How big is GW 2 currently? (Gamefile size)

Sephiroso

Looking to try out GW2 with a friend and am curious how big it is. GW2's support page says it recommends 50gb hdd space but i find that ridiculously high...is that really close to the amount of space GW2 takes up? Not even WoW took up more than like 45gb and that's had many more expansions/content added to it than GW2.

someforumguy

My GW2 folder size is 36.4GB atm. But during updates and installing, it probably needs more then that to move files around. This is normal for all big games. As for the size, GW2 has much higher resolution textures then WoW.

jpnole

I am just curious why the game size would be a consideration in 2018? Most anyone has a 1TB HDD and many have SSDs of at least 512GB or more. You can always uninstall games you are not currently playing. For example, I uninstall any game I haven't touched in 90 days. 

Kyleran

You do realize some people on these forums claim to play a "rotation" of 10 to 12 games at a time.

Such a player could have space issues, especially on a smaller SSD drive.

Sephiroso

Exactly as Kyleran said. I'm not stacked with money so i don't have a 1tb SSD nor even a 512GB. I'm rocking a 64gb and 256gb ssd. Space is very limited after taking into account OS space. That's only room for like 4 games max with growing space needs with games. WoW is like 50, So is BDO.

Phry

Sephiroso said:

Exactly as Kyleran said. I'm not stacked with money so i don't have a 1tb SSD nor even a 512GB. I'm rocking a 64gb and 256gb ssd. Space is very limited after taking into account OS space. That's only room for like 4 games max with growing space needs with games. WoW is like 50, So is BDO.

You really need the extra space tbh, i would recommend bunging a 2tb HD in there as a minimum, particularly as game installs are only likely to increase in size, its entirely possible that in the next few years even that installations will increase to something approaching, if not exceeding 100 gb.

Sephiroso

I have a 2 tb hd but i was only talking about games and i never put games on my hdd unless its just trying out it out a little bit or i have no other choice due to space constraints.

Hmm or it's a game that i know doesn't need to load very often or much. Like if i'm playing an idle game or somethin like that.

Vrika

Sephiroso said:

Exactly as Kyleran said. I'm not stacked with money so i don't have a 1tb SSD nor even a 512GB. I'm rocking a 64gb and 256gb ssd. Space is very limited after taking into account OS space. That's only room for like 4 games max with growing space needs with games. WoW is like 50, So is BDO.

You can get 2TB HDD at $50.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/p8tCmG/hitachi-internal-hard-drive-hua723020ala640

EDIT: I didn't see the post above this one when I was making this post. These forums should have some kind of warning that the thread's been updated when posting.

Sephiroso

Ahaha s'all good, happens to me all the time

crankked

A normal HDD isn't 'that' slow when loading.  Have we become so impatient in society that we can't play games on a standard HDD because of loading times?

Sephiroso

I don't know about "we as a society" but considering the amount of time that i game, those seconds add up. And honestly it really depends on the type of game you're playing. Once you get used to it, it's just really hard to go back.

rertez

Sephiroso said:

I don't know about "we as a society" but considering the amount of time that i game, those seconds add up. And honestly it really depends on the type of game you're playing. Once you get used to it, it's just really hard to go back.

If you have an Intel motherboard with a SATA controller that has RAID support I'd highly recommend you to use IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) to cache your hard disk drive's content. That way you could install a lot of games on your hard disk storage without the hassle of constantly managing your limited SSD capacity. Your 64 GB SSD could do miracles as a cache drive assigned to your 2 TB hard drive.

All you have to do is install IRST, remove all partitions from your 64GB SSD, set your SSD's SATA controller port to RAID mode in BIOS, then assign your empty SSD to your hard drive as a cache drive in the IRST client and reboot. That way the IRST driver would automatically cache everything you use from the HDD to the SSD and all your recent files would load directly from the SSD.

Sephiroso

Oh wow, is there any downsides to doing any of that? It sounds pretty awesome and i would be free from the managing and moving around of games sometimes or just be free to download a few more i've had my eye on

Vrika

Sephiroso said:

Oh wow, is there any downsides to doing any of that? It sounds pretty awesome and i would be free from the managing and moving around of games sometimes or just be free to download a few more i've had my eye on

There are no real downsides, but the cache only speeds up loading times if it has predicted what data you're going to load and cached it before you start loading. So with 2 TB hard disk and 64 GB cache, you'd have 3.2% of your hard disk's data cached for faster loading while the rest would load at that hard disk's normal speed.

It's faster than having 2 TB hard disk without cache, but it's slower than having stuff installed on SSD.