ArenaNet has revealed via a new blog post that the culling effect many players of Guild Wars 2 are currently familiar with will be a thing of the past come March 26th.

Featured in the popular World vs World PvP section of the game, the culling effect would essentially limit how many people would appear on your screen in exchange for better performance, however it seems ArenaNet are now comfortable enough to turn this off.

While this achieved our goal of limiting bandwidth and client-side resource utilization, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing large battles in WvW to be confusing, as there were sometimes many enemy players that were completely invisible. Additionally, there were side effects of culling which could result in stealth characters getting up to two seconds of additional invisibility when coming out of stealth. By removing culling, we’ve been able to eliminate these negative side effects and greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.

Three new options have been revealed to help facilitate players with varying hardware configurations, including the option for high resolution models, lower resolution fallback models and nameplates only.

Two other options will also be added to select how WvW characters are displayed, which include WvW character limit, which controls how many of the reported characters render with models and how many render only with nameplates and WvW character quality, which controls how many characters rendered use high resolution models and how many use lower resolution fallback models.

You can check out the difference between culling on and culling off below in the screenshots, but head over to the blog post for the full run down including a more detailed explanation of just how everything works in the background.


Culling On


Culling Off