Just under a month ago, Xaviant announced a sequel to their battle royale game The Culling. The game officially releases today, but fans have some misgivings about how the game will turn out.
The Culling II is a battle royale game themed around a brutal game show. On their website, Xaviant describes The Culling II like this:
Cullcast Productions and everybody’s favorite host CHAS formally invite you to our biggest event yet! We’ve pumped up the brutality, expanded the battlefield, crammed in an arsenal of new firepower and dropped in just the right amount of fresh meat competition to make The Culling 2 the most thrilling moment-to-moment action available on your planet of choice!
The Culling 2 is Battle Royale distilled, refined and designed from the ground up for consoles and PC. Get the full, authentic, Battle Royale experience regardless of hardware or controller type as you join a group of 50 players in a fight for sport, glory, and for the entertainment of our home audience.
The sequel will have a bigger focus on ranged combat, although the creators stress that melee combat, which was a big element in the original game, is still viable. The game will also go straight into a full release, instead of the original game’s Early Access.
Despite this, fans are concerned about how the game will turn out. The original game started out strong when it released in March 2016, but as director of operations Josh Van Veld puts it in an interview with PC Gamer:
We did dozens of patches and content updates after that, but we never saw our sales or player numbers return after the initial boom died down. To be honest, apart from a passionate core audience, the majority of PC players haven’t seen or thought about The Culling in two years.
From the perspective of the fans, the problem was that the devs changed too much in the game too quickly while failing to fix core issues.
The Culling II releases today on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.