ArenaNet is in the middle of a number of technical changes and modernization efforts in Guild Wars 2. This means that, recently, access to the game is only available on systems that can run DirectX 11. It also applies to the new Chromium Embedded Framework upgrade, which the team has shared a new devblog on today.
They explain a few important details, especially for the less techy among us and go into the details for this move. So what is the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) anyway? It is a system that will run a web browser inside the game. CEF is also behind things like the Battle.net and Epic Games launchers and Steam.
The system that Guild Wars 2 launched with over a decade ago is called CoherentUI. This has been in use for some UI and web browsing systems. Thus, CoherentUI is getting replaced for a number of reasons:
“CoherentUI is a simpler library to update, and we chose it next for a couple of reasons:
- CoherentUI doesn’t support emerging security standards. Our third-party payment processing partners have indicated this will be an issue in the future. This is a serious risk impacting our ability to fund future development of the game.
- CoherentUI is no longer supported by its vendor. We can’t improve its performance or fix its bugs ourselves. This ultimately manifests as unresolvable Trading Post bugs and performance issues.
- CoherentUI is old. It has limited support for modern programming, formatting, and language standards, and it is not supported by modern tools that would help us develop for it faster.”
The team is working to replace the old system transparently, especially after a previous update where everything was enabled and quickly rolled back after people were unable to play. After considering the possibility of rolling it out slowly, they determined they can't do that based on several other considerations, and they explain why a slow rollout or an opt-in system would not work this time. Last week, the CEF update release on April 18th and they’re keeping an eye on how things are going.
Read the full blog for details on these changes at Guild Wars 2.
