It only takes one foray into Hunt: Showdown's bayou to realise that, as the kiddies (who definitely don't play this game) say, it 'just hits different.' Unless you have the cruel misfortune of making your Hunt debut on a night map, the scene that greets you is pretty, idyllic even, in that distinctly rural American kind of way. The sun is bouncing off the tin roof of a distant farmstead, before which stands a rickety little windmill, lazily rotating in the breeze. It's a fair distance away, but a golden cornfield should help keep you covered as you approach.
Keeping your eyes only on the long-distance however, is your first mistake. You fail to notice the crows just off to your right, which scatter with a caw that will make hunters in a substantial vicinity aware of your general location. They probably won't come running right away, but you're now on their mental map. A much more immediate threat looms however; a group of shambling grunts is drawn to the noise, and attacks you on sight. They may be low-level enemies, but they'll make mincemeat of a new, uncomposed player. You survive the early scare having lost half of your health, before an Immolator–a very angry man on fire–comes sprinting your way. You stab him like you would any other zombie, and he bursts into a fireball, blowing you up with him and ending your game.
Whether it's by a thrilling scenario like above, at the hands of other players, or a chaotic mix of both, death is almost certain during your early Hunt sessions.
Those swamps never become a comfortable place. They're unpredictable, and even though the lore is slowly-slowly shining a light on why 19th-century Louisiana (and beyond) is beset by monsters and hunters vying for those precious bounties held by shadow beasts, giant spiders, and ogrish butchers wearing pig heads, five years on from its initial release release, the game still feels dark and unknowable.
It's a sentiment echoed by the game's General Manager David Fifield, who says, with a cheeky smile suggesting he knows it's a great line, that "the beating heart of Hunt: Showdown is the exquisite tension of the pervasive unknown."
It's ironic then, that Hunt: Showdown was born at Crytek in a period of pervasive uncertainty. It's well-documented that the game began life as a third-person four-player co-op swarm shooter at Vigil Games (of Darksiders fame), before Crytek acquired the studio following THQ's collapse and renamed it Crytek USA. In 2014, however, Crytek entered its own period of crisis, closing many of its international studios and reeling development in all the way back to its roots in Germany.
Amidst the fallout, Crytek USA was shut down, at which point it would've been entirely feasible for the in-development Hunt game to go down with it. But Crytek saw the potential in the project, and decided to extract it back to Germany. "The Austin Studio had done an amazing job building that universe, that whole fantasy around a four-player co-op game," Lead Designer Dennis Schwarz tells me. "It was something that really interested us, so we had to hold onto it."
With a trilogy of Crysis games (and Far Cry before that) under their belts, Crytek knew that the first thing to do would be align the game with their strengths. The perspective shifted from a third- to a first-person shooter, but the game needed a 'hook,' an element that, beyond the powerful visual identity, made it stand out from its peers. As is often the case in games development, to find its uniqueness Hunt would look to one of the most popular genres of the time, and branch off of that.
Before the Battle Royale genre exploded with PUBG and Fortnite, survival games were the hot new thing in online gaming. The likes of Rust and DayZ established vast hostile playgrounds in which the action was driven purely by the players rather than specific game-set goals. Crucially, both games contained zombies (which Rust removed in 2014) as well as other players, making them PvPvE games. "We absolutely looked at these games, we'd have been stupid not to," begins Schwarz. "They were very interesting, as was seeing how players were reacting to this new genre, these new techniques. We wanted to find a way to bring this survival game sense of 360-degree danger around you, and add some structure to it."
That structure would revolve around Hunt: Showdown's iconic bosses. Each map would contain formidable beasts randomly located in one of the many locales on the map, which you'd track down by collecting 'clues' on the map. With a boss dead, you collect the bounty, and try to escape the map with your team while trying not to get killed by monsters and other players.
It was a fascinating variation on the Battle Royale concept, with the 'play area' of the map shrinking as you found more clues, albeit with no consequences should you find yourself outside of that area. When a boss is defeated and starts being banished, the location of the boss gets signalled to everyone on the map with a menacing pillar of lightning shooting into the sky, which is only visible when you're in Dark Sight. It replicates that scrambling Battle Royale feeling, but in a less synthetic way than a wall of blue light slowly closing in on you. Also, you're free to extract from the map at any time and 'Live to Die Another Day,' as the game ominously reminds you upon each successful extraction.
You may not see it right away, but there is a lot of Crysis DNA in Hunt: Showdown. It's a game dense with foliage for a start, which has major implications on the game's flow and tactical opportunities. It's also a game that prioritises stealth and serious environmental awareness, though where Crysis gave you a ton of gadgetry to make you far superior to your foes, Hunt: Showdown is remarkably sparing in its use of technologies and 'powers.' The concept of 'overpowered' doesn't really exist in this game. It's never a power trip. Instead of using powers like the nanosuit in Crysis, Crytek decided that it was much more important for the game to focus on the strengths of each player and the team.
"I started at Crytek when we were like a year away from shipping the first Crysis game, so my entire DNA as a developer is drastically influenced by my experience with it," says Schwarz. "Crysis is a linear experience, but it always had this idea of the sandbox, with room for the player to choose their own path. We wanted to take that sandbox approach, letting you pick your gear, pick your play style, and give the player as much self-expression as possible when playing."
If there's one element that tends to get overlooked in video games (especially online ones), it's acoustics and sound design. Hunt: Showdown, however, is defined by these elements. There's no indicator to tell you how many players are on the map, where other players are (at least until they pick up the bounty), or whether you've managed to kill someone or not. That means you're forced to rely on your actual senses more.
However, long before you use your eyes to figure these things out in Hunt: Showdown, you'll be relying on your ears. You'll always hear ducks quacking in a panic as they fly off away from whatever startled them, so you turn towards the noise before looking to the skies to see what direction they're flying from, and in turn where other hunters are. Distant gunshots give you a feel for where other teams are on the map long before you encounter them, and listening for the distinctive death scream of hunters lets you gauge how many enemies are left in your vicinity.
"Sound in games is usually a little bit underrated unfortunately," begins Schwarz. "We made the decision early on to keep certain things from the player. What we wanted is for the player to need to build up this mental map of what is going on in a particular match, like 'I see a team to the North-East,' or 'I hear shots to the South.'
"We discovered quite early on that it's actually pretty fun having multiple teams competing against each other. You might be on an empty server, but you're still tense because you are never 100% sure, and sound automatically becomes so much more important if you deprive the player of the kind of information that they're used to having."
Play Hunt enough, and naturally you'll familiarise yourself with the maps, the layouts, and how best to dispose of certain types of enemies and bosses. You'll learn that those infuriating Armored enemies covered in barbed wire hate fire, and that the Assassin boss can be lured into a poison trip mine, and kept in that poison cloud by a steady barrage of heavy blows from rakes, axes, and sledgehammers. You can get very good at the game, but the constant wildcard of other players and monsters always threatens to unravel even the best-laid plans.
Hunt: Showdown is a game where cunning and smart teamplay can easily compensate for fast reflexes, but the game is designed around another element that's ultimately what makes it such a fun online shooter, yet prohibits from becoming a competitive e-Sport: luck. "Matches are never a case just of who's the best headshot, who has the best hand-eye coordination, or strong tactical knowledge," begins Fifield. "There's also an element of 'hey, anything can happen.' Roll the dice. See who loads in where, see what they have, see who gets in behind who and and how all the cards end up being stacked in the deck."
In a game with such a strong vision, it's no surprise that plenty of intriguing ideas were left on the cutting room floor. In an incidental homage to Far Cry 2 (which was made by Ubisoft after it took over the IP from Crytek), there was an idea for the map to be a physical in-game map that your hunter held out in front of them, with the goal of keeping the player immersed in the world. Inspired as Hunt was by survival games, crafting was initially in the game, but that was soon scrapped because it detracted from the game's sense of momentum. While there are small bits and pieces to pick up and interact with in the world, Hunt is remarkably free of 'clutter' to distract you from the core experience. It's not a relentlessly fast-paced game, but it's very driving.
Just because something is on the cutting room floor doesn't mean it can't make a comeback either. Early in development, there was talk of adding a Nightmare Mode to the game, which would ramp up the challenge by removing HUD elements and increasing damage taken, among other things. Nightmare Mode was this concept of making the game super hard and taking off the HUD, increasing the damage and all those other things," Fifield tells me. "I would say it's on the cutting room floor, but it hasn't been swept out of the building."
Five years on, there's still no online shooter out there quite like Hunt: Showdown. Enthralling and haunting, explosive yet old-timey, it's become the core game at the heart of Crytek's identity. Born in a period of uncertainty for the studio, it's become the dark beating heart of their revival.