Hunt: Showdown Needs To Be Easier, But Not Easy, Dev Says

Hunt: Showdown takes the title of the game I enjoy the most despite being bad at it. Like most people probably do, at a certain point, I'll drop a game from my life if the losing streaks are piling up too much and it's not feeling fun anymore. I don't win much in the horror-western extraction shooter, but I still play it a lot anyway because I find it alluring in other ways; the audio design is as immersive and instructive as any game I know; the artwork, especially its character design, is diverse and captivating. It's a no-holds-barred PvPvE game that I often play, even when I've come to expect failure.

As the game kicks off its latest event, Garden of the Witch, during its ongoing seventh-anniversary celebration, I recently caught up with a few folks from the Hunt: Showdown team at Crytek. This difficulty ramp was top of mind for me, but we touched on some other subjects too, like that aforementioned audio design being integral to the Hunt experience, and whether we might see Hunt: Showdown in other media, like movies or TV, someday. (Hint: It seems likely.)

You can find our full chat below, including thoughts on how the team hopes to make Hunt's learning curve a bit more manageable without losing its signature ruthlessness.

GameSpot: Hunt: Showdown recently celebrated its seventh anniversary. What have been some of the game's biggest milestones or moments through the years?

Dennis Schwarz, Design Director: Some of the biggest moments for the game have definitely been within the events that we’ve run. One of the first in 2021 was ‘As the Crow Flies.’ This was the first event where the community had to work to unlock Scrapbeak. This event was beloved by both the community and the development team, and we’ve built from there.

Another moment that stands out is when we broke our [concurrent users] record in 2023 with the release of Rotjaw during ‘Tide of Shadows.’ It was a great moment for us to see that there was so much excitement around a new boss/Wild Target and also to see this in the CCU record being broken was an amazing moment for the team!

Of course, more recently, we also broke this record once again with the release of Hunt: Showdown 1896. This was easily one of the most pivotal moments for us as we launched CRYENGINE 5.11, the new map Mammon’s Gulch, and a host of other changes. While that release didn’t go without some hiccups, the reception we got around Mammon’s Gulch was unmatched and something we are still very proud of.

Hunt's audiovisual experience is clearly a focal point for the team. When I play, it feels like everything is so intentionally placed and important to both the setting and surviving in it, and the audio is so instructive. Can you talk about the process of finding and expanding on Hunt's specific style over the years?

Schwarz: We defined audio as one of the main pillars for our gameplay early on and started prototyping how sound would help support our core concept of “hunting” through gunfire broadcasting across the entire map and animals being startled in the distance. Our testers quickly started building up these mental maps of what was going on in a match based on the sounds they heard and how this affected their planning on where to go or what to avoid.

While we have certain supernatural elements in the game, Hunt is generally a grounded game defined by its clunky weapons and limits of the technology of the era. Every move you make produces a sound that risks giving away your position. By embracing this, we managed to focus on a very unique soundscape where creaking wooden boards, shattered glass on the ground or some hanging chains with a bucket could easily spell doom, if you are not careful.

A live-service game often changes based on player feedback. How has the Hunt community helped reshape the game over all these years?

Schwarz: Definitely--community feedback is a huge driver for us. One of the main ways we do this is via event surveys this can give us real data-driven insight as to what people like or didn’t like, what they want to see more of, etc. We also pay extremely close attention to our key player hubs online like Reddit, Steam, Discord, and so on.

With this update, we have implemented changes, especially to game balance. We heard from the community that some weapons/ammo types were unbalanced or changed the game in ways with which they were not satisfied, so we have stripped back some of the choices that led to those complaints. We have many more improvements coming to the game throughout the year, such as UI changes, which are at the forefront of the community’s mind.

Another good example was the crosshair, which we implemented with our 2.0 update. Since the beginning of Hunt, the crosshair was always lowered. Some players really liked this about the game, but others were vocal about it changing. We changed this in the update to give players the option of having a centered one or a lowered one.

Are there any aspects of the game the community has been vocal about changing, but Crytek finds them integral and non-negotiable to Hunt's identity? Surely the community for any game isn't always right, yeah?

Schwarz: There are some things which we have implemented from community feedback but put our own twist on it to make sure gameplay and the community's feedback were balanced.

For example, we had a lot of requests from the community to put a “Roaming Boss” in the game since Early Access, but this concept never quite worked with the Compound Arena style of boss fights in Hunt. The compromise we came up with was Wild Targets, which spawn outside certain compounds but don’t quite “roam,” and this was seen first with the release of Rotjaw.

Hunt has changed shape a lot, especially in the 1896 update last year. How satisfied are you with the game's onboarding of new players right now? I find the game extremely unforgiving, but I also love it for that. But maybe some are turned away by this. Do you feel the game is very hard, and if so, is that a "bug" or a feature? If you are still addressing that, how might players expect to see it change in the future?

Schwarz: Onboarding is a very important topic for us. We realize that while many players fall in love with the game exactly for how unforgiving it can be at times, there is a very hard and sometimes frustrating journey ahead for many before they reach that point or quit before.

Moving forward, we expect to have further improvements here to better ease new players into the game step-by-step. Hunt, in its core, is a hard game. We feel this is what makes it appealing for many and honestly, is expected of us by our community. That doesn’t mean we cannot make becoming a Veteran Hunter a far smoother and more enjoyable experience, however.

There are a lot more extraction shooters today than there were in 2018 when Hunt began, and live-service games are always competing with other live-service games outside of their own genre, too. How does the team look at the challenge of staying successful well into the future in such a competitive space?

Schwarz: We are confident in our core gameplay loop and the overall gameplay experience Hunt offers through its unique setting and features. The aesthetic and world of Hunt is unlike anything else on the market--and when you begin to add in our unique approach to sound and music with elements like Port Sulphur Band, our dedicated in-game band, we offer a distinctive package.

There are a number of really interesting games on the horizon of course, but we are confident about our strengths and what sets us apart and continue to embrace that to move Hunt forward in the right direction.

Of course, sometimes that also means pausing for a moment, reflecting on the past updates and doing corrections where needed. We are not perfect, but we are lucky to have such a dedicated community that give us tons of excellent feedback on how they envision the game to be and help correct where we might oversteer. After all, this longstanding relationship with our players is what has helped keep us focused year after year.

The Garden of the Witch event kicks off today and revamps the weekly challenge system. What went into the decision to change those and how will they alter how players approach the game?

Sam Tunnel, Game Designer: The rationale behind the decision to revamp the weekly challenge system was to make the games more varied. We got feedback that the same weapons and ammo types were being used every week to complete the challenges and in some weeks there would be half the teams in the match using the same items as they all had the same challenges. By changing this up by giving players different weekly challenges every week it now means that players will have more varied games and teams won’t be incentivized to use the same items.

In terms of how this will affect players’ approach to games, players can still work together to complete challenges, as many of them are open-ended and complimentary (i.e. Player X will have a challenge for “Deal damage with rifles” and Player Y has a challenge for “Deal damage with Frontier 73C”). It’ll require a little more coordination and ensure that players should encounter less instances of the same items in their games.

This event also adds more to the story that's always underlying every action in Hunt. Live-service storytelling is an interesting, relatively new facet of games. How much weight does the team give to its overarching mythology? Could we see the Hunt storyline come to other media, such as a movie, TV series, or comic book?

Nicollette Kyle Stewart, Lead Narrative Designer: A live-service game gives us really unique storytelling opportunities, and it’s something we will continue to experiment with. Storytelling is the lifeblood of any fiction world, and a game’s depth, immersion, and believability all live and die by its worldbuilding. Everything we put in the game--whether Hunter, weapon, or location--unwinds another thread of the bigger story. You can read up on a lot of the archival Hunt lore on our website Mythos, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As for exploring storytelling media outside of the game, we’ve already had great success utilizing our music in this way. Port Sulphur Band--who are both an in-game story element and a real-life band made up of Crytek developers--release a new single for every event, and every song tells another story from the Hunt universe.

We’re not ready to share details of other upcoming projects, but Hunt’s world and mythos has incredible storytelling potential, and you can be certain there will be more to come.