Guild Wars Reforged

Play ArenaNet's official Guild Wars Reforged client natively on your Mac — no Windows install, Wine, or compatibility layer to configure.

Download · Install guide · Verify a release · Discord · Report a bug · Support development

This is an independent interoperability project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by ArenaNet or NCSoft, and it ships no game binaries — the app downloads ArenaNet's official WebAssembly client and game data directly from ArenaNet, verifies it, and hosts it in a sandboxed Chromium process.

You need: an Apple Silicon Mac, and a Guild Wars account. This app does not create accounts or bypass the login — if you don't own the game yet, buy it from the official store.

1. Download the latest .dmg release and open it.
2. Move Guild Wars Reforged.app into the Applications folder.
3. Open the app from Applications.

Releases are signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Every release also includes SHA-256 checksums, an SPDX SBOM, and GitHub build attestations; see Verify a release.

Releases are numbered by date — 2026.7.1 is a July 2026 build — which says how recent a release is and nothing about which game client build it certifies: Release numbering.

On first launch the app asks how you want game data downloaded, and waits for your choice. The two modes are:

You can switch modes later in Settings → Game Data, pause and resume a full download, or start playing mid-download with Play Now Instead.

• No telemetry is ever uploaded. Diagnostics are written locally and only leave your machine if you attach a .gwdiag file to a bug report yourself.
• Passwords, account identifiers, cookies, request bodies, and game packet payloads are never recorded.
• Guild Wars' own Remember Password stores one opaque item in Apple's Data Protection Keychain in provisioned Release, Preview, and signed Development builds. Each channel is isolated. Source and ad-hoc builds keep saved login only in memory for that process.
• Updates check on a declared schedule, or not at all. The app checks GitHub at launch and about every six hours while it stays open — a default declared at first run that one checkbox turns off. Switched off, it asks GitHub only when you press Check for Updates. A downloaded update is offered as a restart and otherwise installs on the next restart. See Updates.

Report security-sensitive findings privately — see SECURITY.md.

Requirements: macOS on Apple Silicon · Node.js 22.19+ · pnpm 11 · Rust (via rustup)

corepack enable
pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm dev

Rust is a build prerequisite, not an optional extra: every entry point runs pnpm build, which compiles src/companion-kernel/lib.rs to WebAssembly with rustc. rust-toolchain.toml pins the compiler version, the components the build needs, and the wasm32-unknown-unknown target, so rustup installs them on the first build. Continuous integration installs that same pin rather than using the runner image's own toolchain.

The first online run fetches the small JSPI client artifacts.

Ordinary pnpm dev deliberately forgets saved login when the process exits. For persistent developer-only login, register the .dev App ID, install its Apple Development identity, keep its device-authorized profile outside this repository, then run:

export APPLE_DEVELOPMENT_PROFILE=/absolute/path/gwonmac-dev.provisionprofile
export APPLE_DEVELOPMENT_IDENTITY=0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF01234567
pnpm dev:signed

Use the 40-character identity fingerprint printed by security find-identity -v -p codesigning. The Dev app shares settings, templates, diagnostics, and game downloads with Release, but not credentials. Because those channels intentionally share one profile, quit Release or Preview before starting a signed Dev session.

On a clean macOS test account with no saved Dev login, pnpm test:signed-dev packages the same provisioned app and proves both ArenaNet and Steam secrets survive relaunch, moving the app, and a replacement signature. It refuses to overwrite an existing Dev login.

pnpm test:electron launches a real macOS application process, so it needs permission to open GUI applications. Those launches run in the background and do not take keyboard focus. The networked smoke test is opt-in:

pnpm build && GW_LIVE_SMOKE=1 pnpm test:electron

This is a pnpm workspace: the Electron app lives at the root, the download site under apps/.

src/shared/contracts.ts is the single source of truth for IPC channels, settings, and every project link — the launcher and website both import it.

Releases are cut from main by manual dispatch of the macOS workflow. The approval-gated workflow signs with Developer ID, notarizes and staples the app and DMG, generates the updater feed, checksums and SPDX SBOM, attests the exact DMG and ZIP, and publishes only after re-verifying the complete draft.

The GitHub release environment must require a maintainer approval and contain these secrets:

• APPLE_DEVELOPER_ID_P12: base64 of the exported Developer ID Application G2 certificate and private key;
• APPLE_DEVELOPER_ID_PASSWORD: the export password;
• APPLE_DEVELOPER_ID_PROFILE: base64 of the Developer ID distribution provisioning profile for io.github.mat4m0.gwonmac;
• APPLE_API_KEY_P8: base64 of the App Store Connect API key;
• APPLE_API_KEY_ID, APPLE_API_ISSUER_ID, and APPLE_TEAM_ID: their Apple identifiers.

On macOS, base64 -i DeveloperID.p12 | pbcopy, base64 -i gwonmac.provisionprofile | pbcopy, and base64 -i AuthKey_KEYID.p8 | pbcopy produce the three encoded secret values. Keep the originals outside the repository and remove unneeded local export copies after the GitHub secrets have been set.

Every verified push to main publishes a temporary snapshot-* prerelease for players who want to test the newest changes. A maintainer can publish the same kind of snapshot from another repository branch with the Tester build workflow. Snapshots are unsupported, never offered by the website or in-app release check, and are bounded: only the newest three remain, while every snapshot except the newest expires after fourteen days.

Pull requests keep their packaged app as a GitHub Actions artifact for three days. Those artifacts require a signed-in GitHub account; snapshot prereleases use ordinary public download links. Report results with the preview feedback form; diagnostics remain local unless you explicitly attach the exported file.

The app keeps a bounded, local-only flight recorder — startup and frame timings, cache/network/disk cost, memory, GPU and power state, socket lifetimes — and Help → Report a Problem… turns it into one redacted .gwdiag file that only leaves your machine if you attach it yourself. Report a problem covers which capture to record for which symptom; Diagnostics covers the format and exactly what the redaction does and does not guarantee.

Inspect captures without launching the app:

pnpm diagnostics:validate capture.gwdiag
pnpm diagnostics:summarize capture.gwdiag
pnpm diagnostics:compare before.gwdiag after.gwdiag

Performance claims should compare alternating sets of packaged-build runs, not a single profiler-contaminated trace.

Profile data lives under ~/Library/Application Support/Guild Wars:

• Cached game chunks and client artifacts — reproducible, safe to delete via Settings → Game Data → Clear game data.
• Window size, position, and display mode in an owner-only window-state.json; missing monitors fall back to a centered window.
• At most five 5 MB diagnostics files.

Saved ArenaNet and Steam login are the exception: provisioned Release, Preview, and Development apps keep them in two fixed, device-only Data Protection Keychain items per channel, reachable only through the narrow credential IPC methods.

The game proxy drops cookies in both directions, and browser cookies are also cleared at startup and quit. Clearing game data never touches your login or settings; resetting launcher settings never deletes downloaded data.

Each document owns one thing; this page links rather than repeating them.

• User guide — everything the app does from a player's seat: first launch, download modes, settings, updates, local data, bug reports
• Technical documentation — how it does it: the process model and its boundaries, the content pipeline and both updaters, the WASM host and client certification, diagnostics, and which claims are proved by which test
• Verify a release — checksums, attestations, and what a version number means
• Product brief — who this is for, what ships next, and what this project will not do
• Contributing · Security policy

This project is a fork of gwdevhub/gw_in_browser and would not exist without it. That work established the approach this app is built on: hosting ArenaNet's official WebAssembly client outside the browser and supplying the platform surface it expects. The upstream git history is preserved in this repository.

Upstream authors:

• Marc Henderkes (dub_le) — original author of gw_in_browser; wrote the foundational "Guild Wars in the browser" work this fork descends from, and the research that established how the official WASM client can be hosted outside the browser at all.
• Jon (3vcloud) — gwdevhub maintainer and contributor; shared the proof of concept this project started from.
• GWToolbox++ — contributed the macOS launch wrapper that this app's native host grew out of.

Upstream is licensed GPL-3.0, and so is this fork. If you find this project useful, the credit belongs upstream first.

Also with thanks to:

• QualiType — the QT Friz Quad typeface, released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• ArenaNet — for the game, and for keeping the Guild Wars client alive and publicly downloadable more than twenty years on.
• gwnative — an independent native Rust host with the same goal, reached by a different route. Ideas and fixes travel both ways; several here came out of that exchange. It also identified the official Reforged App Store artwork and prepared the macOS icon adopted here.

© ArenaNet LLC. All rights reserved. NCSOFT, ArenaNet, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, GW2, Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire, End of Dragons, Secrets of the Obscure, Janthir Wilds, Visions of Eternity, and all associated logos, designs, and composite marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCSOFT Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

assets/AppIcon.png is the 1024 × 1024 Guild Wars Reforged application artwork published by ArenaNet on the official Apple App Store listing. The committed macOS icon was prepared by gwnative from that artwork. The artwork and Guild Wars marks remain the property of their respective owners.

The loading-screen video and logo were published by ArenaNet on the official Guild Wars Reforged website. The loading-screen typeface is QT Friz Quad, © 1992 QualiType, distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; its license ships with the font.

No cursor artwork ships with this application. The game cursor — on by default, switchable off under Settings → Controls — reads the bitmap the player's own installed client has already decoded, and never redistributes it.

Source code is GPL-3.0-only — see LICENSE. Unless an asset carries its own license, Guild Wars imagery, screenshots, loading artwork, the official application-icon artwork, and derived favicons are not relicensed under GPL-3.0, and all underlying rights remain with their respective owners.