Greetings Contestants,
Get ready to party like it's 2016 because murder is back on the menu, starting….today!
After a hiatus during which we needed to learn some major lessons and get our heads straight, we’re putting The Culling back in development. Our mission is to rebuild our relationship with you and regain your trust. We’re taking the first step today as we bring back the Day 1 build.
That’s right, the literal Day 1 version of the game from way back in March of 2016 will be deployed on what we’re now calling our Day 1 Reference servers (formerly known as Test Servers). As we move forward in development, this build will remain live to serve as an ongoing reference point to keep us from losing our way.
If this comes as a big surprise, please refer to our recent announcement. LINK.
If you own The Culling on Steam, you will be able to play The Culling: Day 1 Reference now, for free. All owners of The Culling will see Day 1 Reference as a separate app in their Steam Library.
With the Day 1 Reference servers live, the team will move forward toward our next goal; a relaunch of the latest version of the game updated to feature all of the gameplay elements of the original. Think of it as a modern remaster that is as true to the original as it can be, but still retains all of the bug fixes and optimizations.
From there, we will continue development of the game with a new philosophy that centers around preserving and maintaining what made the original release so special. Don’t be scared, because we will bring you all along for the ride and keep you informed at every step along the way.
The Culling: Day 1 Reference is limited to PC only. Since this is literally the same client we released in March of 2016, it is not Xbox One compatible. We would love to make it available on Xbox, but that would require weeks, if not months of work. Rest easy though Xbox One players, because we will be bringing all of our future changes directly to you as well.
At first, The Culling: Day 1 Reference will only be available on our North American servers, but we are already working on European servers and expect to have it available to our European players very soon. We may consider other regions, but we’re not ready to discuss that at this time.
In case you haven’t heard, when the mainline version of The Culling relaunches it will be free-to-play. We want you to have plenty of friends to play with (read: murder) on the island and we think F2P is the best way to lure fresh meat to the servers. We need to do more work before we can provide a timeline or even predict what form it will take, but we will announce our relaunch date as soon as possible.
We know we’ve made serious mistakes as a studio, but we’re not ready to throw in the towel. Every last one of us wants a chance to get things right and show you that we’re just a good group of people who love making games together. At minimum, we want to give you a fresh opportunity to enjoy The Culling the way it was meant to be.
We can’t do it without your help. We hope that you can find it in yourselves to give us the chance we need. This is a new day. Tonight, the sun sets on the island, but not for the last time.
We’ll see you there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnsR1pn_0k