Games
We speak with Crytek about their brutal bounty-hunting title, Hunt: Showdown, and find out how its community is helping to shape the game.
“Yeah, but can it run Crysis?”
It’s a phrase that PC gamers have used sincerely, and later, as a joke. As the developers of Crysis, Crytek have a storied history of making PC games that are visual spectacles, often requiring monster rigs to run at a satisfactory level. They also made the first Far Cry game for Ubisoft, worked with EA on the Crysis series, created Ryse: Son of Rome for Microsoft’s Xbox One launch and, most recently, even dropped into VR game development with rock-climbing title The Climb for Oculus Rift in 2016, before dipping back into first-person shooter territory with another VR game that same year.
What we’re saying, is that Crytek as a studio have made some interesting, graphical powerhouse games. Now, though, they’re turning their hands to something different. This time they’re wading deep into the multiplayer landscape, so we thought it’d be the right time to chat to Fatih Özbayram, Producer on their new game, a title that dips its toes into a lot of different genres, and is most certainly an interesting prospect. This is Hunt: Showdown.
“Hunt is a competitive first-person PvP bounty-hunting game with heavy PvE elements that packs the thrill of survival games into a match-based format,” says Özbayram. “We see it as being a mix of survival, strategy and run and gun. Not a Battle Royale, but a bounty hunter.”
That’s a lot to take in and it’s a tough game to play since each round gives you one life. If you fall, you’re out. Similar to PUBG, it’s a one-and-done type of situation. “The higher the risk, the higher the reward, but if you die, you lose your Hunter character forever, and all the gear they were carrying”, says Özbayram. “There are a lot of ways to play Hunt: you can grind for XP, you can go for the bosses and the bounties, or you can work alone or in pairs, just to name a few. There are so many strategic options, which gives players a lot of space to make the experience theirs.”
But let’s back up a little. Hunt: Showdown is a brutal endeavour, with you starting out from a preset loadout of hunters, tasked with finding a monster (in the build we played it was a spider), and hunting it while also being up against other human-controlled players. Although it sounds like a drastic change from the story-heavy games Crytek has previously been known for, it’s still a first-person game and it’s still a shooter. Watch the tutorial below for a flavour of the what's involved.
But the game’s story is perhaps best told by Özbayram: “It starts at the Crytek Austin studio,” he tells us. “The concept for Hunt was born in Austin and the game was quite different then. When Hunt development moved to Frankfurt, we took a look at where the game was and where our strengths were as a team, and we decided to turn it into the dark, bloody, tense first-person experience it is now.”
And he’s right there; it’s definitely tense, especially thanks to the incredible ambient audio, which is something the team have really tried to dial in during development according to Özbayram, who has a free tip for you: “We’ve put audio front and centre in Hunt and you can learn a lot about the world by listening, or tell your enemies a lot about you if you’re not quiet.”
Right now it’s on PC only and Crytek are tight lipped on whether it’ll stay that way. “All I can say for the time being is that Hunt will be coming out on PC first”, starts Özbayram. “Because we wanted a release model that would allow us to work closely with the community as we continued to develop the game.” The Xbox One has a preview program, too, but they’re not currently looking into using it, and although we couldn’t get any future platform info out of Özbayram (“we’re PC-focused for now”, he tells us), the team are clearly very interested in using feedback from the community properly.
Early Access is a thing that can cause extreme reactions. On one hand, PUBG and Fortnite dominate in terms of player numbers, but for every one of those games, there are many more that people forget, or leave a bad first impression causing gamers to never come back to them. So what made Crytek decide to go early access and what do they think are the risks and benefits of doing so?
“An Early Access release gives us the chance to stay tight with the community and take players into account as we continue to develop and polish the game. It’s really exciting to be working together with a group of passionate fans to make a game we can all get excited about and to get that immediate feedback as we work,” says Özbayram, “There are risks too, of course, and we worry about living up to community expectations. We have our roadmap planned out for Early Access and the three updates that will follow it, and we need to both stay on track with that and to take continuing community feedback into account in how we implement those milestones and plan for the future. But with an Early Access release, we see more pros than cons.”
Watch the Steam trailer for Hunt: Showdown
One thing we noticed when playing Hunt: Showdown is that there’s potential for griefing from other players. For example, you might take your time and track the monster, only to find someone waiting for you as you approach and ruining all your well thought-out plans. While this kind of thing can easily be addressed with balance patches, we wanted to know specifics about how the players are shaping the game already.
Özbayram says, “The Closed Alpha phase has been a huge help. We’ve been able to collect data that helped us improve balancing, game readability, connectivity, server function and general performance, just for starters. All of these things are key to reaching the kind of stability we need for an Early Access release.”
But there’s more, and he continues, addressing the ability that leads you towards a new clue: Dark Sight. “Players in the Closed Alpha found the clues in Dark Sight visually confusing and so we changed their colour and look to make the signs easier to read,“ he says. “Another example is extraction time. At the start of the Closed Alpha, we had different extraction times for solo players and teams and it was all pretty confusing. Thanks to community feedback on that, we made the extraction process the same for everybody.”
Still in early access, it seems that the game will be updated and take shape over the coming months and beyond. One thing is for sure though, you won’t play Hunt: Showdown and walk away thinking it’s dull, and that’s perhaps key in a market flooded by multiplayer ideas. “Basically, we wanted to make the game we had always wanted to play ourselves,” Özbayram says. “Something that combined the tension of match-based shooters with the thrill of survival games together into one expansive sandbox experience.”
If Crytek can achieve their ambition, we’ll be hunting monsters long into the night for a while to come.
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