The Culling: Origins' free-to-play relaunch is today

The Culling is going back to the beginning. With the battle royale’s sequel now officially shelved, developer Xaviant has returned to its predecessor; today it relaunches as The Culling: Origins. If you played the original back in its early access days, it might be familiar.

“When The Culling originally launched in March of 2016, it had an exciting, ‘anything goes’ approach to battle royale that was eventually sanded down over the course of many updates,” says Xaviant. “Origins brings back that special mojo by returning to the game’s roots, incorporating the spirit of Day 1 combat, perks, airdrops and overall gameplay.”

It’s a dramatic shift that’s also been accompanied by the move to free-to-play. That’s not the only difference, however; Origins has a new art direction, XP, levelling, leaderboards, new weapons and voice chat. And since it’s going free-to-play, of course it’s going to have some crates.

Cull Crates are awarded when you level up and contain four cosmetic items or in-game currency. Credits can also be used to buy more of these crates. Crates (and premium items) can also be purchased with tokens that cost real cash, though they will also appear in crates occasionally. It’s doesn’t sound like a terrible implementation, and only DLC will be completely unattainable without dropping money. The DLC also won’t be gameplay-related; all of that will be free-to-play.

If you owned the original, you’ll receive an ‘Original Gangster’ founder pack. Inside you’ll get some outfits, 1000 tokens, weapon skins, two Culling Cards and four Cull Crates. The pack will also be available as DLC that will cost the same as the pre-F2P version of The Culling.

The Culling: Origins is due out on Steam today.

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