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Since ArenaNet has announced it is killing the macOS client next month (Feb 2021), I am looking for an alternative solution to run it (as are many others). The current officail client is already based on WINE (though a much older version) so it would be great to see if we could get a community-supported version up-and-running.

 

I have successfully installed GW2 and can run it with PlayOnMac. It's almost playable on my iMac with some low settings.

 

PlayOnMac v4.4.1

macOS 10.14.6

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)

3.6 GHz Intel Core i9

32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

 

Are there any high-level guides to optimizing/tuning settings or wine installations for an unsupported game?

 

Ultimately it would be great to create a supported install for GW2 since there are going to be a lot of players looking for a solution.

 

Thanks for any pointers!

Edited by gumbolia

Hi!

Have you installed it manually or have you installed it through a script?

What is your current specs?

I installed it manually.

I can't seem to try different wine versions "Wine packages website is unavailable", so it's whatever the default is. I see there is a new 4.4.2, so I'll download and try that. (Edit: Looks like 4.4.1 works, but 4.4.2 won't launch at all.)

I left all settings as defaults.

Do you mean my machine specs? They are in the original post above (I edited and added them after the initial post). In case you're reading this all by email, here they are:

 

PlayOnMac v4.4.1

macOS 10.14.6

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)

3.6 GHz Intel Core i9

32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

 

When I run GW2, I can install the game, I can get in and run around and play it, but framerate is very bad even at the lowest (in game) graphical settings, the control feels very choppy, and theres a problem when mounting that you mount inside the ground...

So I was wondering if there are things outside the game - with the wine install maybe - that I can add/change/modify to get better results.

Over on the GW2 forum and in-game, all the macOS people are quite unhappy, so I thought I'd see if anything can be done to make it workable.

 

Thanks Quentin!

Small update:

As I mentioned, PlayOnMac 4.4.2 doesn't launch on my machine, and 4.4.1 won't let me use the interface to add different wine versions. So I went here, downloaded the most recent wine (PlayOnLinux-wine-6.0-upstream-darwin-amd64.tar), and  decompressed it into /Users/[account name]/Library/PlayOnMac/wine/darwin-amd64/. (Aside: I don't know why the tar files are called PlayOnLinux-* - they actually contain macOS dylibs.)

WINE 6.0 then shows up as an option in PlayOnMac.

Using WINE 6.0 seems to help, but performance is still not great (i.e. I think it might be fine for dailies, but any metas or WvW probably not). Still have the mount-in-the-ground problem, though maybe not as frequently.

Still looking for other ways to improve it - wine settings to tweak or libraries to install?

Also note that I'm not having stability issues - it has not crashed once - so this is good!

Another followup...

I followed this and it seems to be working better for me so far:

Running Guild Wars 2 On macOS Using Wine

Perhaps a easier way to install this game: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/guild-wars-2

Edited by Dadu042