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Guild Wars has received an unexpected rollout for a graphics update that adds windowed fullscreen support, 8x MSAA anti-aliasing, doubling the max draw distance, and more.
Although the graphics updates were available through command line options, the new update makes a new “Advanced” option appear that will activate all these improvements at once.
Here’s the full patch list:
- Increased the maximum number of active minipets allowed in outposts.
- Kamadan and other towns have a higher player capacity.
Graphics improvements
- Added windowed Fullscreen support.
- Added a new 8X MSAA anti-aliasing option.
- The “Use best texture filtering” option will now take advantage of 16x Anisotropic filtering.
- A new “Advanced” option checkbox has been added to the Graphics options panel. This will replace the “-lodfull” command line option that was added recently.
- Model LODs will always use the highest available LOD (Level Of Detail), regardless of distance, including the disabling of “imposter” models.
- The max draw distance will be doubled. Ground cover vegetation draw distance will be pushed out even further.
- Terrain LODs will almost always draw in highest.
- Note: Full changes won’t take effect until changing maps.
Chat
- A new option has been added to suppress Whisper messages from players that don’t meet the following criteria:
- Party member, friend, active trade partner, or recent party/team member.
- You may now /report directly in the whisper chat window without needing to type the character name.
- Reporting players is still restricted to the same district that you’re in.
- Custom chat filters are now possible. To use this feature, you must create a ChatFilter.ini file. The file will be placed in the “C:\Users\%username%\Documents\Guild Wars” folder. The file layout is as follows:
[ChatFilter] userFilter1=Censor userFilter2=Suppress
Friends list
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The maximum number of friends and ignored players has been doubled to 100 and 20 respectively.
Party search
- Added a Report button to the party search dialog
Bug fixes
- Fixed an issue where your character’s LOD drops when zooming out the camera.
- Fixed an issue where the game client becomes unresponsive when it gets minimized or sent to the background.
Here’s a comparison video that shows the changes in action [Thanks, WoodenPotatoes on Youtube!]:
According to DrStephenCW, one of the programmers at ArenaNet, the changes started when the datacenter at Frankfurt “blew up”, and the servers had to be moved to the US instead. After moving the servers back and paying attention to the Guild Wars subreddit, he noticed “a lot of cruft” and fixed what he could. Bill, another programmer, spent around 14 hours mostly after hours and worked on the coordinate testing and QA over two days, and worked out the improvements. So the improvements were actually a passion project from several of the employees.
Guild Wars is available for PC.
