Noob learning curve

[Mephisto_Helix]

Greetings

I'm getting adsl for the first time and obviously wanna play GW (rpg's are my thing). The problem is, I've never played online before so have no idea about the setting up part. Is it just a client that you install and it does all the work or is it more of a manual setup? A bit of info for this noobiest of noobs would be most appreciated

Cheers.

 

[flarkit]

For GW, you need to buy one of the chapters:

- Prophecies (the first, original)
- Factions (an eastern/oriental theme)
- Nightfall (an african theme)
- Eye of the North (expansion-only, a nordic, icy theme)

Factions and Prophecies are available as a combo-pack. However, I suggest jumping in at NF, then moving to EotN, to be jacked-up for Guildwars2.

Once you've bought a chapter, you install the client and register your account. Then you can login and start playing. The client will do an initial download (I guess around 1Gb?).

Alternatively you could either first run an image download to grab all the server's content, or copy someone else's DAT file (mine's close to 5Gb, but that's for all for 4 chapters). I'd hazard a guess that 1 chapter has around 500Mb - 1Gb's worth of data. The game does trickle that data whilst you're playing too, but I strongly suggest saving your cap and copying someone else's.

Where are you located?

 

[Tommygun]

Damn....thats a lot of data, i had no idea.

 

[PCTECH]

Damn....thats a lot of data, i had no idea.

LOL not really! He said it was for all the GW games - just over a GB for each game. That's not really a heap of data and it doesn't all have to be downloaded in one go either. I just started playing GW (I have the Prophecies and Factions double pack) and I don't think I've even downloaded a GB yet and I've played both games for around 6 hours each.

Mind you I have a 10GB cap so I'm not really that paranoid about my bandwidth either. If I give up playing BF2 I could probably drop that to around 5GB/month but I don't see myself doing that just yet.

 

[Mephisto_Helix]

Hey thanks for the info. I had nightmares about having all this technical stuff to go through just to play a game. BTW, I'm in Dbn and know no one into gaming so the chances that I'll get the DAT file are slim .... just have to download as it comes (will have a 5 or 10 Gb cap so no biggie).

"Factions and Prophecies are available as a combo-pack. However, I suggest jumping in at NF, then moving to EotN, to be jacked-up for Guildwars2."

... I'm gonna be playing about 3-5 hours a day and I wanna get all the GW goodness that I can get, so I'll start at the beginning

Once again, many thanks and I'll see you guys in there soon.

 

[lilDeath]

It's very simple actually.
1/ You buy a chapter / campaign. Either separately, in a bundle or whatever special they may have.
2/ Install the game, it will ask you to create an account or use an account that already exists.
3/ When this is done, you're good to go. Just login and start playing.

If you do not have the CD's, or bought the game online, via www.plaync.com for instance, you can download the Download Client, which will install and download a core amount of files (8000 files or so) which gets to about 750MB on the disk, less when downloading, due to decompression on disk.

You can start playing the game from here, and also either use an existing login or create a login.

There will still be downloads happening in the background, but you can play the game. This is GW's streaming technology at work.
As you play the game and go through the towns / outposts / maps files you may need will be downloaded. These can be from 500-1500 files, depending what area it is.
It is not big though, from 5mb-20mb or so.

Or, if you want everything in one big bang, you can download all the GW files at once, by using the -image switch after gw.exe, i.e. "gw.exe -image"

This is a lot of files though, in the region of 88,000 files and more, after doing the core download. This total of files amounts to about 1.5GB-2GB of data, which will be decompressed on your disk, so eventually after completing everything, your gw.dat file can be in the region of 3.7GB

(I know the totals, cause I had to reinstall on a new laptop yesterday and am now busy doing the -image process. I have all 3 campaigns and the expansion)