Running the game

System requirements

Official specification for Guild Wars. On January 1, 2021, official support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP will be dropped. On November 25, 2024, Guild Wars was updated to Visual Studio 2022 which removed the ability to play on Windows 2000/XP.

Component	Minimum	Recommended
Operating system	Windows Vista/7	Windows Vista/7
Processor	Intel Pentium III 800 MHz or equivalent	Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz or equivalent
RAM	512 MB	512 MB
Hard drive space	5 GB available	5 GB available
Graphics card	NVIDIA GeForce 3 or 4 MX Series (32 MB of VRAM) or ATI Radeon 8500	NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti Series (64 MB of VRAM) or ATI Radeon 9000
Sound card	16-bit	16-bit
Internet connection	56k	Broadband
Input	Keyboard and mouse CD-ROM drive (required for installation of physical editions)

Support

For help with problems running the game when your system meets the above system requirements, look at the official support site, where you can also ask for help from a support representative if you cannot find a solution to your problem on the support database.

Command line arguments

Command line arguments are startup parameters that can be used to alter the game's behavior.

Languages

Guild Wars currently supports several different languages. These include English, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Bork! Bork! Bork!. Audio language is available in English, Korean, French, German, Italian and Spanish and can be freely mixed together (e.g. Korean text and German voices).

Running the game on unsupported systems

Warning: ArenaNet & NCSoft do not support running Guild Wars on other operating systems. Use at your own risk; Support will not be able to help you.

Note: While some players have reported playing the game using sub-minimum systems, you should expect poor performance, crashes, and other issues.

Unsupported graphics cards

Intel

Intel graphics cards are not officially supported.

• However, all Intel GMA900 or higher graphics processors are believed to be able to run Guild Wars, but the graphics are sometimes buggy; third party software may be necessary to prevent crashes in certain areas.
• All 9xx and Core 2 chipsets with integrated graphics include an appropriate graphics processor, it applies to all new Intel chipsets with integrated graphics from 2005 onward and some new chipsets with integrated graphics from 2004.
• See also: Intel GMA Performance Tweaks in Guild Wars Guru archive (Describes using 3D-Analyze to tweak the Intel GMA3100 graphics card to work with GW).

Unsupported operating systems

Older versions of Windows

As of late 2019, versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 ceased to be supported. On January 1, 2021, internal testing for Windows 2000 and Windows XP will be dropped. While the game may continue to run on those systems, only Windows Vista or newer will receive official support.

Linux (any variation)

Players have reported success on Linux using Wine, CrossOver, or using a virtual machine.

Apple

Players have reported success on Apple systems based on Intel microchips, using emulators such as Wine, CrossOver, PlayOnMac; hosting a virtual machine, or dual-booting into Windows (e.g. using Boot Camp).

Players on Non-Intel Apple systems based on the newer Apple Silicon ARM64 family of SoCs first introduced with their M1 series chips in late 2020 cannot make use of the aforementioned emulators.

• This is due to to Apple's exclusion of a 32-bit instruction set for their in-house family of ARM-based processors, a minimum requirement to run the game.

Utilizing Wine, CrossOver, PlayOnMac etc. in conjunction with Rosetta 2 would enable installation and launch - however, the game would be unplayable with user reports and benchmarks yielding frame rates averaging 1 - 3 frames per second.

An optimal way to circumvent this; is to make use of a Hypervisor such as Parallels or VMware Fusion to install and run Windows within MacOS locally, without the need to dual-boot using Boot Camp or to host a traditional VM. The allotted resources for your nested Windows system, assuming your only goal is to play Guild Wars with some light browsing and VoIP; should not require more than a maximum of 4 vCPU cores, 4GB RAM and a 128GB Storage allocation. As of May 2024, VMware Fusion Pro was made free for personal use making the service available to anyone who would historically have to commit to paying an annual subscription fee.

Misc. Known issues

• Loading screen: The loading screen goes black before loading the destination.
  • If this happens, change the compatibility of gw.exe from Windows XP... to Windows Vista... (and chose your service pack).
    • Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and beyond) offers an option for Windows 7 compatibility, which will also resolve the loading screen problem.
  • This does not work for all video cards.
• Template folder locations: the template folders can be located in different directories, depending on the compatibility mode chosen. If you change the mode, the location will change. The likely locations are:
  • C:\Programs\Guild Wars\Templates (XP compatibility)
  • C:\Users\NAME\Documents\Guild Wars\Templates (Vista compatibility)
  • C:\Users\NAME\Documents\Guild Wars\Templates (Windows 7 compatibility)
• Windows desktop flash: This sometimes happens when the game loads a new zone in Windows 7 under Service Pack 3 or later.
  • Suggested approach: find your GW.exe file, right-click to chose properties, then select the Compatibility tab. Choose "Run this program in comparability mode:" for "Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)".

Mobile Drives (Mobile HDD, Flash Drives)

The game can be run off any removable disk (e.g. Mobile HDD, Flash Drives, ...) even if the game has not been previously installed. After running Guild Wars off a mobile drive first time, the game will leave shortcut in the Start Menu and make changes to the registry. The machine must otherwise meet the same requirements listed above (OS, graphics).

Alternatively, you can copy your Guild Wars program folder from one machine to the removable disk and from the removable to another machine.

Networked Hard Drives

The game can also be run from a networked location or networked hard drive, although you should expect performance issues due to lag within your Local Area Network (LAN); it takes a long time to transfer data from the multi-gigabyte gw.dat file.

Make sure that the drive is properly shared and accessible from any machine on that network. To launch, browse to the Guild Wars directory. This method also leaves shortcuts and registry changes.