For posterity, I’ve saved my review from 2017 as a postscript below.



TLDR: Xaviant continues to struggle in all the usual departments: player relations, communication, development, and marketing. In the grand scheme of things, the Origins version of the game is actually pretty good, but it’s difficult for me to justify flipping my review to positive when matches in this now free-to-play game are made up of 80% bots. It feels like we need a miracle to save The Culling. Realistically? I give it no more than 4 months on life support before the devs move on.



If you read my old review then you know I was critical of Xaviant specifically for not being communicative enough during the beta. So when they announced that, for Origins, they would place a special emphasis on opening a dialogue with the players it was like music to my ears. And for the most part, this new, conciliatory Xaviant has been an improvement, but it hasn’t been perfect. Now the dev team is getting quieter and they’re slumping back into business as usual as we watch The Culling slowly bleed players. I’m not the only veteran who is starting to feel anxious over the future of the game.



To fill you in, during the initial development of Origins, Xaviant was throwing a lot of bones for players to chew on that included weekly surveys and video diaries a la Jeff Kaplan. It felt good to be part of the development process and you could feel the energy that had returned to the community. Transparency definitely helped during the transition and Xav has, so far, avoided surprising players with any broadly unpopular changes.



But for all this effort, I have to say it’s not quite turning out to be the relationship I imagined would be necessary to save this game. Players can fill in surveys but have no say in what the survey topics actually are and the results aren’t public. What’s more, Xaviant rarely responds in discussion threads and they post diaries that are narrowly focused and are coming out at an ever waning rate. The team is already starting to feel very remote.



To their credit, the first update wasn’t bad, but it came entirely by surprise and the balance solutions don’t appear to have come from the community whatsoever, and to that extent they’ve been inadequate. In other words, Xav is already behaving a lot like they did two years ago; they correctly identify the biggest problems, but when it comes to actual solutions, the player feedback is getting lost in the mail.



By far the biggest obstacle is the lack of players. Xav just can’t seem to get people to play this game, and they appear to have no idea what to do about this as evidenced by the fact that they dubiously sponsored a $25,000 Twitch streamer invitational that accomplished absolutely nothing. I sympathise more with the marketing department than with the designers, because whereas I feel like I could personally come up with a plan to balance the entire game in 2 hours, I too have no idea how to get people to actually log in. Let’s hope they figure something out soon, because the roadmap is preparing for expanded duos matches and squads mode that will place an even higher demand for average daily players. In the meantime, vets can only puzzle over why Xaviant is catering to the playerbase it doesn’t have rather than the one it does.



As a kind of noncommittal sell, I will promise to returning players that they should at least feel comfortable in this version; it’s one of the better iterations we’ve seen to date, and it will likely not change much at a fundamental level since Xaviant has become very timid and focused on content. But the problems that do exist will frustrate you and it’s looking like it will be the all-too-familiar uphill battle for vets who want good updates.





October 6th, 2017 Review



There’s no denying it, The Culling has been one the best games I’ve ever played and there are droves who would agree with that sentiment. Xaviant has successfully captured the feel of a zany yet bloody game show, and The Culling offers as much uproarious and wicked fun as it does blood pumping and hair raising intensity. Even in a saturated market, there really aren’t any other games out there that promise as rich a package as does The Culling, and that fact makes it something truly special.



So I am pressured to give The Culling a positive review because to do otherwise after it gave me 1400 hours of high quality entertainment makes me look like a bitter fraud, but prospective players who owe nothing to nostalgia would not be justly served by that endorsement. The answer to the plain question: Is it worth $24.99 in its current state? Sadly, is a “no.” I paid $14.99 at open alpha release and believe that that’s still the right price. But even if the game went on sale tomorrow, there’s simply too high of a risk that the game will soon die. Any potential buyer should know that through the final stage of the beta, The Culling maintained so few players that queues wouldn’t even fill to start more than handful of games in NA over the course of several weeks, and full 16 player matches seem to be a thing of the distant past even in EU where the population has also waned to within an inch of its life.



As to the future, Xaviant has reported that they will continue updating the game, but this is about as promising as offering a lifetime supply of tampons to a troop of boy scouts. The dev team’s idea of a major update appears to be largely cosmetic, while bugs and balance problems that have plagued the game for months (and in some cases over a year) remain entirely unaddressed. The prevailing theory is that the staff doesn’t even have any engineers left that can adequately optimize the game, and if they do, then one has to assume that the leadership has completely derailed.



One warning to anyone who plans to read other reviews: The common complaint that Xaviant “doesn’t listen to player feedback” is demonstrably false and the team deserves that much to be known. That trope grew out of a vituperative campaign to which many community members have fallen prey due to lack of a better understanding of the situation and justified general frustration. The dev team has proven that they do listen to feedback; they just never seem to know what to do with it.



The real issue at Xaviant is their lack of reciprocal communication, misguided priorities, and woeful execution of what would otherwise have been reasonable ideas - lack of communication being the most inexcusable of the three, since had they not maintained a policy of silence about their patches as they developed them, they would have had more than enough feedback from the player base that, if taken, would have at least steered any patch away from total disaster. Instead, many players feel that after waiting patiently for updates, they were forced, time and again, to swallow unsolicited changes littered with bugs and without any word about why the most important issues could not be resolved.



The 2016 alpha will forever be revered, and in fairness, the current version isn’t so much worse than the darling release that charmed so many of us a year and half ago despite the rocky road we traveled to get here. But The Culling proves just how difficult it is to revitalize a community once it has bitterly departed. As of my writing this, on the day after full release, Xaviant has just closed down the official discord server and retreated at long last into total darkness. What players still remain stand at a gloomy precipice and are left wondering not what the future of The Culling may hold but what it could have been.

For posterity, I’ve saved my review from 2017 as a postscript below. TLDR: Xaviant continues to struggle in all the usual departments: player relations, communication, development, and marketing. In the grand scheme of things, the Origins version of the game is actually pretty good, but it’s difficult for me to justify flipping my review to positive when matches in this now free-to-play game are made up of 80% bots. It feels like we need a miracle to save The Culling. Realistically? I give it no more than 4 months on life support before the devs move on. If you read my old review then you know I was critical of Xaviant specifically for not being communicative enough during the beta. So when they announced that, for Origins, they would place a special emphasis on opening a dialogue with the players it was like music to my ears. And for the most part, this new, conciliatory Xaviant has been an improvement, but it hasn’t been perfect. Now the dev team is getting quieter and they’re slumping back into business as usual as we watch The Culling slowly bleed players. I’m not the only veteran who is starting to feel anxious over the future of the game. To fill you in, during the initial development of Origins, Xaviant was throwing a lot of bones for players to chew on that included weekly surveys and video diaries a la Jeff Kaplan. It felt good to be part of the development process and you could feel the energy that had returned to the community. Transparency definitely helped during the transition and Xav has, so far, avoided surprising players with any broadly unpopular changes. But for all this effort, I have to say it’s not quite turning out to be the relationship I imagined would be necessary to save this game. Players can fill in surveys but have no say in what the survey topics actually are and the results aren’t public. What’s more, Xaviant rarely responds in discussion threads and they post diaries that are narrowly focused and are coming out at an ever waning rate. The team is already starting to feel very remote. To their credit, the first update wasn’t bad, but it came entirely by surprise and the balance solutions don’t appear to have come from the community whatsoever, and to that extent they’ve been inadequate. In other words, Xav is already behaving a lot like they did two years ago; they correctly identify the biggest problems, but when it comes to actual solutions, the player feedback is getting lost in the mail. By far the biggest obstacle is the lack of players. Xav just can’t seem to get people to play this game, and they appear to have no idea what to do about this as evidenced by the fact that they dubiously sponsored a $25,000 Twitch streamer invitational that accomplished absolutely nothing. I sympathise more with the marketing department than with the designers, because whereas I feel like I could personally come up with a plan to balance the entire game in 2 hours, I too have no idea how to get people to actually log in. Let’s hope they figure something out soon, because the roadmap is preparing for expanded duos matches and squads mode that will place an even higher demand for average daily players. In the meantime, vets can only puzzle over why Xaviant is catering to the playerbase it doesn’t have rather than the one it does. As a kind of noncommittal sell, I will promise to returning players that they should at least feel comfortable in this version; it’s one of the better iterations we’ve seen to date, and it will likely not change much at a fundamental level since Xaviant has become very timid and focused on content. But the problems that do exist will frustrate you and it’s looking like it will be the all-too-familiar uphill battle for vets who want good updates. October 6th, 2017 Review There’s no denying it, The Culling has been one the best games I’ve ever played and there are droves who would agree with that sentiment. Xaviant has successfully captured the feel of a zany yet bloody game show, and The Culling offers as much uproarious and wicked fun as it does blood pumping and hair raising intensity. Even in a saturated market, there really aren’t any other games out there that promise as rich a package as does The Culling, and that fact makes it something truly special. So I am pressured to give The Culling a positive review because to do otherwise after it gave me 1400 hours of high quality entertainment makes me look like a bitter fraud, but prospective players who owe nothing to nostalgia would not be justly served by that endorsement. The answer to the plain question: Is it worth $24.99 in its current state? Sadly, is a “no.” I paid $14.99 at open alpha release and believe that that’s still the right price. But even if the game went on sale tomorrow, there’s simply too high of a risk that the game will soon die. Any potential buyer should know that through the final stage of the beta, The Culling maintained so few players that queues wouldn’t even fill to start more than handful of games in NA over the course of several weeks, and full 16 player matches seem to be a thing of the distant past even in EU where the population has also waned to within an inch of its life. As to the future, Xaviant has reported that they will continue updating the game, but this is about as promising as offering a lifetime supply of tampons to a troop of boy scouts. The dev team’s idea of a major update appears to be largely cosmetic, while bugs and balance problems that have plagued the game for months (and in some cases over a year) remain entirely unaddressed. The prevailing theory is that the staff doesn’t even have any engineers left that can adequately optimize the game, and if they do, then one has to assume that the leadership has completely derailed. One warning to anyone who plans to read other reviews: The common complaint that Xaviant “doesn’t listen to player feedback” is demonstrably false and the team deserves that much to be known. That trope grew out of a vituperative campaign to which many community members have fallen prey due to lack of a better understanding of the situation and justified general frustration. The dev team has proven that they do listen to feedback; they just never seem to know what to do with it. The real issue at Xaviant is their lack of reciprocal communication, misguided priorities, and woeful execution of what would otherwise have been reasonable ideas - lack of communication being the most inexcusable of the three, since had they not maintained a policy of silence about their patches as they developed them, they would have had more than enough feedback from the player base that, if taken, would have at least steered any patch away from total disaster. Instead, many players feel that after waiting patiently for updates, they were forced, time and again, to swallow unsolicited changes littered with bugs and without any word about why the most important issues could not be resolved. The 2016 alpha will forever be revered, and in fairness, the current version isn’t so much worse than the darling release that charmed so many of us a year and half ago despite the rocky road we traveled to get here. But The Culling proves just how difficult it is to revitalize a community once it has bitterly departed. As of my writing this, on the day after full release, Xaviant has just closed down the official discord server and retreated at long last into total darkness. What players still remain stand at a gloomy precipice and are left wondering not what the future of The Culling may hold but what it could have been. Check this box if you received this product for free (?) Do you recommend this game? Yes No Cancel Save Changes