Xavient, the developers behind The Culling series, have announced that, due to a very poor launch, they will be shutting down The Culling 2. In a video released this morning, Josh Van Veld, the Director of Operations for Xavient, advised that they would be pulling the game from all marketplaces and issuing refunds to those that had purchased it. The Culling 1 was also shut down in December of last year after being just two months out of early access.
Within this video, however, came good news for fans of the original game. While searching for solutions to the predicament that Xavient had found themselves in, Van Veld claims that the team came to the same conclusion that players have been saying for quite some time. That solution is to bring back The Culling in its original Day 1 form. He went on to state that shutting down the original game was “a mistake” and that “they didn’t see a path forward.”
The team behind The Culling is now working on bringing the Day 1 mechanics into the latest build of the game. This will act as the base for which they create all future updates. They are also planning on making the Day 1 build of the game always available to play on a test server going forward. One final note Van Veld touched on was the decision to make the game entirely free-to-play upon completion of the next update.
Despite all the missteps that have been taken with this franchise, it is refreshing to see a developer own up to the mistakes surrounding their series and listen to their fans, even if they decided to listen later rather than sooner.
