I'll come right out and say it.

The game used to be an incredibly immersive experience with a wide range of playables, simple yet functional mechanics that largely was carried off the amazing sound design and stellar animations, models, textures of the playable assets.

Combat has ranged from a joke to fun as hell over the 5+ years I have had the game. Combat's really what I am playing for, as well as the simple stakes, eat or be eaten, and the loss from a mistake sending anyone back to the start. As someone who stuck to official servers, with no such thing as revives or p2w grows, the game was awesome, a no man's land with only a few rules. Sure streamers got special treatment, but the experience overall was fun so long as you knew where to find action. Balance wasn't great, with a lot of awful classes that take forever to grind for (in this game, you spawn as ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ versions of your end product and need to survive until you can actually play a somewhat balanced experience) such as the Parasaurolophus that was eaten by everything or the Pachycephalosaurus that couldn't fight even similarly sized animals without exploding from bloodloss, or the semiaquatic Suchomimus who swam slower than a Tyrannosaurus...

But it was still fun, especially with friends, and the world felt alien and unsettling at times with great music and unforgiving combat.

The game is none of these things anymore. The "legacy" experience, which houses all the great playables people really care about, it wasn't perfect by any means, but it could have been touched up. Sure, it didn't have the necessary framework for things like grapples or kill moves, but it WORKED. It was serviceable and fun. Now, the abandoned legacy, what you have when you buy the game and fresh install? A hellscape filled with hackers and 'fake' servers, the officials long dead and a few community servers clinging to life.

The beta branch, which is really more of a tech demo if we are being honest here, is called evrima. It sucks. The sound design makes every animal feel small, movement feels clunkier than before and to top it off, it is not only a horribly buggy mess plagued with crashes and character deletion... but it also just lacks in content, the one thing that legacy was carried by.

I'm only still here bc of stockholm syndrome. I remember when the game was fun as hell, and all the great memories that I've made. But evrima develops so, so terribly slow, keeps failing to meet the expectations the devs set themselves and the game gradually is losing its magic. Its just boring. It lacks the eye candy that made legacy acceptable, the diverse range of matchups, and so on. Sure, evrima has better scent system and more combat mechanics... but it isn't enough to really warrant the price of all the other things wrong with it.