We’ve been here before. That point in every new trends cycle where we reach the breaking point. We saw it with the MOBA genre not all that long ago. Games would release and disappear before we’d even know they were live on Steam. Only the strong survived, and much the same thing is happening with the Battle Royale trend.
We’re at the point where Battle Royale games, even ones from big studios, or back by big industry names are arriving DOA. The Culling II is one such title, a game that nobody was expecting, wanting, and one we didn’t really need. This Battle Royale sequel to the Battle Royale original was so bad that the team behind the game pulled it from Steam and issued an apology.
The Culling II currently sits on Steam with a “very negative” review. The game was/is a broken mess that has become unplayable two days after release. The most action the game affords is waiting in the virtual lobby, hoping for another sorry sap to join so you might get yourself into a game. Mind you, this is a 50 man Battle Royale, so a 1 v 1 game isn’t what most people signed on for.
In an announcement posted by the company, the studio stated that they would be refunding anyone that purchased The Culling II that wants their money back. This is an offer you are going to want to take as the team isn’t going to be fixing any of the issues with The Culling II.
Rather, the team is going to shift their focus back onto The Culling 1. The studio wants to revive that game. “Our immediate goal for The Culling in terms of our first update is to take the October 2017 build that’s live right now and to modify it so that every aspect of the gameplay matches the day one build.”
The Culling 1 got off to a fairly good start back in early 2016 when it hit Steam Early Access. But problems arose as development continued and the studio continued to tweak the game –A problem so many games have stuck in Early Access hell—that by the time the title released the entire player base was about the size of a full Fortnite match. Josh Van Veld, director of studio operations noted that “We took a game that you loved and changed it out from under you, and I want to apologize for that.”
Fans of the Culling series –whatever is left of them—have not had the best of times over the past year and a half. The studio behind the game hasn’t made it easy to stand by the game, the studio claiming in emails with Kotaku “That literally nobody was able to spend more than a week or two with that game because of the rapid pace of development.”
This rapid pace probably did rub some fans the wrong way to be sure, but the nail in the coffin for The Culling Team was when development on the game simply stopped without warning or reason in December of 2017. Fans, the few that were left, were left with nothing for their devotion and continued support, not to mention their money.
Then –if things weren’t already bad enough—the studio announced The Culling II at the beginning of summer without any warning, hype, or build up. Usually the community of the original game is the first to know as developers want to gove back to their fans first, and get them on as early adopters, but that’s just not how developers Xaviant plays.
What’s worse is that The Culling II released a month after it was announced, so players, online media, and those people on YouTube that put red circles and lie in their titles had no time to prepare. The team behind The Culling simply didn’t care that they broke their own game, and instead of trying to fix it and build a community chucked it out and stared fresh with a sequel.
The unfortunate part is they failed to tell anyone outside the studio this, like, you know, their fans. So now the team has spent 6 months building a sequel that nobody wanted, nobody is playing, and most everyone hates.
It’s nice that Xaviant is trying to go back and save The Culling I by, you know, continuing to develop the game, but after 6 months of being dead all they’ve done is push away fans of the original game, piss of any fans of the new game, and show that they really have no idea what it means to build a community around a type of game that lives and dies thanks to its community.
But hey, they are making The Culling I free to play to try and bring in new fans, so that’s something. We’ll see how bad the microtransactions are as I have a feeling Xaviant has a lot of money to make back after this month’s long fiasco.
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