The future of Guild Wars and our hard drive space

My brother recently pointed out a simple observation about Guild Wars. We’ve both been playing for roughly 6-7 months and we’ve witnessed our Guild Wars directory grow from 1GB to a little over 2GB after the Factions Preview Event.

I would imagine that when we both get Chapter 2, the amount of space Guild Wars will consume would be around 3GB or more. Not to mention all the new streaming content we might receive in the future.

Now, if we put the release of 2 new campaigns a year into consideration. For the dedicated GW fans that plan to purchase each and every one, our GW folder will begin to grow pretty large through out the years to come.

We’ve even contacted NCSoft support staff to ask what their outlook on this might be. But they replied with the following excerpt:

Which really doesn’t help, considering that each chapter is standalone, and the requirement will only reflect that of the chapter in question.

So, we were wondering what the rest of you think? Will this be an issue for some of you?

For us personally, I’m not worried because I still have about 10GB worth left on the GW installed hard drive. But for my brother who plays on a laptop. He’s edging on 3GB left. And who knows how long that will last. hehe

one important thing to remember.

as new chapters are released only new artwork (scenery,character animations,etc) will be added.

along with missions/quests

as more and more of these are already on your hard drive they will have to add less and less *unique* new material.

i forsee the new content megabytes dropping in the future

I don't see what the problem is, most up to date computers have 40+ gig hard drives.

I have 2 40gig hard drives, 1 for my OS + Tools/Programing/Games etc.. and still have 23gigs free. My other is for Music/Backup/Pictures/Babes lol/Programming/etc..

if the Gw.dat file ever gets over 5gigs i'll be surprised, but big hard drives aren't too expensive anymore.
80 gig IDE ATA133 Hard drives on Newegg

I think I'm set for another chapter or two.



Laptop users could always replace their existing drive with a high-capcity one or use an external drive + FireWire interface if they're not picky about having to be totally unchained.

If you and your brother only have about 10g or 3g left on your hard drives, then it's time for an upgrade to larger drives. Your hard drive performance starts to decline after you reach the half way mark of drive capacity.

I'm set for quite a long time with my 300g.

600+ gigs here, I'm OK.

250gigs + 80gigs here (on each pc)

I'll only be worried if it surpasses the Oblivion level of around 4.5gbs.

Not that concerned with GW, as games go, GW is not that bad. Expect 2-3 gb w/ factions to be honest.

A lot of game take up a ton of space. FFXI was up to 4-5gb when I stopped. UT2004 can grow greatly if it plays on-line or add the "packs" to the game.

As capacity increase on hard drive more software assume you have more room (invaild assumption or not). Looks at how much space the OS takes with each version of windows.

Yep. World Of Warcraft is currently running in the neighborhood of about 4.93GBs.

Honestly, Guild Wars currently is a lightweight on space.

I'm not really bothered about it. I have about 100GB spare on my main drive and with the price of HDD's dropping all the time buying a new 250GB+ drive in the future is not going to break the bank.

3-5GB's is nothing really. Hell, my FS2004 folder is a little over 12GB's!

I still have alot of HD space available, but if I ever run out i'm going to uninstall the games I don't play much anymore, like Fable TLC.

Looks like space consumption isn't an issue here for any of you so far. hehe. We're not worried ourselves, we just wanted to see what you guys/gals thought.


When I say 10GB and 3GB I'm specially referring to the partition we have GW installed on (default system drive in Program Files). Our hard drive overall have way more than we need.

Doesn't bother me at all. I've got 53 GB of harddrive space on my main machine and a miniature NAS on my home network with 240 GB free

Didn't someone ask this exact same question last week? Yeah they did cause I replied in it.

Anyway, as I said in that thread a lot of new games use 4 GB+ for starters, thats without any mods etc you might install down the line. My HL2 install for example is over 5 GB and that's only with HL/HL2/CSS installed. My point, by today's standards Guild Wars uses very little hdd space and by the time it is up to what you are thinking our average hard disk size will have probably doubled.

If you are worried about space on a particular partition, why not delete/expand the partitions?

My steam file is ~12gb... if GW ever gets that big, and I know my way around all of the maps, I think its time I move on

HHD are cheap today. I have 1 TB (1000Gs) over 4 HHD on one PC. My other has two 120 and 160. So, I have enought I think?