The Culling 2 Has Been Culled, Xaviant Re-releasing The Culling 1

Last week it was reported that The Culling 2 was down to single digit player numbers just days after it launched. Not a great look for a brand new battle royale title so Xaviant have made a smart decision and are offering refunds to everybody that purchased the game on PC, PS4 or Xbox One. They’ve also explained via the YouTube video below that they’re going to be revisiting The Culling 1 and they’re going to give it another shot.

If you’re unaware, The Culling 1 (also known as just The Culling) launched in March 2016 in Early Access and was one of the first standalone battle royale titles on the market. It focused largely on melee combat and while it saw immense popularity at first, the developers continued to alter the gameplay, turning the experience into something vastly different from what the original playerbase enjoyed.

Josh Van Veld, director of operations at Xaviant, explains in the video that the solutions they’ve come up with have largely been the same as ones suggested by the fans. They’re returning to the original game with a plan to merge the very first instance of the game, the “day one” form, with the most recent build in October 2017. When they’ve completed that, the team at Xaviant will build upon that basis with the aim of making The Culling 1 an enjoyable battle royale experience.

Starting this week, The Culling 1 will be available for all existing owners of the game with that day one build on test servers. Van Veld apologised for the way Xaviant handled the game last time around, saying that they realise now turning off the game entirely was “a mistake” but they didn’t see a way forward for the title at the time.

In today’s industry, just two years on from the initial launch, the battle royale competition is much bigger with titles like PUBG and H1Z1 having the ‘realistic’ approach nailed down while Fortnite has blown everyone away with its child-friendly approach and building mechanics. It’ll be interesting to see whether the first game can restore some of its player numbers, though we fear Xaviant may have laid their own bed when it comes to this franchise.

(Header image courtesy of Game Rant.)