Getting Ready For Guild Wars: The Reinstall

As I type this, I'm reinstalling Guild Wars. You might remember when last we were illmet by monitor light, I ragequit a lot of things for a lot of ill-defined reasons that I'm still not entirely sure about and, in the process, cleaned the game from my harddrive and my life.

I kept around that little Guild Wars installer that I downloaded way back when to take part in the E34E event, though. It's only 67k, after all, and I've hung on to it over the years and drives as a little reminder of good times.

But having gone through the lightning quick initial install steps, I'm now streaming the game's entire contents. It's probably a lot of stuff I'm not going to need but since it'll save me from loading every time I zone, I'm all for it. It's a little trick I picked up back in the test from someone who wanted to cache the whole game in the downtimes to save on the constant downloading and reinstalling of updates – which came fast and furious at the time, of course. Lots of games and programs have this sort of feature, it's just GW is the first one I've ever bothered with it.

The upshot is that you can force the game to update all its files by adding -image to the command line. Although you can run it from the Start Menu and “Run”, I just have a shortcut on my computer that I call “Update Game”, it points to where the game's executable is located on my drive. For example, if it was on my C drive, it'd be something like “C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe”. After that, in the shortcut's properties is added -image. Clicking on the shortcut brings up the familiar “Connecting to ANet” screen but if there are any differences between your client's version of the game and the one on the game's servers, it'll downloaded everything you need to be up to date. Pretty useful if there's a big update. Or, of course, if you're reinstalling the game and hate loading screens.

There's other command line tags, as well, like ones to start the game in windowed mode or having it display FPS and other info. You can even set it up with your password so it automatically logs you in although that's a step that's a bit risky, of course, as it lets anyone with access to your computer into your account. You can find an exhaustive list of the possibilities here at the snazzy, about two years too late, official wiki.

I'm running that update in the background right now. The game has grown over the years and what used to be less than an hour now started with something like 100k files to download. After a good hour and a half I'm up to 1.5 gigs and roughly halfway to go. This is going to take a while.

Finished now. My .dat file, the file which contains everything except the templates which I thankfully, missed deleting, stands at 3.44 gigs. Considering the game was once a lean, mean gig and lauded for it way once upon a time, that's hefty. Not exactly putting a dent in my spacious new harddrive, and light compared to an MMO like WoW, I'm sure, but it's the principle of the thing.

Firing it up for the first time. Seems as though all my settings and UI customizations have been retained, along with my templates. So, that's some tweaking I won't have to do although I probably should anyway, I was never happy with what I wound up doing with my Hero control panels.

Not really feeling the new login screen background. I miss the waters and ships thing from Factions, that was my favorite (Beyond the original campfire with your characters sitting around it who'd step back and forth as you selected them that I'm not sure ever made it through the testing phase and into release. Oh well, NDA breach, if not.). It was graceful, epic, exotic. This snowy fort thing feels dingy and claustrophobic. But, anyway, I'm at the character select scene for the first time in a long time, all my characters are right where I left them. Now, to pick one and get on with it. But that's a post for another time.