The culling servers down

The saga of The Culling and its sequel, The Culling 2, has seen one disaster after another. Like most online games, developer Xaviant made several changes to the first game over time, but when these changes turned out to not be what players wanted, the team abandoned development and rushed out the sequel. Reception to the sequel was poor — it had a different style of gameplay to the original and this new style had been done better by other titles. It was removed from the store just a week after release. The team then returned to support the first game and it was changed to a free-to-play format in November. It seems like that didn't work either, because Xaviant has now announced the servers will close for The Culling in May.The servers will be closed on May 15th, 2019. When this happens, players will be able to play the game's offline modes, but none of the online pay or online features will be available, including in-app purchases. The game will soon be delisted from the Microsoft Store too, although it is still available for download at the time of writing. This means that 15 of the game's 20 achievements will become discontinued on that date. They are:The Mates achievement in The Culling worth 15 pointsPlay an online Team MatchThe Duet achievement in The Culling worth 272 pointsWin an online Team MatchThe Loner achievement in The Culling worth 14 pointsPlay an online Solo MatchThe Soloist achievement in The Culling worth

380 pointsWin an online Solo MatchThe Moneybags achievement in The Culling worth 335 pointsEarn 400 FUNC in a single Online MatchThe Serial achievement in The Culling worth 405 pointsGet 5 Kills in a single Online MatchThe Oldtimer achievement in The Culling worth 482 pointsReach 20 hours of time alive in Online MatchesThe Deuce achievement in The Culling worth 101 pointsDeal 200 damage in a single Online MatchThe Threes achievement in The Culling worth 125 pointsGet 3 Kills in a single Online MatchThe Veteran achievement in The Culling worth 61 pointsGet 10 Career KillsThe Master achievement in The Culling worth 133 pointsGet 25 Career KillsThe Pro achievement in The Culling worth 789 pointsGet 100 Career KillsThe Marathon achievement in The Culling worth 291 pointsTravel 100 KM in Online MatchesThe Delivery achievement in The Culling worth 104 pointsCall in a personal airdrop in an Online MatchThe servers are closing because the team was unable to create enough revenue from in-app purchases to support the game once it had turned into a free-to-play title. The team size has been reduced to a point where they can no longer provide the online support the game needs. In the team's full statement, they're also looking for another development team to take the game forward, so there is a chance it might be resurrected in the future, but don't get your hopes up.It seems fitting to leave the final word to the team at Xaviant:While it’s sad for us to say goodbye, we want to offer

Developer Xaviant pulled the plug on the battle royale game The Culling in December 2017, just a couple of months after taking it from Early Access to full release. Today, the studio revealed that a sequel, The Culling 2, is now in development. There are no details yet beyond the tweet and the fact that the account is now called The Culling 2, but it's a surprising move for Xaviant to make. The average concurrent player count of The Culling when development was ended was 14, and it hadn't been above double digits since May 2017. And it's not as though the battle royale genre has become less crowded and competitive since then: The Culling's player count started tanking right around the time we described Fortnite as "a fun but bloated base defense shooter," and we all know what's happened since then.(And if you don't know, the short version is that Fortnite is a juggernaut and there are plenty of other smaller-but-good BR games to choose from too.)I also wonder if the quickness with which Xaviant hit the brakes on The Culling (and to be clear, the servers are still up, so it's not dead, just abandoned) will work against it, particularly with work on a sequel beginning so soon after. If nothing else, it doesn't strike me as a good look.I've reached out to Xaviant to ask about its plans for the new game and will update if I receive a reply. Either way, I expect we'll be hearing more about The Culling 2 very soon.Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Catastrophe – gave us perspective. We’ve been able to come back level-headed and calm. With hindsight, the situation is a lot more clear than it was at the time.PCGN: Let’s talk about that catastrophe. The Culling had a unique identity, but The Culling 2 looked and felt a lot more generic. Why did you take that direction?Van Veld: When we started developing The Culling 2, from our point of view The Culling had sort-of died. We didn’t have the perspective that we do now on why that was, but we were looking at it like: ‘we are ready to move on, the community doesn’t like us, they feel like we’ve let them down, nobody is really playing the game on the PC, every time we do an update it feels like we get as much hate as we do anything else’. So we were very discouraged, and we were playing PUBG and Fortnite and the other stuff that was out there.And obviously, it’s hard to look at PUBG and not be impressed by how many people are playing. We figured maybe the fact that it is a gun game makes it more accessible, because people understand how shooters work, whereas The Culling has a melee combat system that takes a bit to wrap your head around. We took that system and put it in The Culling 2, so melee combat was still really powerful, but it was less prominent because it was a gun game.With hindsight it’s obvious why it didn’t work, but we thought one of the problems with The Culling was how different it was. We’ve now realised that you can’t compete against those giant games unless you’re really significantly differentiated, but also, even if The Culling is a bit more of a niche product, it’s nice to be in a niche in battle royale at this point, rather than trying to swing with the big 800-pound gorillas in the room.We are a small studio, and we were just way over ambitious looking back on it. We shipped on three platforms, PC, Xbox One and PS4, which is

Initial cull will help to speed up your workflow before importing images to Lightroom as you’ll import fewer images.Here you can see the Lightroom options for culling photos: star rating, flagging and color labelsCreate a culling systemCulling can become challenging when you’re emotionally attached to images, making it difficult to assess their quality objectively. I find it helps to load photos to the computer, have a quick look and then come back later or the next day to start the culling process. This gives me time to detach from the images and can make decisions more easily.For an efficient manual culling system you need to figure out a way that works for you so that you have a consistent process that you don’t spend time reinventing each time. This’ll also help you to detach emotionally and assess images based on merit only.The top photo editing software programs have similar culling tools that include:Star ratingFlaggingColor labelsFilteringWe all have different ways of selecting final images, which we develop over time. I’ll give you a quick overview of my digital photography workflow that’s the most efficient way for me.Further reading: How to delete photos from Lightroom SAFELY (step-by-step guide)My Lightroom culling workflowThis is how, for the last 10 or 11 years, I’ve been reducing a large number of photos (150 – 200) from a portrait session down to a maximum of 80 photos that I present to the client.Import photos from memory card to a new folder in my Lightroom catalogIn Lightroom Library module I create new collection with the client’s name in loupe viewSelect all images in the folder and add to the new collectionFirst pass – use the arrow keys on my keyboard to go through the photos one and a time and delete rejected images from the folder as I