Guild Wars 2

So for those who missed the live stream yesterday, here is a transcript of what Colin Johanson said about culling (25:45 in the video):

The January release you’re actually gonna see our first kind of major improvement in that area what we are gonna start doing is models that load in around you are gonna start being replaced by a sort of a lower res model that is a placeholder one until your full models characters are loaded in.
So this will fix characters that load into you, load in invisible next to you for three seconds, or
if somebody uses a mesmer portal to teleport next to you they won’t be invisible for a little while and killing you.
You’ll see their model instantly and they will draw in under a low poly and then transform up.
That’s kind of the first step is to deal we the immediate issues: how do we deals with models that we want to get and show them very quickly when you need to have that information
the next major step is how do we show more and more of that stuff, show more players, and more things on screen. And we are building toward that.

Its welcome news.

Totally a game changer. Excited to see it in action, and great work DEV team!!! Thank you for listening to us.

If this works well this will be a great change!

Exactly what i suggested they take from DAOC several months ago. Glad to see they are doing it. If it worked a decade ago on the available hardware and bandwith then, it should work just fine now.

Great news. I wouldn’t wish culling on my worst enemy (except maybe that d/d Ele who ganked my warrior alt today, just him).