Following last week’s unfortunate launch, Xaviant have announced that The Culling 2 will be officially shut down this week on all platforms, with players receiving full refunds.

Josh Van Veld, Director of Operations at Xaviant, states that when searching for solutions, the team came to similar ones as the fans. As such the team will be returning to The Culling 1, in its original form, for another stab at it.

Van Veld apologises for the way the team handled the original game, stating “they didn’t see a path forward” at the time, but that in retrospect turning off the game was “a mistake”.

The Culling 1 will be available in its ‘Day 1’ form on the test servers starting this week, free for existing owners of the game. This version of the game will be the original day 1 build from March 2016.

The team plan to work on merging the original build, into the latest October 2017 one. When this work is completed that will form the base as a platform to build upon from. Alongside the completion of this work, the team will be releasing The Culling 1 as completely free-to-play.

Whilst last week’s, now infamous, disaster of a launch for The Culling 2 was unfortunate, it’s refreshing to see a studio hold up their hands, admit their mistakes, and be so incredibly transparent with the community about where things are headed in the future.