Cataclysm: New Launcher!

One of the biggest improvements for Cataclyms in my opinion is the new Launcher blizzard introcudes. For people like me with slow connections it is a very good way to get back into the game as soon as possible, even while downloading a patch. With my awesome 70kb/s download here (don’t laugh) I had major concerns about this feature at first, but it turns out to be a very nice change.

 

How it works!

Basically there are 3 stages for the downloader.

• „Red“ stage: You cannot play, because essential game files have not been downloaded, yet.
• „Yellow“ stage: All essential files have been downloaded, a large amount of additional data is still missing, but you do not mind issues you can start to play!
• „Green“ stage: most of the content has been downloaded, there might still be some minor issues.

An Example

When downloading the Beta Client (~16 GB). Usually this would have meant 1-2 days wait until the client was available to me, but the new launcher allowed me to go into the game after only 600 MB download. This is just fabulous. I happened to have logged out in Hillsbrad foothills, not the major content area they’d expect us to be. Here is what happened!

As you can see upon logging in, nothing of the area was loaded, but I stood still for like 30-40 seconds and slowly the area around me appeared. The blue walls you can see are Areas you should not cross, as the content hasn’t been loaded, yet.

The Dalaran area seemed to have been mostly downloaded and was ready a few seconds after I hearthstoned, it looked like this with a slight blue wall towards the fishing daily, but it worked just fine.

Then I headed on to Stormwind. After a few seconds of a pretty „blank“ surrounding the new launcher had all data for stormwind ready.

I suppose if you are questing or stay in one area, like Hyjal, Vashj’ir it won’t be an issue at all to download the game while playing. For me it received a thumbs up!

Ofc it may cause issues for people who have a strict and low traffic limit on their internet. While having p2p enabled there is surplus data sent to other wow clients which of course adds to your limit. On the other hand the same data would have been trnasmitted anyhow while doing a normal download, unless you deactivate p2p.

I absolutely love the new Loader at least.