The Isle Developer Accused of Soliciting Minors for Nudes/Sending Nudes to Minors - Ongoing since 2015. Close friend of game creator (Dondi).

[j666]

Forgive me for being a little lazy, but I don't know enough about the entire situation to go into details. I'm only posting this information here for the sake of posterity, as the person who originally uploaded these albums keeps deleting it "for legal reasons".


I've never participated in The Isle's discord, but apparently Paradym/Spartan5150 being a pedo has been a running joke in their community for years and Dondi has allegedly been aware of this since 2015 when accusations first arose. It's also worth mentioning that Para is apparently a close childhood friend of Dondi's. Accusations are making rounds again, right as Dondi suspiciously decides to "take a break from the game". Multiple mods on their subreddit are quitting and encouraging others to uninstall the game.

Subreddit Mod Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/theisle/comments/i2l0m9/bye_everyone/ (Archive)

Claims made by someone on The Isle sub 2 weeks ago:

Their Account: https://www.reddit.com/user/Darth_EA/ (Archive)
Deleted Posts: https://snew.notabug.io/user/Darth_EA/

Screenshots (mostly) from The Isle Discord, with users joking about or mentioning Para/Spartan being a known/self-admitted pedophile:

Spoiler

Information linking Paradym as Spartan5150, legal name Chris Wistock (when he mentions @wistock, I believe he's talking about his father?) :

Spoiler

1 of the accusations, with proof:

Spoiler: NSFW

 

[dreamworks face]

Rare footage of the Star Wars-only pedophile.

“We always say there are two types of pedophiles: Star Trek and Star Wars” says Det. Ian Lamond, the unit’s second-incommand. “But it’s mostly Star Trek.”

 

[MrTroll]

Will the dinosaur game community ever recover from this scandal??

 

[Dark Edea]

What the fuck is The Isle? You know what, I don't care. It's probably some dumb open world crafty game with shitty Unreal graphics that attracts hordes of preteen boys with no standards.

Will the dinosaur game community ever recover from this scandal??

Wow it has dinosaurs, too? I was going to say that but figured it would be a bit over the top.

What I want to know is when are we going to be shutting down Discord? Every time one of these stories comes out, there's a Discord trail a mile and a half long. Parents: let your kids play video games, they're fine and the kid will have fun. Do not ever let your kid go on Discord.

 

[RJ MacReady]

I've heard of this guy before. Average thin-skinned Greenlight dev that blows up at criticism, etc. IIRC he's also the dude who bought his way into a GTA 5 private server populated by streamers, threw money at the server admin to get special powers, threw money at the streamers to play with him and then got banned because the admin refused to give him the source code and he threw a shitfit.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

It's "posterity", not "prosperity.

 

[George Orson Welles]

The fuck? 2015? What? I've never heard of this game, I'm gonna go on a whim here and say that nobody else here has either, still not surprised about pedo accusations though.

 

[A Cardboard Box]

I don't know, she was 15, knew what she was doing.

 

[Y2K Baby]

Based and cunnypilled.

 

[Muttnik]

Fun random fact: The Isle is essentially the definition of blue-balling.

You love dinosaurs? GREAT, here's a game where you can BE the dinosaur. Oh well, actually only about five or six of them. The others are only playable on the sandbox servers that no one goes to. Also you have to kill other players or AI (that never show up) to eat if your carnivore dinosaur ever wants to level up into something badass so have fun running around blindly in the dark until you starve to death! Did I mention that your senses stop working when it starts raining on the map and that it rains ALL THE TIME? Not to mention it's extremely difficult getting to specific parts of the map, especially when it comes to crossing over narrow terrain. You fall? You're either dead or you're crippled for five minutes. The scent system itself is terrible. You never know where other players are and you have to blindly trust that your "compass" is pointing you in the right direction when in reality, you have no clue where you are on the map, where everyone else is, or if you're even going in the right direction. Certain parts of the map are complete ghost-towns with no players or AI to hunt. At some point, you can't even rely on eating AI anymore because, if by some lucky instance you managed to reach the sub-adult level, your dino is now "too big" to eat tiny little triceratops bots. So you're forced to find other players and good fucking luck with that since your heavy-fuck footsteps can be heard for miles away. Mods police pretty much all of your behaviors and will ban you if you try to hide from other players coming at you. Also growing into a full grown T-Rex takes three hours so buckle up buckaroo and try to stay fed and hydrated for three full hours while stumbling around directionlessly during the ungodly long nighttime segments and trying to not get killed by overpowered mods and regulars.

If by some miracle you manage to do ALL OF THOSE THINGS, watch in shock and awe as the sever deletes all your progress on its own because of its shitty autosave function or enjoy getting one-shot murdered by a bunch of pack-mentality assholes out of nowhere. Three hours down the drain.

Anyway, fuck all the developers. The game itself makes me want to drink and barely anyone can run it because the graphic levels are absurdly high.

 

[j666]

The fuck? 2015? What? I've never heard of this game, I'm gonna go on a whim here and say that nobody else here has either, still not surprised about pedo accusations though.

it blew up a few years ago when streamers were covering it, but overall its just an okay game. its been in beta for like 5 years if that tells you anything.

 

[Inflatable Julay]

Rare footage of the Star Wars-only pedophile.

It's like an alternate universe Aatrek

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Fucking disgusting

 

[Marissa Moira]

Fun random fact: The Isle is essentially the definition of blue-balling.

You love dinosaurs? GREAT, here's a game where you can BE the dinosaur. Oh well, actually only about five or six of them. The others are only playable on the sandbox servers that no one goes to. Also you have to kill other players or AI (that never show up) to eat if your carnivore dinosaur ever wants to level up into something badass so have fun running around blindly in the dark until you starve to death! Did I mention that your senses stop working when it starts raining on the map and that it rains ALL THE TIME? Not to mention it's extremely difficult getting to specific parts of the map, especially when it comes to crossing over narrow terrain. You fall? You're either dead or you're crippled for five minutes. The scent system itself is terrible. You never know where other players are and you have to blindly trust that your "compass" is pointing you in the right direction when in reality, you have no clue where you are on the map, where everyone else is, or if you're even going in the right direction. Certain parts of the map are complete ghost-towns with no players or AI to hunt. At some point, you can't even rely on eating AI anymore because, if by some lucky instance you managed to reach the sub-adult level, your dino is now "too big" to eat tiny little triceratops bots. So you're forced to find other players and good fucking luck with that since your heavy-fuck footsteps can be heard for miles away. Mods police pretty much all of your behaviors and will ban you if you try to hide from other players coming at you. Also growing into a full grown T-Rex takes three hours so buckle up buckaroo and try to stay fed and hydrated for three full hours while stumbling around directionlessly during the ungodly long nighttime segments and trying to not get killed by overpowered mods and regulars.

If by some miracle you manage to do ALL OF THOSE THINGS, watch in shock and awe as the sever deletes all your progress on its own because of its shitty autosave function or enjoy getting one-shot murdered by a bunch of pack-mentality assholes out of nowhere. Three hours down the drain.

Anyway, fuck all the developers. The game itself makes me want to drink and barely anyone can run it because the graphic levels are absurdly high.

Is this the game where they spent a shitload of time researching shit to be `100% accurate to the late cretaceous and got the furries mad when they removed the t-rex with feathers model and replaced it with the non-feathered version?

 

[Terror Rism]

holy shit the Sky Williams-related abuser rabbit hole goes DEEP

 

[Al112ex995]

Fun random fact: The Isle is essentially the definition of blue-balling.

You love dinosaurs? GREAT, here's a game where you can BE the dinosaur. Oh well, actually only about five or six of them. The others are only playable on the sandbox servers that no one goes to. Also you have to kill other players or AI (that never show up) to eat if your carnivore dinosaur ever wants to level up into something badass so have fun running around blindly in the dark until you starve to death! Did I mention that your senses stop working when it starts raining on the map and that it rains ALL THE TIME? Not to mention it's extremely difficult getting to specific parts of the map, especially when it comes to crossing over narrow terrain. You fall? You're either dead or you're crippled for five minutes. The scent system itself is terrible. You never know where other players are and you have to blindly trust that your "compass" is pointing you in the right direction when in reality, you have no clue where you are on the map, where everyone else is, or if you're even going in the right direction. Certain parts of the map are complete ghost-towns with no players or AI to hunt. At some point, you can't even rely on eating AI anymore because, if by some lucky instance you managed to reach the sub-adult level, your dino is now "too big" to eat tiny little triceratops bots. So you're forced to find other players and good fucking luck with that since your heavy-fuck footsteps can be heard for miles away. Mods police pretty much all of your behaviors and will ban you if you try to hide from other players coming at you. Also growing into a full grown T-Rex takes three hours so buckle up buckaroo and try to stay fed and hydrated for three full hours while stumbling around directionlessly during the ungodly long nighttime segments and trying to not get killed by overpowered mods and regulars.

If by some miracle you manage to do ALL OF THOSE THINGS, watch in shock and awe as the sever deletes all your progress on its own because of its shitty autosave function or enjoy getting one-shot murdered by a bunch of pack-mentality assholes out of nowhere. Three hours down the drain.

Anyway, fuck all the developers. The game itself makes me want to drink and barely anyone can run it because the graphic levels are absurdly high.

Ok, where do I even begin... Even though I genuinely do not agree and am actually super against most of the behavior shown by the devs, I do still love this game and will defend it against actual and literal slander. I'll go over your points 1 by 1 to make it simple.

1 - "here's a game where you can BE the dinosaur. Oh well, actually only about five or six of them". This is completely untrue and false and if you played the game for more than one session you would know it to be true. Even a quick google search will tell you that there are actually 15 dinosaurs in the survival game mode in The Isle.

2 - "The [other dinos] are only playable on the sandbox servers that no one goes to". Again this is another almost completely wrong statement. Sandbox has a high population and it is due to 2 factors, 1 some people don't have enough time to play survival, and 2 most people practice PVP in these sandbox maps since you have literally nothing to lose.

3 - "Also you have to kill other players or AI (that never show up) to eat if your carnivore dinosaur ever wants to level up into something badass so have fun running around blindly in the dark until you starve to death!" I have never died of hunger in The Isle and only died once to thirst due to the fact that it was the first time I ever played the game. AI distribution and quantity is actually a problem in the opposite way you depict as it is simply too easy to grow in the game by going to unpopulated areas and hunting AI until you can kill everything else. AI is plentiful and water is almost everywhere on the map. Everyone dinosaur in-game has a built-in night vision which even though I believe to be a poor implementation, would not allow you to be "running around blindly in the dark[...]". I also am under the impression you don't know that there is a herbivore faction as that would easily explain why you said there were only 5-6 dinosaurs in the game however that still does not mean your intentions are not malicious since even taking herbivores out of the game would result in 7 dinosaurs and not 5-6 as you say.

4 - "Did I mention that your senses stop working when it starts raining on the map and that it rains ALL THE TIME?". Yet another almost entirely factually incorrect statement. Your experience may have been that of rain 24/7 however that is simply bad luck on your end and is not something implemented into the game. If by senses you mean smell, then yes you do lose the ability to smell, however sniffing provides very specific abilities such as an in-game compass, tracking, finding berry bushes/carcass gore, and finding water. If you are dehydrated in-game and do not know where water is because it is raining, you are simply playing a survival game incorrectly. You are supposed to prioritize water in any survival game and finding water as soon as you spawn is essential to almost any survival game and since you can't see where water is while it is raining, you actually cannot die from thirst while it is raining.

5 - "Not to mention it's extremely difficult getting to specific parts of the map, especially when it comes to crossing over narrow terrain. You fall? You're either dead or you're crippled for five minutes". You should understand not to cross over narrow terrain as a dinosaur which is not very mobile. Fortunately, the only not very mobile creatures in the game are apexes and some other carnivores(Suchomimus and Carnotaurus which have niches that don't even need mobility, to begin with.) "The scent system itself is terrible. You never know where other players are and you have to blindly trust that your 'compass' is pointing you in the right direction when in reality, you have no clue where you are on the map, where everyone else is, or if you're even going in the right direction". The scent system does exactly what it wants and needs to do. It is not a map or a player locator. Players familiar with the game know popular spots where other dinosaurs usually gather just like how it would work in real life. Animals have to learn through experiences that other animals they may or may not be able to hunt usually gather in some areas. You are asking for a map that you can open in-game with ease that tells you where other players are. Opening a map in-game is currently impossible however there are maps on the internet in which you can quickly copy and paste your location from the character menu and do exactly what you are wanting except the whole player finder thing which kinda defeats the whole purpose of tracking/hunting.

6 - "Certain parts of the map are complete ghost-towns with no players or AI to hunt." This is partially wrong. Depending on the server, sure there may be places in which there are no players. This is not a fault in the game, however, but instead on your poor choice of servers. There are 300 player servers in which I cannot find any peace which ended up making me go back to the other 150 player servers since you can actually breathe without other dinos violating social distancing in them. There are areas in which AI is less common however they do not stop spawning outright as long as there is a hungry carnivore nearby. "At some point, you can't even rely on eating AI anymore because, if by some lucky instance you managed to reach the sub-adult level, your dino is now 'too big' to eat tiny little triceratops bots". This is just wrong. Even full adult apex dinosaurs can eat the smallest animal in the game. Those "tiny little triceratops bots" can even provide a quick meal for a full adult rex and since they spawn so frequently, will be more than enough to fill a rex up if they choose to stay in one area. "So you're forced to find other players and good fucking luck with that since your heavy-fuck footsteps can be heard for miles away". This is also wrong. Unless you are a full sub-adult apex, things will only hear your footsteps within a range you can chase down or ambush most of the dinosaur cast easily. And even if you are a full adult rex or Giga, sneaking is an element available in the game in which you "sneak", thus making your footsteps make barely any sound. The problem with sub-adult and full-grown adult apexes is that they are easily visible unless in very thick shrubbery and even then as a fully grown apex there is no reason to sneak in the first place since your niche is of active confrontation not stalking.

7 - "Mods police pretty much all of your behaviors and will ban you if you try to hide from other players coming at you". Mod abuse is indeed a pretty big problem in The Isle however that is not in any way a fault in the game as many of the most popular servers have rules and mods that are generally good which is why these servers get popular in the first place. "Also growing into a full grown T-Rex takes three hours so buckle up buckaroo and try to stay fed and hydrated for three full hours while stumbling around directionlessly during the ungodly long nighttime segments and trying to not get killed by overpowered mods and regulars." There are 2 things here, 1 is that growing into a full rex actually takes almost 6 hours I believe and growth times are honestly a big turn off for playing the game for me however the adrenaline you get from getting into a fight you don't think you can win and having over 10 hours on the line is well worth it imo especially if you are good at the game and can pull off winning ridiculous scenarios like Sticky Utah who killed 2 rexes as a raptor among other even crazier things he's done. The 2nd thing is that The Isle is extremely balanced. There is almost no dinosaurs that have it extremely tough other than a herbivore called pachycephalosaurus. These overpowered mods are indeed a problem however again this is easily solved by joining a good server where mods lose their jobs for abusing their power.

8 - "If by some miracle you manage to do ALL OF THOSE THINGS, watch in shock and awe as the sever deletes all your progress on its own because of its shitty autosave function or enjoy getting one-shot murdered by a bunch of pack-mentality assholes out of nowhere. Three hours down the drain". And finally this. Servers rarely delete your progress and the log system is extremely straight forward. Hell, I even understood how it worked when I was 10 so unless you have some mental handicap(which if you do I'm sorry) then you should have no excuse in not understanding the log system. Simply put, to log out you must wait a designated amount of time and if you log out before then your dino takes 5 extra minutes to actually leave the server. This is here to avoid people logging out mid fights and hunts. and being one-shot killed by these "pack-mentality assholes" is only possible for 2 reasons, 1 you are not aware of your surroundings and got ambushed or 2 you are a pachycephalosaurus and cannot outrun things that instantly kill you like rexes.

Lastly, I play the isle on a laptop so no, you do not need a very powerful PC to enjoy the game. It would be good if you did however it is simply not necessary as there are lower setting implemented for a reason. Even then the game is optimized enough for me to play on full epic quality visuals (the 2nd highest before cinematic) with almost no frame drop whatsoever...

Honestly much of all your text is just false information and you are spreading it on a site in which not a lot of people know about the game. This hurts the community and people who just want to have a fun dino game. People who grew up watching dino documentaries such as myself (I guess I'm still growing but whatever lmao). If you don't like a dev or a group of devs fine, however, if you go out of your way to spread false information to people who are not aware, then it's just wrong.

 

[Muttnik]

Ok, where do I even begin... Even though I genuinely do not agree and am actually super against most of the behavior shown by the devs, I do still love this game and will defend it against actual and literal slander. I'll go over your points 1 by 1 to make it simple.

1 - "here's a game where you can BE the dinosaur. Oh well, actually only about five or six of them". This is completely untrue and false and if you played the game for more than one session you would know it to be true. Even a quick google search will tell you that there are actually 15 dinosaurs in the survival game mode in The Isle.

2 - "The [other dinos] are only playable on the sandbox servers that no one goes to". Again this is another almost completely wrong statement. Sandbox has a high population and it is due to 2 factors, 1 some people don't have enough time to play survival, and 2 most people practice PVP in these sandbox maps since you have literally nothing to lose.

3 - "Also you have to kill other players or AI (that never show up) to eat if your carnivore dinosaur ever wants to level up into something badass so have fun running around blindly in the dark until you starve to death!" I have never died of hunger in The Isle and only died once to thirst due to the fact that it was the first time I ever played the game. AI distribution and quantity is actually a problem in the opposite way you depict as it is simply too easy to grow in the game by going to unpopulated areas and hunting AI until you can kill everything else. AI is plentiful and water is almost everywhere on the map. Everyone dinosaur in-game has a built-in night vision which even though I believe to be a poor implementation, would not allow you to be "running around blindly in the dark[...]". I also am under the impression you don't know that there is a herbivore faction as that would easily explain why you said there were only 5-6 dinosaurs in the game however that still does not mean your intentions are not malicious since even taking herbivores out of the game would result in 7 dinosaurs and not 5-6 as you say.

4 - "Did I mention that your senses stop working when it starts raining on the map and that it rains ALL THE TIME?". Yet another almost entirely factually incorrect statement. Your experience may have been that of rain 24/7 however that is simply bad luck on your end and is not something implemented into the game. If by senses you mean smell, then yes you do lose the ability to smell, however sniffing provides very specific abilities such as an in-game compass, tracking, finding berry bushes/carcass gore, and finding water. If you are dehydrated in-game and do not know where water is because it is raining, you are simply playing a survival game incorrectly. You are supposed to prioritize water in any survival game and finding water as soon as you spawn is essential to almost any survival game and since you can't see where water is while it is raining, you actually cannot die from thirst while it is raining.

5 - "Not to mention it's extremely difficult getting to specific parts of the map, especially when it comes to crossing over narrow terrain. You fall? You're either dead or you're crippled for five minutes". You should understand not to cross over narrow terrain as a dinosaur which is not very mobile. Fortunately, the only not very mobile creatures in the game are apexes and some other carnivores(Suchomimus and Carnotaurus which have niches that don't even need mobility, to begin with.) "The scent system itself is terrible. You never know where other players are and you have to blindly trust that your 'compass' is pointing you in the right direction when in reality, you have no clue where you are on the map, where everyone else is, or if you're even going in the right direction". The scent system does exactly what it wants and needs to do. It is not a map or a player locator. Players familiar with the game know popular spots where other dinosaurs usually gather just like how it would work in real life. Animals have to learn through experiences that other animals they may or may not be able to hunt usually gather in some areas. You are asking for a map that you can open in-game with ease that tells you where other players are. Opening a map in-game is currently impossible however there are maps on the internet in which you can quickly copy and paste your location from the character menu and do exactly what you are wanting except the whole player finder thing which kinda defeats the whole purpose of tracking/hunting.

6 - "Certain parts of the map are complete ghost-towns with no players or AI to hunt." This is partially wrong. Depending on the server, sure there may be places in which there are no players. This is not a fault in the game, however, but instead on your poor choice of servers. There are 300 player servers in which I cannot find any peace which ended up making me go back to the other 150 player servers since you can actually breathe without other dinos violating social distancing in them. There are areas in which AI is less common however they do not stop spawning outright as long as there is a hungry carnivore nearby. "At some point, you can't even rely on eating AI anymore because, if by some lucky instance you managed to reach the sub-adult level, your dino is now 'too big' to eat tiny little triceratops bots". This is just wrong. Even full adult apex dinosaurs can eat the smallest animal in the game. Those "tiny little triceratops bots" can even provide a quick meal for a full adult rex and since they spawn so frequently, will be more than enough to fill a rex up if they choose to stay in one area. "So you're forced to find other players and good fucking luck with that since your heavy-fuck footsteps can be heard for miles away". This is also wrong. Unless you are a full sub-adult apex, things will only hear your footsteps within a range you can chase down or ambush most of the dinosaur cast easily. And even if you are a full adult rex or Giga, sneaking is an element available in the game in which you "sneak", thus making your footsteps make barely any sound. The problem with sub-adult and full-grown adult apexes is that they are easily visible unless in very thick shrubbery and even then as a fully grown apex there is no reason to sneak in the first place since your niche is of active confrontation not stalking.

7 - "Mods police pretty much all of your behaviors and will ban you if you try to hide from other players coming at you". Mod abuse is indeed a pretty big problem in The Isle however that is not in any way a fault in the game as many of the most popular servers have rules and mods that are generally good which is why these servers get popular in the first place. "Also growing into a full grown T-Rex takes three hours so buckle up buckaroo and try to stay fed and hydrated for three full hours while stumbling around directionlessly during the ungodly long nighttime segments and trying to not get killed by overpowered mods and regulars." There are 2 things here, 1 is that growing into a full rex actually takes almost 6 hours I believe and growth times are honestly a big turn off for playing the game for me however the adrenaline you get from getting into a fight you don't think you can win and having over 10 hours on the line is well worth it imo especially if you are good at the game and can pull off winning ridiculous scenarios like Sticky Utah who killed 2 rexes as a raptor among other even crazier things he's done. The 2nd thing is that The Isle is extremely balanced. There is almost no dinosaurs that have it extremely tough other than a herbivore called pachycephalosaurus. These overpowered mods are indeed a problem however again this is easily solved by joining a good server where mods lose their jobs for abusing their power.

8 - "If by some miracle you manage to do ALL OF THOSE THINGS, watch in shock and awe as the sever deletes all your progress on its own because of its shitty autosave function or enjoy getting one-shot murdered by a bunch of pack-mentality assholes out of nowhere. Three hours down the drain". And finally this. Servers rarely delete your progress and the log system is extremely straight forward. Hell, I even understood how it worked when I was 10 so unless you have some mental handicap(which if you do I'm sorry) then you should have no excuse in not understanding the log system. Simply put, to log out you must wait a designated amount of time and if you log out before then your dino takes 5 extra minutes to actually leave the server. This is here to avoid people logging out mid fights and hunts. and being one-shot killed by these "pack-mentality assholes" is only possible for 2 reasons, 1 you are not aware of your surroundings and got ambushed or 2 you are a pachycephalosaurus and cannot outrun things that instantly kill you like rexes.

Lastly, I play the isle on a laptop so no, you do not need a very powerful PC to enjoy the game. It would be good if you did however it is simply not necessary as there are lower setting implemented for a reason. Even then the game is optimized enough for me to play on full epic quality visuals (the 2nd highest before cinematic) with almost no frame drop whatsoever...

Honestly much of all your text is just false information and you are spreading it on a site in which not a lot of people know about the game. This hurts the community and people who just want to have a fun dino game. People who grew up watching dino documentaries such as myself (I guess I'm still growing but whatever lmao). If you don't like a dev or a group of devs fine, however, if you go out of your way to spread false information to people who are not aware, then it's just wrong.

Lol someone made an account just to sperg about their clunky mess of a game

Listen, buddy. I'm sure as shit not great at games but I have almost 60 hours clocked in trying to play this turkey. I think I'm very aware of my experiences and frustrations trying to play it. Everyone's experience is different depending on their level of patience. But the game itself isn't fun. It's empty, frustrating, and at times extremely tedious.

Obviously in my rambling the use of sarcasm and mild exaggeration is used in order to convey a sense of exasperation. But I'll be frank--I have given this game chance after chance and it has fucked me over every time. The scent is bullshit and doesn't help. The maps are too big to find anyone and you are running in circles to find prey. I have starved to death over and over and over again and when I didn't, I'd get ambushed out of nowhere. It's bullshit that the growth takes that long, the sandbox maps are always empty on my end, the graphics are complete ass on my laptop, the AI rarely spawn when you need them, the community itself is a shitshow, the night segments make me want to shoot myself because hunting is almost nigh impossible, you shouldn't have to save a PDF image of a map just to know where you're at, the list goes on. It's a mess and not something that people can just hop onto for good old dinosaur fun. It relies on pure luck and chance instead of actual skill. And that's... really awful imo.

So have fun. You do you. The game for me is borderline unplayable.

 

[Herr Flick]

I casually play the Isle, have kept an eye on some of the drama and frankly this development isn't surprising to me in the slightest. The title here says 2015 but the Isle has been a consistently atrocious affair ever since for many reasons, with the most recent drama happening just about a month ago.

Spoiler: Here's a summary.

Matt aka DeathlyRage was a developer and programmer for the Isle, until he had a falling out with the team, was fired by Dondi, and left to go make his own dinosaur game, Path of Titans. Deathly had coded all of the Isle, and when he left, the other devs used it as an excuse to throw their hands up and go 'we can't add/fix anything to the game until we remake it from scratch. Deathly was a bad programmer anyway and his coding was so bad we can't fix it.' This lead to the fabled legend of the recode, the transformation that would recreate the Isle to match the vision of the devs and fix everything people have been complaining about for actual years; it doubled as a conveninent way to blame all current issues on DeathlyRage. Once the recode was on the horizon, anything that players bitched about was answered with "just wait for the recode you faggot." So, people decided that well, alright, it's an early access game, they've said they won't do anything else with the current state of affairs, so, let's see if they deliver.

Well, the recode finally arrived mid-June of this year............ and, surprise, it was (and is) shit. After years of hype, the recode (named EVRIMA, Greek for 'discovery') arrived and was completely dead on arrival. It is an objectively inferior experience to legacy in every way imaginable. There are only two dinosaurs to play, with buggy new mechanics, a broken new map, broken combat mechanics, no collision, no AI, not even any working menus for adjusting system settings, no group system (which the old game had,) absolutely fucking nothing. A literal walking simulator, barely even a tech demo, with optimization so atrocious that it caused high end machines to stutter and lag around 10fps on launch, and an annoying glitch where, if you tried to log into a server and it failed, you had to restart the entire game to try again, which was terribly fun because the servers were glitched and displaying themselves as being 10 people below their listed max capacity when they were full.

And, in addition to having LESS content than the broken mess that is the legacy branch, it doesn't have a single one of the promised new features except the ability to wallow to make your footprints impossible to detect with scent, which hardly matters when there's only 1 carnivore in the game and the map is massive and nobody is playing EVRIMA.

So, the vaunted recode finally arrives, people play it for 1 day and then uninstall it and go back to playing legacy because it is worse than the game it was supposed to replace.

The devs went on to further dig their own graves by saying that the recode is a work in progress, a new foundation to build on, and that they were hoping to release batches of dinosaurs every month. So far, a month+ out from EVRIMA dropping, we still have two broken dinos with no sign of new dinos or AI being implemented any time soon. Surprise! People have asked why they don't just add the old game's roster back in, but get told the team wants to 'do it right,' demonstrating their complete inability to read the room. At this point, adding the old broken dinosaurs to the game might be the only thing to keep The Isle as a whole on life support.

Meanwhile, Deathly went on to develop his own competitor to the Isle, named Path of Titans, beginning development a little over a year ago. A little while after EVRIMA dropped, PoT--which, allow me to reiterate, has been in development for A YEAR in comparison to the Isle's five--came out with a patch for its demo that implements collision, something Isle players have been asking for for ages. As of this posting, the Path of Titans demo is further along in functionality than both The Isle Legacy and EVRIMA combined. This from the 'bad programmer' that made the only branch of The Isle that's playable. Must be pretty terrible at his job, eh?

So, what happens next? Well, EVRIMA rightfully gets shat on, the Isle reddit gets filled with memes at the game's and devs' expense, and Dondi, the Isle's lead dev with an extremely toxic reputation, goes on Twitter to talk about his depression. Then, a couple weeks later, Dondi announces that he is taking a break...

The Isle has been squandering the good will of its loyal fans and playerbase for ages. People were already quitting when Path of Titans came out with collision while The Isle's recode, which was supposed to fix everything, is a broken mess that is far too little, far, far too late. Now we have this pedoshit, and that sheds a lot more light on why Dondi might've decided to take a break and step away. All of this is a shame, because the game has some potential, and some really talented folks are responsible for its art, models and sound design. But it's had a rotten heart from the beginning and the reveal of a pedo in a prominent position is just the cherry on a shit sundae half a decade in the making.

Let me end this post with a recent gem: live on stream, the devs called a respectful and eloquent teenage content creator that's been a fan of the game for years a "shitbird" and denied him content creator status in the Discord for the crime of politely criticising the opinion of one of the devs, once, in a well-made video full of suggestions for improving the game. (The big punishment was not being able to play the trainwreck that is EVRIMA early. Oh no, such a deprivation.) Guess who did damage control after the fact? Why, Captain Pedo here!

When a pedo is one of the only adults in the room, you really have got a problem.

Spoiler: Game sperging

@Alto It sounds like your experience was from one of the game's early incarnations where, on Survival mode, you had to 'progress' through surviving dinos in a sequential order before you could play bigger/better dinos. That shit was garbage and it's amazing it stuck around as long as it did. But even so, while the game is better now in that regard (you can start as whatever dino you want,) it's still not great enough to keep me coming back except for when I have a really particular itch. Also, t-rex takes 6 hours to grow now lol, but adult t-rex is also a nightmare to encounter as any other dino because they'll usually win in a 1v1, so I personally prioritize killing them when they're young. Circle of life, mein Freund.

Just to be clear: game's still a shit afk/frustration simulator, there are pedo/pedo-protecting devs, Dondi's an asshole--even though it's improved, it's far from worth it to play. If you want a dino game, there are way better options.

Edited to add this, harvested from The Isle Discord:

Edit again: Fixed a link.

 

[BOONES]

Holy shit the real crime in all of this is how much there is to read, whatever happened to summaries people?!

 

[Emanems]

Hold up... I didn't know there was a Taco'n'Banana connection with all of this, that's interesting. A bunch of those are not of The Isle Discord, but the Taco'n'Banana one.
There's shitloads of drama in the years of that community alone.

It's weird how for a fucking Gmod roleplay community there seem to be "expats" of it all over the Internet, it's almost as if the internet is a small world really.