3rd November 2004, 12:54 PM
Nope. It'd be a bit unrealistic to have the whole game streamable and have it be multi-gig, so they had to limit it... for the second beta only in a thread of install sizes I saw between 300 and 900 MB depending on how thurough you were in your explorations. My 535MB includes the first test too, so I obviously had a lot more to go...
It's like the graphics. The minimum requirements are quite mild -- p3 800, 256mb ram, 32mb video card... on my computer not only does it look great (as you can see) but I can run it at 1024x768 with all graphics options except Full Screen Anti-Aliasing on at a pretty good framerate!
If you want an example of where it is an issue, this summer I played the open beta of the MMORPG Saga of Ryzom. It was a 1GB file download that installed to a 4GB game install... only a mediocre game too, IMO... and on performance and lag issues it was miles behind Guild Wars. It looked great, but with those framerates and amounts of lag, that didn't matter much...
It's like the graphics. The minimum requirements are quite mild -- p3 800, 256mb ram, 32mb video card... on my computer not only does it look great (as you can see) but I can run it at 1024x768 with all graphics options except Full Screen Anti-Aliasing on at a pretty good framerate!
If you want an example of where it is an issue, this summer I played the open beta of the MMORPG Saga of Ryzom. It was a 1GB file download that installed to a 4GB game install... only a mediocre game too, IMO... and on performance and lag issues it was miles behind Guild Wars. It looked great, but with those framerates and amounts of lag, that didn't matter much...