Installation-Not responding-Game still works

hey, i went over to my friends house to play guild wars. he had the installation disk. at like 95% done it just froze up. so i tried playing the game and it worked! but only 780mb was installed...wen the total was 1,220mb for the game when it was fully installed....thats funny. why would it work when only 3/4 of the game was installed?

If some of the assets needed by Guild Wars are missing from the gw.dat file the game will automatically download them from Anet's servers as needed. This is also how the game keeps itself updated.

You can actually start the game with only the Guild Wars executable on your computer, though it's likely to take quite a while before you'll even see the game's menu and the loading times are going to be nasty for a while, depending on your Internet connection's speed and server load.

If you want to finish "installing" via the Internet to avoid downloading stuff when entering new areas the game can be forced to download all the game content at once by running it with the command line argument "-image" (no quotes). The full gw.dat file's about 3.6 GB in size.

oh. i had no idea about that...so it downloads stuff for it ingame?

Yes - you'll notice it every time there's an update. Especially a big one, like Wintersday for example. Look for a little yellow lightning bolt symbol on your ping circle - that's the telltale that gw is downloading content in the background.