This is a little bit curious. The Guild Wars 2 beta client, which, for all intents and purposes is a useless chunk of gigabytage on your hard drive until the end of August rolls around, has just updated, with almost 10,000 files being changed or added.
Which, naturally, means that I’m going to have to do a little speculation. Because that’s what client updates are good for. You root around in the files and see what you can see.
This was all spotted by Reddit, tireless vigilants that they are, and as well as supersampling and an FPS counter being added in the options, a few maps have been updated, namely Raid of the Capricorn and Legacy of the Foefire, both PvP arenas, and Sorror’s Ambrace, a PvE area. There’s also an unknown area that might be the Hall of Memories, or a part of Orr.
The hopefuls among you might think that this means another stress test ahead of launch, and while that could happen, I think it’s fairly unlikely; they went to a lot of effort to make the final BWE properly epic, and to have one little hurrah before launch might detract from that event.
It’s more likely that they’re just going to be rolling out updates as they go, so that those who want to keep up to date can do so, as when release rolls around they won’t then have to download gigabytes of data, and instead get straight to the business of playing. It should also reduce some of the load on their servers as everyone rushes to download it.
You’ve still got three weeks to go, though, before you can rush out into the world and get some Guild Wars 2 goodness. Three long weeks.