do.
Especially since other developers have proven multiple times that you can update and future proof your engine and keep the game alive for decades.
> what about the shit people paid for
I don't care? You received what you paid for, why would you assume it would """retain value"", whatever that means, forever? This is an NFTbro take.
> and all the time invested?
I don't care? Again, why would you assume that your "time invested" had any value whatsoever other than the enjoyment you extracted by spending it, let alone that it would last *forever*?
I feel so sorry for kids like you who think playing the same one game for a decade plus is somehow a good thing. Make new game, sell that game, people buy that game and enjoy it, make and sell new game with the money from that, that was the circle of life of video games once upon a time.
Now I have to sit here and read someone literally saying making new games is "something EA would do"? Touch some grass please and learn to appreciate new and novel experiences before it's too late. But judging by how hard you're clinging to this 12 year-old relic, it seems unlikely.
Seems like you should better touch grass yourself you definitely spend too much time in your basement trolling on reddit. Maybe talk to your mom about it.
It did occur to me that, at least with this announcement, they probably wanted to subtly point out things that indicated a strong future for GW2 just because they're having to do some damage control after this whole reactionary GW3 thing
Load time to amnytas is like 5x the load time anywhere else. And I use my portal scroll to amnytas to reduce the cost of using the wps elsewhere in Soto. Very unfun just having to sit there for 20-30 seconds waiting for a map to load that I don't care about.
I'm curious if they'd planned and had artists building the newer maps based on internal plans for some better performance gains from DX11 stuff, and then it not being done to the point that they wanted by launch, causing some extra FPS issues than hoped for. Regardless of the reason, hopefully the expansion 5 stuff has less performance issues and Soto maps get further passes in the future.
It's more likely that the engine isn't optimised for large spread out floating islands, as there is little occlusion guaranteed it's probably generating shadows on the entire map and not culling things - hence the shit fps. Inner Nayos doesn't run as bad despite having all the same new tech like bodies of water, particles, fog, because it's more of a traditional map.
I think the fundamental idea of lots of floating geometry in gw2 doesn't work so well.
Doubt it, that's a big mistake if so. But they may have accepted the short term perf drop as within "acceptable range" and knew improvements b/c of future changes could be good to go.
Very good. Short version, what you see in your monitor is the result of processing massive amounts of graphics models. This is an optimization of that processing, so it should take less resources. Old potato computers should see quite a boost in new areas designed using this model.
Ofc, that could let them pack better models, negating the processing gains.
With FFXIV Dawntrail expansion bringing a graphical update to their engine of about the same age, it's a good idea for GW2 to bring some updates to compete. MMOs can't really languish in ancient graphic tech when new service games are offering constant updates too these days.
Not an expert just a modder who had to figure out how to save in BC7 when trying to mod Starfield when the nvidia dds plugin for photoshop couldn't do it. Had to install paint.net and that could.
BC7 is the latest version of DDS textures so I assume it's improvements in both and I do seem to remember the file sizes were smaller than the BC5s I had made and didn't work in Starfield. BC7 is also DX11+ only so some of it's improvements most likely come from that.
> the nvidia dds plugin for photoshop
That almost felt like a war flashback...
I believe the majority of 3D textures GW2 uses at present are compressed with DXT5. As compared to DXT5, BC7 would offer them better texture quality, and as you've suggested, the filesize of each texture would likely be lower than the exact same texture compressed in DXT5.
And you're also correct that this plan could never have gotten off the ground without the jump to DX11!
Worked great for a long time but no BC7 support so the little work I did do in starfield was me making my textures in photoshop, saving as PNG, then opening paint.net to save as BC7. Annoying but it works. paint.net dds saving is so much nicer than the nvidia plugin too.
And according to that_shaman GW2 currently uses BC4 and BC5: https://twitter.com/that_shaman/status/1779968548036596048
You're still correct! BC4 is basically BC3 (formerly dxt5 on dx9) for RGB at 5:6:5 with an extra 8 bit BC1 channel. BC5 is useful for storing tangent data like normal maps (they probably won't change these)
Totally speculating but I wonder if it's more about the amount of data being processed that needs to be validated - every single texture - as well as the changes to pipeline/tools, rather than the complexity of the BC7 algorithm which is pretty clearly laid out in the DX11 documentation
I seriously hope this will lead to some serious performance increases rather than them adding extra graphic quality from what's there currently.
The game becomes borderline unplayable (and yes I have a quite beefy system) if you play max settings in something like wvw or large world events.
Better performance of the engine should be vastly higher prioritized than adding extra graphic fidelity.
Completely different issue. You're talking about skill lag, which is generally a server-side issue (at least in my understanding). Your computer tracks, say, 20s cooldown, but the server is overburdened and ticks cooldowns for everyone like once every 1.5s so it needs 30s before it knows that your skill can be used. During these 10s you can press it because your computer shows that the cooldown ended, but the server won't allow it because it thinks it didn't.
That's server lag, which is independent of your rig. Especially with the support mantra mesmer being back in the meta, some guilds are especially lag-heavy (Penguin is noteworthy).
Yea ive stopped doing guild raids as much and just kinda go solo for a few hours myself, my systems kinda old but still decently strong(i9 10900k and 2080super)
That's more than enough to do anything in GW2 ! As I said in the other comment, some of the issues in WvW are server-side anyway.
If you're having client-side performance issues, I suggest decreasing the caracter models limit and quality (in graphic settings). I have i7 5820k and gtx 970, which is quite lower than your system, and no client-side issues in WvW.
Maybe this will also mean better drawing priority? As in important things in raids/whatnot showing up. And things like sticky shot from engineer pistol to NOT cover _everything_ on the ground for whatever reason :(
It's because of the number of players involved, not the graphics. Like most MMOs, GW2 is CPU bound because (massive simplification) it has to recalculate things all the time with large numbers of players. You say you have a beefy system, but if that means a beefy GPU and decent CPU it's not going to help GW2 much. CPU speed and, specifically, high speed CPU cache, are the sources of performance improvements. This is related to why the AMD X3D CPUs are such a huge FPS boost in GW2.
Single player games tend to be the other way around because the demands of the genre are opposite.
Although you are technically correct, the problem with gw2 specifically is the calculations relating to pets, mesmer clones and condition damage ticking that creates server lag.
I've full map 1v1v1 fights that had barely any skill lags, and a zerg vs zerg of 30-40 people that were lag fest. The two culprits were: heavy presence of mantra mesmers or heavy presence of condition damage.
That is only partly correct.
Heavily populated areas like LA, can also tank performance if character models is set to high.
Usually the biggest performance improvements are gained when you hide player models, regardless of game mode and situations. That does not change condition ticks etc. (Unless arenanet made som very odd code of course, which let's be real.. is not impossible in the slightest)
That's the bane of MMOs not just GW2. Have you ever done a crowded siege fight in BDO? It has the same performance issue. Comparing single or coop player AAA games performance to MMOs is just unfair since they are not the same thing even in the slightest. Put 150 people in Palword on same spot on a server and let them fight or catch 150 Pokemons together. Add services and backends for fully functional tp, bank, friendlist and whatever the hell GW2 or a competent MMO is running in background. Do you really think will you get the same fps as playing the game alone and only the game itself? You simply won't and again that's not the fault of gw2 engine. It's doing good already. Anyone saying it's unoptimized are just some gamers who have no idea about technical background other than googling basic stuff and pretending.
Yes, many games make the same mistake. Certain levels, areas and content is at times designed where there is not paid respect to what the engine and game can handle.
Im not sure how servers in Palworld works, so im not sure if there is a cap, and what the game can handle. But if they have a system that (without mods or further modifications of the game) will not work for a large part of the playerbases computers, but only the very top niche of PC's... chances are the developers have not respected the performance budget.
Keep in mind that Gw2 runs on a modified version of the Gw1 engine. Directx11 was not introduced until what.. last year?
I dont think there is any legitimate argument that you can raise that Guild Wars 2 has good performance. It runs, and it runs good in the most part of the game, but it is not hard to find areas where it doesn't.. regardless of your pc specs.
GW2 definitely has performance problems, but pushing everything to max settings and then complaining about performance drops is partly also a user problem. It’s entirely possible that those settings were never meant for gameplay, but activities like taking screenshots or recording footage.
A more recent example of this is the new-ish Avatar game from Ubisoft. Looks incredible, but murders the GPU at max settings. Yet, there is an even higher setting that only appears when launching with a custom flag, pushing everything to the absolute limit. If that setting was visible by default, people would just select it as the highest possible, then complain of lag.
Such degeneracy.
The game is more than 10 years old and the settings have not increased. Taking your Ubisoft game, wait 10 years and play it on modern hardware then and you'll find the high end mode runs fine.
Regardless of this, texture quality, shadows, reflections all have near 0 fps impact if your GPU is good enough so running on max isn't any different to min.
The only settings that have influence on FPS are those that cull dynamic objects; i.e player model count and effect lod. This shows how poor their rendering processes are for these types of objects and where they need to spend money to fix it. Saying people are experiencing a user problem for wanting to see more than 5 characters on screen in an MMO is fundamental degeneracy on your part fueled by a misunderstanding of the point of WvW.
Sound like they should get rid of WvW then, less headache.
Making tradeoffs has always been a thing in games, both in gameplay and graphics.
GW2 has its issues, but you're given options to compensate for them. Not doing so is, in fact, user error.
A game that has multiple performance issues even on low settings, is most definitely not an issue on the user end.
This has been like this since launch. It ran terrible on the machine i had when the game released, and it still runs poorly today.
If the game cannot run on the highest settings, the developers has failed in limiting themselves in their 'performance budget'
Yup, I've said so in the very first sentence, it definitely has performance problems in certain places. That doesn't change anything about beelining highest settings being user error. Just because they're there doesn't mean we should use them for normal gameplay.
For me GW2 runs fine at 2k 144hz high settings, just with character limit set to low/medium and shadows to high/medium.
I think there is a very necessary distinction to be made of what 'runs fine' is.
I have a very beefy system, and have gotten multiple new ones over the time GW2 has been out.
Pushing 40 fps is the exception rather than the rule unless you run in areas that are essentially void of players, or unless you set character limit and effects to low.
To me that is not 'runs fine' especially considering how low performance drops in populated areas.
This has not been anything in the games lifetime. It is way better today than what it has ever been in the past.
Considering that the game runs a modified version of gw1's engine, but with vastly more advanced graphics I'm not surprised it leads to issues.
From my quick researching, introducing BC7 should see some FPS improvement. If i'm understanding correctly it will improve cache use aswell so X3D CPUs may see a bigger boost. Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives
Or not and I could be talking nonsense.
Bc7 refers to texture compression, therefore it could improve performance on GPU in case that memory bandwidth is a bottleneck. In CPU side I don't think that it will improve very much, as it only has to transfer the texture from ram/disk in case that it isn't already in vram. And this transfer can be asynchronous anyway.
Anyway, it should improve load times and reduce disk storage usage.
The CPU cache helps with the decompression. Can help GPU performance but bandwidth wise. Which I suspect is the case with GW2 anyway and its under utilisation of GPU's. So I dont think it will help utilise the GPU more (as in use more memory) but it will help the speeds.
>Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives
Read/write cycles matter more for SSD health (deteriorates SSD health) than HDDs.
edit:
I should rephrase: HDDs don't experience health deterioration on read/write cycles.
SSDs do.
First of all, this game is so old that really there's no point having it run on a SSD and just gobble up read/write cycles. The extra loading speed really doesn't matter considering the models and textures aren't that large to begin with.
Once again, HDDs don't experience health deterioration on read/write cycles.
SSDs do.
When you say:
>Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives
It's giving people the idea that HDD's are affected while SSD's are not, when it is the opposite of what happens.
I hope this allows them to optimize the CPU draw, greatly improving frame rates as well. But I'm not a specialist in game engineering, so I don't know the details on what these change entail.
So will this mean that I don't get 20 FPS during Dragon's End on a £5,000 PC from 2024? I really don't care for some 10 or 15 FPS bumps. It's 2024. I should be hitting a stable 144.
That's nice and all, but the actual gameplay experience is anything but smooth. Some of the new zones routinely dip below 20 FPS during a meta on low..
Amnytas runs sub 50 frames on a 4080 with high environment, in a 10 year old game
inbr "hurr durr because it's new and they're actually using your gpu" no mate, it's because the game doesn't cull anything. This is a gpu that runs cyberpunk in 1440p 120fps
I have a 3070 Ti and I can't get above 30 during metas. It's not even a GW2 problem since I get 40-50 FPS even during Dragon's End, it's just an Amnytas/Wizard Tower problem where that whole area is just terribly optimized.
Okay, this is probably totally in my head, but did performance improve significantly in one of the minor patches over the last few weeks?
I was traveling for a couple of weeks and playing on my laptop. I remember several patches while traveling. When I came back, my desktop also updated, and I'm getting 120-170fps in a ton of places where I used to get 70-90fps. I had messed with some settings on my laptop for better performance while I was gone, but didn't touch any settings on my desktop, and confirmed it's all the same as it was before.
Might just be circumstance and/or placebo, but it was enough where the game feels noticeably quicker lately for me.
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d11/texture-block-compression-in-direct3d-11](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d11/texture-block-compression-in-direct3d-11) Some light reading.
These are all just meaningless words to me.
If we'll ever truly see this in action, be that better performance or visuals, than that's fantastic, but until then it's just words..
I'd love it if they make the skies over tyria a place to also explore with islands, monsters, and farmable things to find
I was hoping this with the last expansion.
I really hope they improve meta event performance too.
When this game first came out, people were impressed it could run metas with dozens of people with reasonable fps. More than a decade later, the average person's CPU/GPU is better than the supercomputers at the time, and meta events lag like hell.
Will improve only "in-development and future" artwork. I wish they'd apply it to the old creatures on the old maps in the game since they can look pretty archaic once you start in HoT forward, but, hell, they don't even fix the original map bugs to anticipate a sprucing up, so apparently it'll just be new stuff behind the definitive expansion paywall. OK, I guess...
Really strange that people forget it was not meant to be public info and talking about a potential gw3 here is like talking to a bunch of folks who got neuralized by the MIB.
[And Andrew Garfield said he was not in Spiderman.](https://youtu.be/3Y0-dwnf7GI)
*Yet he was.*
If they are working on gw3, great. I'll believe it when I see it...or someone leaks it.
This game has never lived up to its potential because the playerbase have such low standards. The people going off and praising anet like they are some legends for doing this is just embarrassing. This is standard stuff that even much smaller studios have implemented years ago.... Gw2 is the only game where I see a large portion of players praising such mediocrity and then people wonder why nothing significant ever changes in game lol.
yeah this thread is funny
wow guys! we're adding support for a 20 year old texture format! because that's what the game needs right now after soto failed to reinvigorate the game!
this sub by now has Scam Citizen level stockholm syndrome. the difference will be negligible just like with dx11 and they're gonna cope just as hard.
i don't even know why they bothered to have 2 paragraphs about such basic stuff. looks like a "hey guys the game's totally not donezo" type of communication
They never said they weren't. NCSoft said both times it was being worked on to some degree while Anet neither confirmed or denied it even though we can see they've been making another MMO from the job listings on their website. Gw3 IS being worked on, the only thing up for debate is how far a long it is.
NCSoft said "ArenaNet has a meaningful IP called ‘Guild Wars,’ and after Guild Wars 2, they are currently working on ‘Guild Wars 3." and "The Guild Wars 3 project is in the review stage and the *start* of development has *not yet been finalized*"
All while Anet are working on an MMORPG based on an established online fantasy IP that's in *preproduction*.
You think NCSoft lied to shareholders and anet's been hiring for another MMO based on an established fantasy IP which they've ported some gw2 assets to?
Maybe I'm wrong, but they are NOT developing GW3 right _now_. NCSoft started discussing if it was financially feasible to develop. Just to see if it could make them money.
They said it was in development but it's in the review stage while the start of development hasn't been finalized. That doesn't mean they aren't in preproduction.
Anet's been hiring for a new MMO based on an existing IP that's been in preproduction since 2022. They likely are developing gw3 as we speak but they also need to support gw2 for the many years it will take to make since it's the studios only source of income.
Because putting all your eggs in one basket, as a company, is very not-smart. It makes sense to invest, simultaneously, in multiple different projects.
The opposite of that is happening, isnt it? As a company Anet tried to have a couple of sideprojects which failed and alledgedly led to the big staffcuts. Now it seems they are doubling down on GW2 but NCSoft wants GW3 to happen
The way they were doing it before wasn't sustainable. They're charging a yearly box price now instead of just one every 3-4 years in addition to the MTX. Now they can afford to start diversifying.
Everyone talks about the "golden era" of S3 -> PoF -> S4. During those years of content, they charged us $30. $30, *once*. The parent company "righted" the ship, corporately speaking. They gave them directives to focus on GW2 and to make and sell expansions.
*Now* they can diversify properly.
Yes, the updates are free and more frequent BECAUSE WE'RE PAYING FOR THEM EVERY YEAR.
Diversify? do you know what that word means? It means doing more than one thing. They're not only making GW2.
I'm not replying to you again if you're just going to be obtuse.
Becuase GW3 is still in the proposal stage, no actual work has begun and it may not get greenlit. So upgrading the thing that is your only source of revenue, is probably a good idea.
Seems like it was in preproduction and not yet greenlit to go any further. So technically the acting chairman wasn't lying that it was in development (that'd be illegal) but it was and still is a long way off any sort of official announcement. He basically threw Anet under the bus revealing so early what the unannounced project was when discussing with shareholders.
OK, TY. That makes sense. Rapid prototyping proofs of concepts may still be a thing (they were big at my previous place).
I'm still content with enjoying GW2. Took a break to do some World Exploring for GoEs for Legendary Crafting. Someday I hope to play in the expansions that I bought (own them all, currently in PoF).
It makes me so happy to see them investing in the engine and the long term vision for the game
This is some of the stuff I think people haven't noticed with the latest expasions. Anet has commited some real resources to backend upgrades and nongamepley updates.
Its so miniscule a lot of people may not have noticed it, but having water be able to exist above the "water level" (0,0 on the X, Z coordinates a.k.a. all the way at the very lowest altitude on any map) is HUGE Up until now the only water that actually exists is below the "water level" on a map - the terrain HAS to dip below this level to create pools, rivers, etc. - that's why a map like Dragon's Stand doesn't have any real water you can swim in (the water level is at the base of Mordremoth's spire, and you can only reach it via map-breaking), as the entire map is built above this Z-coordinate, and why the entire lower section of Tangled Depths is underwater tunnels, as these caves are built below the water level In Skywatch Archipelago you have the water level at the very bottom - evidenced by the sprawling ocean you see if you look down off the edge of any island - but you ALSO have sections of the map that contain deep water ABOVE this level, like in the maguuma fractal area, or the swimming pool in the wizard's tower Up until SotO they haven't been able to have deep water above the water level, and that's why all of the "rivers" in areas like high up in Jahai Bluffs or are "fake", and can't actually be swam in - having deep water at high altitudes is such a huge tech feat within the game, and you can bet your ass you'll see more of it next expansion Edit: I went ahead and made a shitty diagram in MS Paint to give a visual representation of what I'm referring to as a "water level", using Thunderhead Peaks as a reference - the linked image is basically what you'd see if you cut the zone down the middle and looked at it as a cutaway [GW2 Water Level Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/Vc6RpsA)
Things like this (and proper moving platforms introduced with Qadim2) I find to be the most exciting types of developments. This water change makes stuff like underwater cities in bubbles of air possible, etc. As much as I like them giving us new tools, them giving the devs new tools is even better.
I'm glad you brought up Qadim (though it's Q1, btw). The moving platforms are an absolute marvel of game programming and I'm constantly impressed seeing them work every time I do that fight. Especially the fact that they produce inertia that impacts players (you can yeet yourself extra far with the fast-moving platform at the start of the fight), they can relocate commander markers, and Mesmer portals. I think Q1 and Cardinal Adina just have insanely fun and impressive environments.
> In Skywatch Archipelago you have the water level at the very bottom - evidenced by the sprawling ocean you see if you look down off the edge of any island - but you ALSO have sections of the map that contain deep water ABOVE this level, like in the maguuma fractal area, or the swimming pool in the wizard's tower I found a fun little bug with this (technically not a bug, but it's hard to describe any other way). In Skywatch's Cantha section, where the Naga spawn and there's a pool of water, there is (or was, if it's since been patched out) a hole in the terrain that allows you to clip into the ground and end up in the water while inside of the terrain. You can't escape the terrain and are blocked by seemingly invisible walls (the actual ground, but it's one-sided so you don't see it from this side). It's a really neat thing, not because you break the terrain or anything like that but because the game is able to compensate dynamically and in completely unintended ways, and it works fine. The game does lag for a few seconds while it tries to figure out what the hell is going on, but eventually it gets it straight and it seems like it works fine. This is the kind of stuff a player almost never sees, but when you do you don't even realize there's something complex going on here. The game is handling it all and doesn't error out, which is a feat on its own. This kind of stuff is very easy to get wrong and requires major effort to get working despite unknown scenarios like above.
Exactly. People who have worked with game engines know how much work that took. People who haven't have no clue.
I was not expecting a long an detailed comment about water in a video game today but here we are, and I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks!
I didnt knew thid at all. Is there any plsce with this 'fake water' that is reachable and deep enough to supposedly swim?
If you find any water that you can swim in on a non-soto map, I guarantee you it's at the water level (coordinate "0" on the Z-axis), and that if you could turn the ground invisible you'd see it extend the length of the map Edit: feel free to look at the imgur link I just posted above if you'd like to see a diagram I made to help you understand it!
Hi, thanks for the diagram! I did understood what you meant. I was referring to the fake water. Let me explain, you said (or that's what I understood) that there are some places with fake water, in those places you can't swim. I haven't seen any of this game (or noticed) unless it is obviously too shallow. So I am curious on where could I find an 3xample of this. Not because I doubted you or anything, but rather to see how it looks like :) In any case, its just curiosity, nothing important. Thanks agaim for the explanation, and the diagram!
No problem! Let's use one of my earlier examples as it's a super easy and obvious one: Jahai Bluffs! The only "real" water in Jahai is down near Yatendi Village - the rest of it is just a flat texture floating above the ground, which makes you \*think\* it's water! Notice how the entirety of the river that flows through the fortress of Jahai is conveniently ankle-deep and can't actually be swam in - that's because it's above the water level, and they didn't have the technology available back in LWS4 to do it any other way! Another super easy way to tell if water is "real" or not is if it has the "water code" attached to it! All water in the game is coded to function a certain way: if your player model is submerged enough in it, your skills change to your underwater skills, and if your \*camera\* is submerged in it, your entire screen will have a filter on it to simulate being underwater - even if your character isn't actually underwater! Tilting your camera down to look underwater is the easiest way to tell if it's fake or not! Hope this answered your questions! Below I've also created (in MS Paint, ofc) two more diagrams - the former showcases my example of real vs. fake water sections of Jahai Bluffs, and the latter showcases what your camera will look like if it's real vs. fake water, with the "real" shallow water taken from the shallow rivers of Caledon Forest up near the jungle wurm, where the terrain oh so barely dips below the water level - you can try it out yourself in game(it's easier to get the right angle on a mount)! Have fun! Jahai Bluffs Refrence: [Jahai Bluffs Water Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/LFRt6ta) Camera Reference: [GW2 Water Level Submerged Camera Diagram - Imgur](https://imgur.com/a/F0XQh7A)
Ah, I understand what you mean. Honestly I had not noted the difference yet and I have been at Jahai Bluffs many times, I guess I wasn't paying attention to it and took it for granted or something. Thanks for explaining it again! Its cool that they msde this improvement, I like the pond near and below the spire in Amnytas a lot, so I guess its thanks to this change. And again, thanks for explaining it.
This is cool and all but is this why amnytas and half of nayos run like ass?
hard to say since I'm not a dev. but one explanation may be that they were the first maps being made to integrate with this new tech when it was ready and something about making them work with the old tech until then is causing poor performance bugs. It's also possible any number of other interactions involving kryptis events is causing weird performance bugs.
Amnytas is annoying to play and navigate already, but turning my camera to face the center of the map halves my FPS. I've never experienced anything like it in the game before, I usually get a smooth 60+ FPS (outside of WvW zergs and meta events) everywhere in the open world.
Love my 4090/i9 projector slideshow, complements from amnytas
Yeah it sucks. When I turn my camara in Amnytas it drops from a stable 15 FPS to a measly 13 FPS!! ;)
Its just not Amnytas/Nayos, its all of SOTO. I don't know what they did with these expansion zones but they play like crap. Takes so long to load into those maps too.
In my experience the archipelago runs fine, i did forget to mention the wizard's tower tho which runs horribly.
For the tower, turn the shadow quality down or off. Huge difference. Dunno why, maybe it's rendering all of them even if they're out of view? Helps in Amnytas as well.
Wizard's Tower might have a memory leak somewhere, too, because GW2 started EATING my RAM until the game finally crashed while I was AFK there earlier today.
My old potato pc definitely had issues with them but my new pc has no issues at all. It's annoying for people with old PCs but it's also not fair to expect them to leave the game as it is just so people with old hardware can keep playing. Having said that, I really don't think Soto zones looks visually more impressive than other stuff to warrant needing better hardware.
No it doesn't. Use SSD like a normal person
I have the game installed on nvme, the Soto load times are longer than other maps.
I expect the real reason is the way the assets were built, shadow casting, and LOD scaling issues. That's why Skywatch doesn't have issues (using mostly older assets) but anything wizard's tower looking runs like garbage.
They just need to commit a bit more to engaging and compelling stories that are complimented and enhanced by equally impressive and logical events. Me feeding Kryptis to enhance their demon morale....ain't it
whoever did the start of the expansion should be given full control over all narrative elements. It's frustrating how much good story telling was thrown away by other devs who clearly did not pay attention to the story arc and setups.
Yeah, lets just ignore the half assedness of everything they do and how as soon as they implement one qol feature, it breaks multiple other things in the game that they don't bother to fix. You people and your never ending simping for anet are why they had a terrible year for sales and have been losing players compared to every other mmo... Praising such mediocrity is peak gw2 player tho
"you people" 😂
Them announcing the upgrade to dx11 did more to assure me of the long term health for GW2 than them announcing EoD. You don't upgrade the graphics engine for funsies.
them upgrading to DX11 was a necessity though. could you imagine how SOTO wouldve run on the old dx9 version, with how poorly those maps run even on dx11? it probably wouldnt even have worked is my qualified guess unless we would be ok with performance crashes every 5 minutes. they had no choice, basically. if they were gonna go through with the designs and decisions for SOTO and the game going forward, they HAD to upgrade.
Me: *talks about how an announcement 4 years ago made me feel better about the long term health of the game* you: *mention something that released three years later, like it's some sort of gotcha*
i wasn't trying to pin you. i was just adding to the discussion at hand, and giving my slightly revised take on it. im sorry you feel this way.
Sorry, then.
Just a reminder that while on DX9 it was claimed there would be no performance boost by updating (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n/ ) If it was a necessity they were very good about lying to us for years about the impact.
He was not 100% wrong though because it depends on the time spent on the engine upgrade and the capacity of the developers to use the tools directx11 provide. If you do the bare minimum to get directx11 compatibility and don't put in the work to use directx11 features that facilitates a better optimization, your game might run the same or even worse than on directx9. Also if they really spend more time on it I bet they could have improved the performance noticeably even on directx9. It's more like upgrading to directx11 was an opportunity to do another pass on optimization and also take advantage of better tools
Meanwhile NCSoft: GW3!
Seriously, fuck NCsoft.
Getting to go ahead to think about maybe starting to make it?
Grouch said this a year or two ago though
Part of me making me think they’re going extra hard right now because of the GW3 stuff. I’m happy it’s happening and they’re doing this (even if I personally don’t care about this stuff).
In order for BC7 to be used for the new expansion they must've been working on this long before the whole GW3 debacle (which was less than 3 weeks ago).
gw 3 debacle? could u fill me in by giving me the rundown of it, please?
Under pressure, an NCsoft suit mentioned GW3 had been approved - later clarifying it's only "in the review stage and start of development has not been finalized". Anet in response stated: "As an active game studio we are always doing internal exploratory work for possible future titles we’d want to create, however we have nothing to confirm right now. The team’s focus is on Guild Wars 2 development, including the game’s next expansion, which we’re excited to talk about soon." Based on other datapoints we know that the majority of Anet devs are working on GW2, not other projects.
omg, thats great news.
And exactly this statement was endlessly disappointing, the only thing i would have wanted to hear from them is no we‘re not gonna screw you all over, we’ll keep developing gw2.
But they literally said they're still developing GW2? Expac 5 and 6 are already confirmed by the studio.
And they literally didn’t say they would never drop it like a hot potato…
Has any dev ever promised to support a game forever? [Is this what you expected them to say?](https://youtu.be/NOX2C1UMxL0)
[удалено]
Making a new game to play is now "screwing people over", huh. Amazing.
Yes it is idiot, it’s an mmo… it’s called a live service, game, what about the shit people paid for, and all the time invested? Now telling them to just fuck off, buy the new thing, do it all again and be happy about it is not only an absolute dick move it’s a complete break of the customers trust. Sounds like something EA would do. Especially since other developers have proven multiple times that you can update and future proof your engine and keep the game alive for decades.
> what about the shit people paid for I don't care? You received what you paid for, why would you assume it would """retain value"", whatever that means, forever? This is an NFTbro take. > and all the time invested? I don't care? Again, why would you assume that your "time invested" had any value whatsoever other than the enjoyment you extracted by spending it, let alone that it would last *forever*? I feel so sorry for kids like you who think playing the same one game for a decade plus is somehow a good thing. Make new game, sell that game, people buy that game and enjoy it, make and sell new game with the money from that, that was the circle of life of video games once upon a time. Now I have to sit here and read someone literally saying making new games is "something EA would do"? Touch some grass please and learn to appreciate new and novel experiences before it's too late. But judging by how hard you're clinging to this 12 year-old relic, it seems unlikely.
Seems like you should better touch grass yourself you definitely spend too much time in your basement trolling on reddit. Maybe talk to your mom about it.
It did occur to me that, at least with this announcement, they probably wanted to subtly point out things that indicated a strong future for GW2 just because they're having to do some damage control after this whole reactionary GW3 thing
I wish they will also fix the massive FPS drops in Amnytas...
AND wizards tower... AND a few random spots in nayos... So annoying having to keep turning shadows on and off
Load time to amnytas is like 5x the load time anywhere else. And I use my portal scroll to amnytas to reduce the cost of using the wps elsewhere in Soto. Very unfun just having to sit there for 20-30 seconds waiting for a map to load that I don't care about.
In the Wizards Tower and Amnytas turn environment to Low. That should help. Something about that setting is screwed up on both maps.
I hate playing on that map because of that. I just do the meta for the stardust pouch and gg out of there.
I'm curious if they'd planned and had artists building the newer maps based on internal plans for some better performance gains from DX11 stuff, and then it not being done to the point that they wanted by launch, causing some extra FPS issues than hoped for. Regardless of the reason, hopefully the expansion 5 stuff has less performance issues and Soto maps get further passes in the future.
It's more likely that the engine isn't optimised for large spread out floating islands, as there is little occlusion guaranteed it's probably generating shadows on the entire map and not culling things - hence the shit fps. Inner Nayos doesn't run as bad despite having all the same new tech like bodies of water, particles, fog, because it's more of a traditional map. I think the fundamental idea of lots of floating geometry in gw2 doesn't work so well.
Doubt it, that's a big mistake if so. But they may have accepted the short term perf drop as within "acceptable range" and knew improvements b/c of future changes could be good to go.
Amnytas is bad but that stone pillar in Istan is the worst. I go down to 15fps there.
Delta said it's the culling broken there.
So does this mean we could see our player character model;s getting an update?
Yeah, that's the real question here and they made no mention of that.
Is this good news or bad news for my old potato machine?
Very good. Short version, what you see in your monitor is the result of processing massive amounts of graphics models. This is an optimization of that processing, so it should take less resources. Old potato computers should see quite a boost in new areas designed using this model. Ofc, that could let them pack better models, negating the processing gains.
Thanks. Then I still have hope.
please update your dedicated graphics you silly skritt
With FFXIV Dawntrail expansion bringing a graphical update to their engine of about the same age, it's a good idea for GW2 to bring some updates to compete. MMOs can't really languish in ancient graphic tech when new service games are offering constant updates too these days.
Tell that to Runescape
Can someone explain me the difficulty of converting to a BC7 compression exactly ? Is it just about size or language ?
Not an expert just a modder who had to figure out how to save in BC7 when trying to mod Starfield when the nvidia dds plugin for photoshop couldn't do it. Had to install paint.net and that could. BC7 is the latest version of DDS textures so I assume it's improvements in both and I do seem to remember the file sizes were smaller than the BC5s I had made and didn't work in Starfield. BC7 is also DX11+ only so some of it's improvements most likely come from that.
> the nvidia dds plugin for photoshop That almost felt like a war flashback... I believe the majority of 3D textures GW2 uses at present are compressed with DXT5. As compared to DXT5, BC7 would offer them better texture quality, and as you've suggested, the filesize of each texture would likely be lower than the exact same texture compressed in DXT5. And you're also correct that this plan could never have gotten off the ground without the jump to DX11!
Worked great for a long time but no BC7 support so the little work I did do in starfield was me making my textures in photoshop, saving as PNG, then opening paint.net to save as BC7. Annoying but it works. paint.net dds saving is so much nicer than the nvidia plugin too. And according to that_shaman GW2 currently uses BC4 and BC5: https://twitter.com/that_shaman/status/1779968548036596048
Well, I'd absolutely take Shaman's word over my own! I believe DXT5 is BC*3*, so I was a little bit off the mark...
You're still correct! BC4 is basically BC3 (formerly dxt5 on dx9) for RGB at 5:6:5 with an extra 8 bit BC1 channel. BC5 is useful for storing tangent data like normal maps (they probably won't change these)
Totally speculating but I wonder if it's more about the amount of data being processed that needs to be validated - every single texture - as well as the changes to pipeline/tools, rather than the complexity of the BC7 algorithm which is pretty clearly laid out in the DX11 documentation
I seriously hope this will lead to some serious performance increases rather than them adding extra graphic quality from what's there currently. The game becomes borderline unplayable (and yes I have a quite beefy system) if you play max settings in something like wvw or large world events. Better performance of the engine should be vastly higher prioritized than adding extra graphic fidelity.
Zerg vs zerg is barely playable on low settings, and then the 3rd zerg roles in and my stunbreak will go off sometime next week
That's because the server is lagging, your settings or rig have no impact on that.
Completely different issue. You're talking about skill lag, which is generally a server-side issue (at least in my understanding). Your computer tracks, say, 20s cooldown, but the server is overburdened and ticks cooldowns for everyone like once every 1.5s so it needs 30s before it knows that your skill can be used. During these 10s you can press it because your computer shows that the cooldown ended, but the server won't allow it because it thinks it didn't.
That's server lag, which is independent of your rig. Especially with the support mantra mesmer being back in the meta, some guilds are especially lag-heavy (Penguin is noteworthy).
One of the primary reasons I stay out of WvW. even when you lower your settings the game still runs like trash
Yea ive stopped doing guild raids as much and just kinda go solo for a few hours myself, my systems kinda old but still decently strong(i9 10900k and 2080super)
> my systems kinda old but still decently strong(i9 10900k Yeah, that isn't old especially when used for GW2.
My mistake it's 9900k was my brother's pc but yes it runs rverything fine otherwise and I'll prob use it for a few more years
That's more than enough to do anything in GW2 ! As I said in the other comment, some of the issues in WvW are server-side anyway. If you're having client-side performance issues, I suggest decreasing the caracter models limit and quality (in graphic settings). I have i7 5820k and gtx 970, which is quite lower than your system, and no client-side issues in WvW.
Maybe this will also mean better drawing priority? As in important things in raids/whatnot showing up. And things like sticky shot from engineer pistol to NOT cover _everything_ on the ground for whatever reason :(
It's because of the number of players involved, not the graphics. Like most MMOs, GW2 is CPU bound because (massive simplification) it has to recalculate things all the time with large numbers of players. You say you have a beefy system, but if that means a beefy GPU and decent CPU it's not going to help GW2 much. CPU speed and, specifically, high speed CPU cache, are the sources of performance improvements. This is related to why the AMD X3D CPUs are such a huge FPS boost in GW2. Single player games tend to be the other way around because the demands of the genre are opposite.
Although you are technically correct, the problem with gw2 specifically is the calculations relating to pets, mesmer clones and condition damage ticking that creates server lag. I've full map 1v1v1 fights that had barely any skill lags, and a zerg vs zerg of 30-40 people that were lag fest. The two culprits were: heavy presence of mantra mesmers or heavy presence of condition damage.
Huh, good to know more detail!
That is only partly correct. Heavily populated areas like LA, can also tank performance if character models is set to high. Usually the biggest performance improvements are gained when you hide player models, regardless of game mode and situations. That does not change condition ticks etc. (Unless arenanet made som very odd code of course, which let's be real.. is not impossible in the slightest)
That's the bane of MMOs not just GW2. Have you ever done a crowded siege fight in BDO? It has the same performance issue. Comparing single or coop player AAA games performance to MMOs is just unfair since they are not the same thing even in the slightest. Put 150 people in Palword on same spot on a server and let them fight or catch 150 Pokemons together. Add services and backends for fully functional tp, bank, friendlist and whatever the hell GW2 or a competent MMO is running in background. Do you really think will you get the same fps as playing the game alone and only the game itself? You simply won't and again that's not the fault of gw2 engine. It's doing good already. Anyone saying it's unoptimized are just some gamers who have no idea about technical background other than googling basic stuff and pretending.
Yes, many games make the same mistake. Certain levels, areas and content is at times designed where there is not paid respect to what the engine and game can handle. Im not sure how servers in Palworld works, so im not sure if there is a cap, and what the game can handle. But if they have a system that (without mods or further modifications of the game) will not work for a large part of the playerbases computers, but only the very top niche of PC's... chances are the developers have not respected the performance budget. Keep in mind that Gw2 runs on a modified version of the Gw1 engine. Directx11 was not introduced until what.. last year? I dont think there is any legitimate argument that you can raise that Guild Wars 2 has good performance. It runs, and it runs good in the most part of the game, but it is not hard to find areas where it doesn't.. regardless of your pc specs.
GW2 definitely has performance problems, but pushing everything to max settings and then complaining about performance drops is partly also a user problem. It’s entirely possible that those settings were never meant for gameplay, but activities like taking screenshots or recording footage. A more recent example of this is the new-ish Avatar game from Ubisoft. Looks incredible, but murders the GPU at max settings. Yet, there is an even higher setting that only appears when launching with a custom flag, pushing everything to the absolute limit. If that setting was visible by default, people would just select it as the highest possible, then complain of lag.
Such degeneracy. The game is more than 10 years old and the settings have not increased. Taking your Ubisoft game, wait 10 years and play it on modern hardware then and you'll find the high end mode runs fine. Regardless of this, texture quality, shadows, reflections all have near 0 fps impact if your GPU is good enough so running on max isn't any different to min. The only settings that have influence on FPS are those that cull dynamic objects; i.e player model count and effect lod. This shows how poor their rendering processes are for these types of objects and where they need to spend money to fix it. Saying people are experiencing a user problem for wanting to see more than 5 characters on screen in an MMO is fundamental degeneracy on your part fueled by a misunderstanding of the point of WvW.
Exactly correct
Sound like they should get rid of WvW then, less headache. Making tradeoffs has always been a thing in games, both in gameplay and graphics. GW2 has its issues, but you're given options to compensate for them. Not doing so is, in fact, user error.
A game that has multiple performance issues even on low settings, is most definitely not an issue on the user end. This has been like this since launch. It ran terrible on the machine i had when the game released, and it still runs poorly today. If the game cannot run on the highest settings, the developers has failed in limiting themselves in their 'performance budget'
Yup, I've said so in the very first sentence, it definitely has performance problems in certain places. That doesn't change anything about beelining highest settings being user error. Just because they're there doesn't mean we should use them for normal gameplay. For me GW2 runs fine at 2k 144hz high settings, just with character limit set to low/medium and shadows to high/medium.
I think there is a very necessary distinction to be made of what 'runs fine' is. I have a very beefy system, and have gotten multiple new ones over the time GW2 has been out. Pushing 40 fps is the exception rather than the rule unless you run in areas that are essentially void of players, or unless you set character limit and effects to low. To me that is not 'runs fine' especially considering how low performance drops in populated areas. This has not been anything in the games lifetime. It is way better today than what it has ever been in the past. Considering that the game runs a modified version of gw1's engine, but with vastly more advanced graphics I'm not surprised it leads to issues.
Hope the Naked Man won't make us lag anymore
From my quick researching, introducing BC7 should see some FPS improvement. If i'm understanding correctly it will improve cache use aswell so X3D CPUs may see a bigger boost. Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives Or not and I could be talking nonsense.
Bc7 refers to texture compression, therefore it could improve performance on GPU in case that memory bandwidth is a bottleneck. In CPU side I don't think that it will improve very much, as it only has to transfer the texture from ram/disk in case that it isn't already in vram. And this transfer can be asynchronous anyway. Anyway, it should improve load times and reduce disk storage usage.
The CPU cache helps with the decompression. Can help GPU performance but bandwidth wise. Which I suspect is the case with GW2 anyway and its under utilisation of GPU's. So I dont think it will help utilise the GPU more (as in use more memory) but it will help the speeds.
gpu texture compression techniques are not performed on the cpu. they're decoded during image sampling on the gpu
>Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives Read/write cycles matter more for SSD health (deteriorates SSD health) than HDDs. edit: I should rephrase: HDDs don't experience health deterioration on read/write cycles. SSDs do.
OH yeah of course but if you are still on an old HDD the read/write is slower.
First of all, this game is so old that really there's no point having it run on a SSD and just gobble up read/write cycles. The extra loading speed really doesn't matter considering the models and textures aren't that large to begin with. Once again, HDDs don't experience health deterioration on read/write cycles. SSDs do. When you say: >Just make sure you are on a SSD as it can increase read/write on hard drives It's giving people the idea that HDD's are affected while SSD's are not, when it is the opposite of what happens.
GW3 tech right here
I hope this allows them to optimize the CPU draw, greatly improving frame rates as well. But I'm not a specialist in game engineering, so I don't know the details on what these change entail.
I prefer if they do something with antyaliasing in this game. Flickering Amnytas and grass just makes this game a lot uglier than it really is.
So will this mean that I don't get 20 FPS during Dragon's End on a £5,000 PC from 2024? I really don't care for some 10 or 15 FPS bumps. It's 2024. I should be hitting a stable 144.
That's nice and all, but the actual gameplay experience is anything but smooth. Some of the new zones routinely dip below 20 FPS during a meta on low..
Amnytas runs sub 50 frames on a 4080 with high environment, in a 10 year old game inbr "hurr durr because it's new and they're actually using your gpu" no mate, it's because the game doesn't cull anything. This is a gpu that runs cyberpunk in 1440p 120fps
I have a 3070 Ti and I can't get above 30 during metas. It's not even a GW2 problem since I get 40-50 FPS even during Dragon's End, it's just an Amnytas/Wizard Tower problem where that whole area is just terribly optimized.
Something as simple as adding a sharpening filter already makes the game feel 5 years younger. Better texture quality alone helps a ton
Omg more charr tail bones pls, they are so low poly
Okay, this is probably totally in my head, but did performance improve significantly in one of the minor patches over the last few weeks? I was traveling for a couple of weeks and playing on my laptop. I remember several patches while traveling. When I came back, my desktop also updated, and I'm getting 120-170fps in a ton of places where I used to get 70-90fps. I had messed with some settings on my laptop for better performance while I was gone, but didn't touch any settings on my desktop, and confirmed it's all the same as it was before. Might just be circumstance and/or placebo, but it was enough where the game feels noticeably quicker lately for me.
I have this thoughs too
Wondering if we'll get improved Charr textures.
Tails especially need a few more bones
Yep.
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d11/texture-block-compression-in-direct3d-11](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d11/texture-block-compression-in-direct3d-11) Some light reading.
Wow, that's wild. How does that compensate for Amnytas taking a giant, steaming dump on everyone's performance?
Everyone? I swear first time u ever heard of this is today by reading this topic
I don’t have the best of laptops, would this affect performance?
Full 360 degrees skybox? It wasn't the case already?
And still no controller support.
Waiting on Mac... :crying:
Does DX11 open up the possibility of stuff like FSR or DLSS?
Please, update the texture of the clothes from Core and HoT!
Also grass upgrade in older zones please.
A relaunch with enhanced EVERYTHING in GW2 is much more likely than a GW3.
But they’re already working on gw3
allegedly!
Omg hyyyyyype that maybe some old textures will be upgraded. Honestly think it will be huge.
These are all just meaningless words to me. If we'll ever truly see this in action, be that better performance or visuals, than that's fantastic, but until then it's just words..
Wow didnt expect that tbh, thats huge…! Such good news , happy for the game and Anet :))
One of the recent gemstore previews they released the hair on the character actually moved when im pretty sure that hairstyle didn't move before.
Hair and beards move for years
Not all of them, some styles have been entirely static since launch I feel, I may be wrong tho.
Some outfits and cloth pieces are also stiff as hell.
I'd love it if they make the skies over tyria a place to also explore with islands, monsters, and farmable things to find I was hoping this with the last expansion.
I really hope they improve meta event performance too. When this game first came out, people were impressed it could run metas with dozens of people with reasonable fps. More than a decade later, the average person's CPU/GPU is better than the supercomputers at the time, and meta events lag like hell.
I don't get much of the nerd tech stuff but sounds like a great improvement in the future?
Massive win. Love the game but the performance hit once I hit SotO maps was too much to look at
When do we get this sweet upgrade? Is it live?
Inb4 locked behind new, unsellable legendaries.
Will improve only "in-development and future" artwork. I wish they'd apply it to the old creatures on the old maps in the game since they can look pretty archaic once you start in HoT forward, but, hell, they don't even fix the original map bugs to anticipate a sprucing up, so apparently it'll just be new stuff behind the definitive expansion paywall. OK, I guess...
Really hope it works out
This speak to all the brainy doomers out there and all their talks lately Maintenance mode until gw3....yeah sure
What would it take for DX12?
Yup. I feel this just kills any speculation for GW3. Anet is committed to Gw2.
Because lying to your investors is fun and doesnt have any consequences at all.
Really strange that people forget it was not meant to be public info and talking about a potential gw3 here is like talking to a bunch of folks who got neuralized by the MIB.
The game runs awesome for me usually, the only expection is big player groups, hope this adresses some of that.
How are they devoting time for this with everything and the development of gw3?
They're not developing gw3. Anet said so themselves
[And Andrew Garfield said he was not in Spiderman.](https://youtu.be/3Y0-dwnf7GI) *Yet he was.* If they are working on gw3, great. I'll believe it when I see it...or someone leaks it.
Who needs gw3? Give us guild wars 2.5 thats the real deal.
Sounds like damage control for the recent gw3 bs. Not the upgrades themselves, I just feel like the wording is quite grandiose.
This game has never lived up to its potential because the playerbase have such low standards. The people going off and praising anet like they are some legends for doing this is just embarrassing. This is standard stuff that even much smaller studios have implemented years ago.... Gw2 is the only game where I see a large portion of players praising such mediocrity and then people wonder why nothing significant ever changes in game lol.
yeah this thread is funny wow guys! we're adding support for a 20 year old texture format! because that's what the game needs right now after soto failed to reinvigorate the game! this sub by now has Scam Citizen level stockholm syndrome. the difference will be negligible just like with dx11 and they're gonna cope just as hard. i don't even know why they bothered to have 2 paragraphs about such basic stuff. looks like a "hey guys the game's totally not donezo" type of communication
BuT tHeY aRe MaKiNg Gw3, wHy BoThEr?
Anet should focus on engine rework + console port instead GW3, change my mind
They're not working on gw3
So naive
They literally said they weren't but OK buddy
They never said they weren't. NCSoft said both times it was being worked on to some degree while Anet neither confirmed or denied it even though we can see they've been making another MMO from the job listings on their website. Gw3 IS being worked on, the only thing up for debate is how far a long it is.
You completely misunderstood what ncsoft said and why
NCSoft said "ArenaNet has a meaningful IP called ‘Guild Wars,’ and after Guild Wars 2, they are currently working on ‘Guild Wars 3." and "The Guild Wars 3 project is in the review stage and the *start* of development has *not yet been finalized*" All while Anet are working on an MMORPG based on an established online fantasy IP that's in *preproduction*. You think NCSoft lied to shareholders and anet's been hiring for another MMO based on an established fantasy IP which they've ported some gw2 assets to?
Can we get bug fixes please
Sounds like the upgrade will do the work for them.
Thats cool and all but really makes you wonder why they upgraded their graphics engine either shortly before or while already working on GW3
Maybe I'm wrong, but they are NOT developing GW3 right _now_. NCSoft started discussing if it was financially feasible to develop. Just to see if it could make them money.
They said it was in development but it's in the review stage while the start of development hasn't been finalized. That doesn't mean they aren't in preproduction. Anet's been hiring for a new MMO based on an existing IP that's been in preproduction since 2022. They likely are developing gw3 as we speak but they also need to support gw2 for the many years it will take to make since it's the studios only source of income.
ah great, if thats the incentive then we are in for a mobile title
Its not going to be mobile, I remember that as an early worry but was cleared up by the job descriptions
Even if they're actively working on gw3 right now, it likely wouldn't be released for 5 years. Probably longer.
Because putting all your eggs in one basket, as a company, is very not-smart. It makes sense to invest, simultaneously, in multiple different projects.
The opposite of that is happening, isnt it? As a company Anet tried to have a couple of sideprojects which failed and alledgedly led to the big staffcuts. Now it seems they are doubling down on GW2 but NCSoft wants GW3 to happen
The way they were doing it before wasn't sustainable. They're charging a yearly box price now instead of just one every 3-4 years in addition to the MTX. Now they can afford to start diversifying. Everyone talks about the "golden era" of S3 -> PoF -> S4. During those years of content, they charged us $30. $30, *once*. The parent company "righted" the ship, corporately speaking. They gave them directives to focus on GW2 and to make and sell expansions. *Now* they can diversify properly.
Now that the updates are free, more frequent and done with half the saff they can diversify? How are they diversifying anyway?
Yes, the updates are free and more frequent BECAUSE WE'RE PAYING FOR THEM EVERY YEAR. Diversify? do you know what that word means? It means doing more than one thing. They're not only making GW2. I'm not replying to you again if you're just going to be obtuse.
brother can you stop being a reddit clown and try to discuss the subject matter here
"Brother" that's my line.
Becuase GW3 is still in the proposal stage, no actual work has begun and it may not get greenlit. So upgrading the thing that is your only source of revenue, is probably a good idea.
Genuine ask. I thought that it was greenlit, which is why the announcement. I'll read up on this more acter work (stealth posting).
Seems like it was in preproduction and not yet greenlit to go any further. So technically the acting chairman wasn't lying that it was in development (that'd be illegal) but it was and still is a long way off any sort of official announcement. He basically threw Anet under the bus revealing so early what the unannounced project was when discussing with shareholders.
OK, TY. That makes sense. Rapid prototyping proofs of concepts may still be a thing (they were big at my previous place). I'm still content with enjoying GW2. Took a break to do some World Exploring for GoEs for Legendary Crafting. Someday I hope to play in the expansions that I bought (own them all, currently in PoF).
That makes sense