Hunt: Showdown aims to create a whole new gaming experience with the upgrade to the new CryEngine 2024, but has consciously decided against a new title. The horror shooter on Steam wants to avoid the mistakes that other major titles made.
Hunt: Showdown is not only an unexpected success among extraction shooters, but also chooses a completely new approach to drive the game forward and enrich it with a new engine.
A sequel, so a Hunt 2
will not exist as such. David Fifield, General Manager of the game, provided the colleagues from PC Gamer some insights in an interview. Among other things, he mentioned that a renaming was considered, but ultimately will not be implemented.
Fifield said that anyone who wants can consider it as Hunt 2, but nothing will be taken away from anyone who has already purchased it. No one should incur new costs, as everyone should have the opportunity to continue playing.
As he says, the official continuation of a game can bring a lot of attention and positive reactions, but also negative criticism and difficult challenges. In addition to rebuilding a player base, new costs arise for the players, the game would need to be reinstalled, and previous progress would be lost.
With the upgrade, the wishes of the community should be fulfilled faster
What does Hunt: Showdown want to do differently? Just like Overwatch, Counter Strike, and Destiny demonstrated, Hunt: Showdown does not want to follow that path. The sequels Overwatch 2 and CS2 can almost be called pseudo-sequels
in this case. Just like Destiny 2, they had to deal with plenty of negative criticism after their release.
Instead, the team plans an upgrade to the current version of the CryEngine in 2024. The engine is developed by CryTek, meaning the developer itself creates it. This allows for the opportunity to tailor it precisely to their needs and the needs of the players.
The upgrade will not come with large news headlines and a new name. However, it will allow the team to work faster, produce updates, and experiment with things. The goal is to give the team the opportunity to develop what the community desires: new bosses and new maps.
With this approach, the developers hope to maintain continuity for existing players while offering them a new gaming experience through technical improvements. They also hope to attract new players with a modernized version of the game, thereby uniting the old community with a new one.
Difficult but necessary decisions had to be made for progress
Of course, the team also had to make a few difficult but necessary decisions for the upgrade to the new engine. The hardware requirements will be slightly increased due to the upgrade, meaning that the new version of the game will no longer be supported on PS4 and Xbox One.
This is a decision that could be made since only 10% of players are currently playing on one of the old consoles. The left behind
players will therefore receive some free updates for their version of the game.
As Fifield says, Hunt cannot always work with the same technology if it wants to keep up in the market. He also admits that there are certainly some things in the game that annoy everyone and are deeply embedded in the core technology. Fixing these seems to make the shift to a new engine unavoidable.
Hunt: Showdown’s upgrade is scheduled for 2024, and the game is set to receive its first new map in three years.
What do you think of this approach? Would you have preferred a proper sequel? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
