The Culling: Origins Is Definitely Officially Dead


Also I’m fairly certain that Xaviant no longer has employees.

The Culling: Origins is a game that pretty much only I have thought of ever since it released earlier this year. Hell I’m probably the only person who thought of it even before it came out for its third embarrassing attempt at swindling a couple bucks from the internet. But I wanted to see if the game ran any better with the added power of the Xbox Series S and downloaded the client last night.

The other 50% was to see if there was anyone left online. To answer the first question The Culling: Origins does not run much better on the Series S than it does on the Xbox One, presumably because the game is poorly coded and shoddily optimized separate from the limitations of the Xbox hardware. The idea that Origins would be an optimized version of the previous game was a complete lie.

For effect I’m going to embed this raw footage showing that The Culling is so poorly cobbled together that the game occasionally struggles through the act of letting the timer count down in the upper left hand corner. This is not edited in any way.

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There are no players in The Culling: Origins. I let the timer go to see how long it would take for the game to just toss me into an all-bot match and while the solo mode threw me in after about 17 minutes, 15 seconds the duo queue never got into a game at all. I stopped the timer after nearly 45 minutes because I wanted to go to bed and there was nobody else in the queue period for either game mode.

I have to assume at this point that Xaviant as an entity is just Josh Van Veld occasionally checking his Microsoft seller account to see if anyone else was gullible enough to buy the game or play tokens. As I predicted the game got no post-launch support or anything to indicate that Xaviant cares about the quality of its products, the integrity of its company, or the few people actually willing to give them money.

I can only hope that Xaviant’s workers have moved on to companies that actually care and don’t embody the sort of entitlement complex that Van Veld displayed in his video explaining why Xaviant needed to leverage the good will it didn’t earn and the community it didn’t have to engage in greedy, predatory practices that were destined to never work.