In the spring of 2019, Snail Games launched Virtual Basement’s then-new survival sandbox MMO Outlaws of the Old West into Steam early access under the Wandering Wizard label, intending to keep it in early access for just a year. Well, it’s now been two, and the game is still right there in early access, with fewer players than ever.
The game’s most recent official update came in October 2020, when all of the servers were wiped outright “to fix critical issues.” Prior to that, the game hadn’t seen an actual patch since June of last year, and that one focused on a handful of bug fixes. Snail put the game on sale back in January without addressing the state of the game, which doesn’t seem to have moved much since our first impressions.
According to SteamDB, the game’s player concurrency peak was nearly 5000 when it rolled into early access two years ago, but it’s been in the 100-players-or-so range for most of the time since that release, barring a noticeable spike last spring. The Reddit appears to be all but dead, with the remaining players clustering in a small but breathing Discord, where gamers still speculate on bad blood between the original developer and Snail Games that may be preventing further development.
Developer Virtual Basement, we note, appears to have shifted its attention to a wrestling-themed game and hasn’t tweeted about Outlaws in at least a year. Needless to say, at this point, we can’t recommend investing time or money into this one.
