Well, I was really looking forward to playing the Guild Wars 2 beta today after I came home from work, only it turns out that the game is almost completely broken. Also it wasn't just broken for me, but for a lot of people as it turns out.
Where to start...
First thing, despite having only let a limited number of people pre-purchase the game as to prevent the beta servers from filling up...they were filled up anyways. It took me over an hour to finally log into the game, and even when I did manage to log in, the game constantly had me logged off every time I opened up certain menus. It makes me wonder how well the game servers are going to work on launch, since this time there was 'supposed' to be enough space for everybody. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, but for the most part with all the traffic these servers were getting, it really bogged down the availability of the game. Once you were logged in then you were good, but if you had to re-open your game once or twice, then good luck getting back in.
Secondly, the game is pretty much broken performance-wise for anyone with modern hardware or high end PC's. I don't know how a problem like this could be overlooked even for a beta, especially when beta testing is meant to look for bugs and elements of the game to be improved upon. It makes it really hard to bug test a game when the majority of your customers can't even properly play the game. To sum up the problem here, the game pretty much switches it's priority for modern setups where it only runs off the CPU and not your video card. While I was in the game I monitored my GPU usage and it never went above 40% while also staying at idle temperatures the entire time. The end result was me and everyone else only getting about 15-25 fps on average, which is way beyond the playable range for any game out there, modern or old titles. Also changing the graphical options had little to no effect at all, which confirms what the developers have been saying that the game is primarily CPU bound at this point in time. It leads me to believe that there's something wrong with the software that the game is implementing in order to access your GPU's power, especially with all modern graphics cards like mine that are getting the exact same bad performance.
Now I knew beforehand that the game wasn't 'optimized' perfectly, but having a constant frame rate of below 20 is beyond a simple optimization fix to me. To me, that indicates that a game is simply broken if I can not achieve anywhere near 60 fps even by lowering settings. Especially on a rig like mine, if the game is unplayable and cannot even achieve 30 fps then it's broken.
It's really interesting to note how in all the press conference videos we saw of this game, leading to up to it's pre-purchase, not a single one of those videos I saw showed any kind of performance issues like the ones this beta is facing. After all those interviews not a single issues surrounding it's performance was addressed, and it makes me wonder how it was even possible that the game ran that well in those videos based on the feedback I'm reading from this beta. There are errors left and right, yet none of them are as numerous as the amount of people who can't play the game because of such low performance.
It's kind of sad that this whole weekend was hyped up a ton, only to be a massive failure that was unplayable by half of it's customers. I'm really hoping that they extend this beta once all the problems are fixed. I know the game won't be released for a while, but it's really concerning to see them release a 'playable' beta version of the game that is in fact no where near playable for the majority of people.
So I hate to say it, but there won't be any Guild Wars 2 videos this weekend like I planned. Maybe the next time there's a beta...
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