Discontinuing support for older versions of Windows

Those are the minimum requirements, not recommended. Just meeting the minimum requirements gives a person many limitations that will force most graphic settings to be on the lowest. Obviously they are probably being a bit generous because of how populated the cities will be. I assume older machines will explode on launch day.

I honestly expected the minimum GPU spec to be an Ati radeon hd 24xx series. I used to run games on an x1600 that had min spec of x1950, albeit at 800x600 and min settings, lol...

How about Windows 3.1? Does this mean you still support that? Just kidding.

I am surprised the game is still supported in old Windows XP when Windows 8 is going to be out soon. I hope GW2 (and maybe even GW1?) would continue to run well in Windows 8.

You guys can download a free beta copy of Windows 8 and test GW2 on it before releasing. Helps to know if there will be any compatibility issues before release.

You can even make a bootable thumb drive for your windows 8 installation from the preview bits.

Actually I've been able to run it perfectly fine with Windows 7...

i made that 3.1 joke first

and i hope they keep supporting XP, as thats the only windows which runs fine for me with anything
tried win vista and 7, and those suck

i've seen so many bad things with those 2, i got back to XP and everything was going very good again

plz Anet, keep supporting XP even after microsoft doesnt anymore (they said for years they would stop it, lol), cuz thats the most balanced windows for these times

tbh, imo 7 and vista (and 8 as i've seen it), are having too many extra's instead of just having everything required to do extra stuff yourself, if you want to

Come on, XP is not so old, like half of the population still uses it and every program still supports it...

Wow. People still have Windows 95? WHAT? But... I was a kid when I used it.. HOW. WHAT.

The number of accounts is not the same as the number of players. I have 4 accounts (3 for storage, as way way way back we didn't have the option of buying character slots), and I know there are players with many more accounts than I have.

I'm glad they are still supporting xp though, as some of my old computers still run that.

Great, time to upgrade from 95. Guess I'll have to take 'ol faithful round the back of the farm.

And this is why XP is still supported, it's actually still a good OS. And it boots in just seconds on a newer computer with SSD. Even Guild Wars 2 will still have XP support Personally I use 7 myself, don't see any needs to upgrade to 8 yet.

It is over 10 years old now....

but but.....
How on earth am I gonna play both my favourite games?? Guildwars and Hover!

But on the other side of realism, I totally understand why they withdraw the support. This doesn't mean however it will stop working instantly on that date. It means when they make new builds or updates they won't test it on a windows 95 pc if it works. So a good change that if you still living underneath a rock in bikinibottom you can still play GW.

Time to opgrade my good old 486 with DOS....j/K, I think this is a good idea.
Actually Im old enough to remember when I bought my 486, and it did cost like 3x my current PC with win7.

guess I wont get to play gw on my old laptop (win95)...still runs, has 2gigs of space (of which only...like 140 megs is free )....but it still boots (guess I wouldnt even be able to upload the program since gw is what 4? 5? gigs now---)...ah, guess it can continue to be my keyboard rest .....

(wonder why the date of june 14th----)

On anything but Ultimate?

Virtual PC requires Win 7 Ultimate which makes it a lot more expensive then running a separate box with windows 98 - or multi-booting...

I am hoping with you, until now GW's been a shining example of decency, but the timing of this change, so close to the release of GW 2 can hardly be a coincidence.


What specs, where did you find them?

https://buy.guildwars2.com/

scroll down to the bottom and you will see :minimum system requirements:

Windows® XP Service Pack 2 or better
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 or better
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA Ge force 7800, ATI Radeon x1800, Intel HD 3000 (256 mg of video ram and shader model 3.0 or better)
25 gigs HDD space available
mouse, keyboard, boardband internet

(sorry if I mistyped--early am and blurry vision will do that).

Yeah, the specs are low (except for the hard drive space - yeesh! Gonna take forever to download at 500KB/s :/), but if you're anywhere near that, don't expect to get even 20fps at the lowest settings... Hell, I bet my 3GHz Athlon 64 X2, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and 512MB [stupid me for saving $10... :/] Radeon HD5670 will only be able to just get 20fps with the lowest settings, but only on a lower resolution than my normal 1280x800 screen or 1280x720 window.

I'm wondering if they'll distribute some kind of DVDs so that we can install the bulk of the game without having to download too much. Or perhaps a torrent of GW2's .dat?

I can't see them having servers capable of providing acceptable download speeds for the hordes who are likely to want to play GW2.

I imagine the game data will be on your hard-disk in uncompressed form, while during download it is compressed, so you'd be looking at a lot less data to download then is stored. The full 25 GB might also be what's needed to store all textures and gfx for all resolutions and settings while in practice you'd only use (and store and download) for one setting.

x1800 or GF7800 are both ANCIENT cards. Diablo 3 has much higher requirements and on max details those games don't differ in quality that much.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if you could run Windows 7 fluidly on those GPUs.