This is an alternative “solution” that I’ve been providing to those who really want to be able to play the game before it closes on March 5th. It’s the “best” alternative for those who cannot rollback to the 1703 build of Windows 10 or don’t want to attempt installing an older version over their current system (and then disabling or deferring the 1709 feature update from installing).
It requires running the game in a virtual machine; either Oracle’s VirtualBox (free) or better yet, VMware’s Workstation Player (also free for non-commercial use).
This also requires either a physical media or ISO disk image of Windows 7 or greater. I would recommend using Windows 7 or 8.1 over 10 unless networking is temporarily disabled during the installation (where it will check for updates and likely ninja install the 1709 update). For those who do not have a physical copy, there is a site which automatically generates download links to actual disk images from Microsoft’s download servers.
It is difficult to get a working download of Windows 7 from this site since Microsoft no longer hosts those disk images. But it is possible to get the links generated for Windows 8.1-10. For the followig test, I used an old ISO image of Windows 7 to see how viable this setup is. I initially created the virtual machine using VirtualBox but had issues getting the game to reliably launch everytime. So I exported that as an appliance and then imported it into VMware. In other words, it is better to just do the install of Windows using VMware.
The other reason why VMware Player is preferred is it provides some extra graphic settings which allows the game to perform better. 3D acceleration needs to be enabled, VMware Tools addition installed (the virtual machine should put up a dialog that asks if you want to install it), and video graphics memory increased to at least 512MB (1GB is optimal if your system has enough power to handle it).
Depending on the host system, some game settings including display resolution will need to be reduced to prevent a lot of frame rate drops. The following is a video of the game running in the virtual machine at 1600×1200 resolution on my system (where it is also dealing with the recording). This system has 16GB of RAM, Core i7-6700 running at 3.4GHz, Nvidia 1070GTX.
There are some frame rate drops when disabling some video settings so reducing the video display size to something like 1280×800/1280×960/1280×1024 will help smooth out performance. Combat will obviously create more frame rate drops so the objective is try out various settings that work well with your system. If all graphics settings are turned down, the visuals will look like crap but the frame rate drops will be negligible.
Basically, this is meant to be serviceable (the only way to accomplish normal performance is downloading that Windows 10 1703 ISO, creating an install media (either DVD or a USB thumb drive) and installing that over the 1709 update (it works).
I was going to try and create a downloadable turnkey appliance but the size even with zip or 7z compression, comes in at 12GB. The only place I would be able to host that is MEGA but many will have trouble downloading it via a web browser since it will require at least 12GB of free space plus an additional 12GB for the browser to create the actual downloaded file. And it would then require an additional 20GB of space to decompress it. MEGAsync (provides 50GB of cloud storage for free) would address this but its an additional step that complicates it for many.
