If there's one issue The Culling has it's players, not enough of them at certain times. To help with this, they've added bots to fill the gaps in online play.
The bots will count towards your experience gain and statistics, however they don't provide a bonus for the leaderboards. They've also been assigned custom names and outfits to keep them interesting. Currently though, it seems the feature is a bit, well, broken. If all other human players die or leave you automatically win even with bots left so they're going to need to patch that quickly.
A small adjustment was done to throwing items for consistency too, so now when you throw anything you're given a brief "interrupt". Additionally, your most recently applied weapon skin is now shown in the main menu, you can rotate your character in the main menu, all hair cosmetics can now be applied to both male and female characters, bow shot stamina requirement reduced and lots of bug fixes made it in. See all the changes here.
They still haven't fixed the issue if the keybind settings showing a bunch of gamepad buttons, instead of keyboard buttons. They all still work, but it's slightly confusing. I really do hope they get around to fixing that soon, but it is a relatively minor issue.
We had quite a lot of fun doing some private games with members of our Discord Channel. It has its share of issues and it's certainly not as streamlined as other Battle Royale games, but it does have a certain strange charm to it. It's very different to other BR games, with the crafting system and how the map works.
Find it on Steam, it's free so you have nothing to lose by trying it.
It is normal for games to rise and then sink again - and some become classics.
But for online games, I don't think they can become classics that some people will come back to play in 10 years once they are out of players.
Even though it's F2P.
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