The GW2 engine is at the end of the road. Secrets of the Obscure shined a massive magnifying glass on it.
I'm standing at Bastion of the Natural in Amnytas. Graphics on 1440p every detail setting as high as it goes. I'm getting 90fps. My system is an i9 13900k and RTX 4090. There are no other players around me. Just me standing alone getting 90fps with this system.
I've been playing Throne & Liberty on KR servers for the last 3 weeks. I have it on 1440p everything ultra. I get mostly 200+fps depending on the content. It's the best looking MMO I've ever seen. It has better graphics than most single player games I've ever played. And it's an actual true open world MMO unlike GW2. It doesn't have instanced maps to mask it's performance issues.
My dilemma is, I like GW2 gameplay more than T&L. If I could swap T&L's engine with GW2's content system it would be my perfect MMO. GW2 has never truly felt like an MMO to me for it's lack of a persistent open world. Map shards are the antithesis of an MMO in my eyes. If I can be standing in the world and click log out, log back in and be on a different instance of the same map with different events and people around me, that's a faux MMO in my opinion. Not to mention the fact that maps have a player limit and can actually be full. That's a lot of smoke and mirrors to hide performance problems.
They've squeezed every last drop out of this modified GW1 engine. Secrets of the Obscure proves that. The new zone's performance is abysmal even on top tier systems. Make a new game. Use UE4 or 5.