Guild Wars 2 bandwidth usage tested

Guild Wars 2 has been out for over two weeks now, and millions of MMO enthusiasts the world over have spent the time exploring the fantasy world of Tyria; myself included.

Guild Wars 2 is easily the most hyped MMO of 2012, and unlike countless games from the genre that came before it, it is just about living up to the lofty expectations everyone had for it. Don’t believe me? Check out it’s Metacritic score, which is currently sitting on 92/100. Out of 28 Metacritic reviews, all have been “Positive. Its User Score is a little lower, sitting on 8.2/10.

This makes it the most critically successful MMORPG we’ve seen since World of Warcraft, and to sweeten the deal, it does not carry any subscription fees. I’ve absolutely loved it so far, and MyGaming will be publishing my review very shortly.

In the meantime, I thought I would take a look at the game’s bandwidth consumption. The issue of high internet prices in South Africa seems to be becoming less severe each year, but bandwidth consumption in online games is still a consideration for many gamers.

Using Bandwidth Monitor, I conducted a series of tests to see just how much data Guild Wars 2 uses. All non-essential applications were shut down prior to each testing phases to ensure that only Guild Wars 2 was sucking up my ADSL pipe’s bandwidth. I conducted 6 test sessions, each comprising of 1 hour’s worth of mixed gameplay. These were my results:

Session 1: 11.7MB download, 4.66MB upload: Total 16.36MB
Session 2: 9.44 MB download, 3.87 upload: Total 13.31MB
Session 3: 12.49 MB download, 4.32 upload: Total 16.81 MB
Session 4: 14.54 MB download, 5.54 upload: Total 20.08 MB
Session 5: 11.5 download, 4.22 upload: Total Total 15.72 MB
Session 6: 12.65 download, 4.77 upload: Total 17.42 MB

Over six hours, the average total data usage per hour turned out to be 16.6 MB per hour.

So how does Guild Wars 2 compare to other online games? Well in a test I did with Battlefield 3 back in 2011, I found the shooter used on average around 35MB of data per hour.

More recently, I ran the same test on Diablo III, and discovered that Blizzard’s RPG uses around 40MB of data every hour.

So how do we feel about Guild Wars 2’s bandwidth consumption? Well, to be frank, it’s low, and marks yet another triumph for ArenaNet.

At under 18MB per hour of gameplay, you can get around 57 hours of gameplay out of 1GB of data, making Guild Wars 2 affordable to play, no matter what you are connecting to the internet with.