GW2 Running From Flashdrive Is Playable

by General Yoghurt Sat Oct 20, 2012 5:23 pm

Back when I played another popular MMO, I remember moving the entire 25GB+ folder to an external hard drive and playing it from other computers around the house without reinstalling the game. After coming across this Reddit posting today by Neurogasm I decided to give it another go, this time with Guild Wars 2.

In the posting, Neuro reported that while the game was generally playable, he had these few comments overall:

• The game did take a minute to load in heavily populated areas.

• The auction house worked fine.

• Crafting took some slowing down (I experienced delays while clicking the qty arrows) so I accidentally crafted more items than I wanted at times.

• The mystic forge worked fine.

• Combat was ok but I was only able to really do heart tasks and not take part in any large group activities.

• I suspect that the video card, if upgraded, would boost the performance off of the flash drive but that will never happen.

I tried my hand at running the game from a flash drive with a USB 3.0 connection and got significantly better results. One thing I noticed was that combat was the slowest process, but I didn’t die at all. It was just a few steps below running the game normally. While I did have a good time with my 3.0 connection, I would suggest installing the game properly whenever possible.