Hunt: Showdown Wiki – Everything You Need To Know About The Game

Hunt: Showdown is a team-based PvP first person shooter centered around monster hunting and survival horror elements. it is developed and published by Crytek.

Development

Hunt: Showdown was first announced in June 2014 as a very different game. Titled Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age, it was to be a four player co-op third person gothic action title set in the late 19th century. Upon the closure of Vigil Games, Crytek immediate hired the former studio’s head, David L. Adams, to head up a new studio in Crytek USA. Adams stated that developing a co-op action title was immediately the things the studio decided to work on.

Hunt was intended to be an experience where players could heavily customize their characters, outfits, abilities, and more, and would also have influences from old-school titles. Unlike many shooting games, Crytek USA also wanted to ensure that Hunt featured a large variety of enemies for players to fight against, as well as several different boss battles. Built on the CryEngine, Hunt would also use procedurally generated maps.

Shortly afterward, however, in July of 2014, Crytek announced that owing to financial troubles, they had undergone restructuring. Development of Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age had shifted to to their main studio, while their Crytek USA studio had been reduced to a support studio only. David L. Adams and many other members of the development team had also left Crytek in response to late wage payments.

After not hearing anything about the game for a while, Crytek confirmed in 2017 with a teaser that Hunt was still in development, but in a very different form. Now called Hunt: Showdown, it would be a team-based player-versus-player (or PvP) competitive first person shooter with survival horror elements. Hunt: Showdown released for Steam via Early Access in February of the following year, while an early access release for the Xbox One, through Xbox Game Preview, came in May the year after that. A final release date for the game was announced for PC and Xbox One as August 30, along with a Fall 2019 launch for the PS4.

Gameplay

Matches in Hunt: Showdown take place in a 1km x 1km map that is populated by up to ten teams of two players each, though players can also play solo if they should wish to do so. Team play is done either through getting randomly assigned a teammate (at which point both players have to confirm), or by matchmaking with an invited friend and entering the lobby of a match as a team.

Every match of Hunt: Showdown sees a players spawning into the map, which is populated by monsters and beasts. At the beginning of each match, a monster is set as the target monster, and all teams compete with each other to be the first ones to get the bounty on the creature and then escape the map unscathed. Fighting and killing against other monsters renders gold and experience points. While all players earn experience points at the end of the match regardless of their success, only the player or team that escapes the map with the target monster’s bounty gets to keep the gold earned during the match, which can then be used to purchase new abilities and gear.

Each match begins in the tracking phase, where all teams have to track down the monster that has been set as the target. The map starts out by hinting at a general area where the monster is, but every new clue found during tracking narrows down that target area further. Players and teams can either choose to take out the target monster themselves and escape with the bounty, or they can choose to wait for someone else to take out the target monster, and then kill the other player carrying the bounty and take the bounty for themselves, and then escape from the arena.

Players can also make use of an ability called Dark Sight, using which they can visualize the boss monster and track it. If the target monster has been killed, Dark Sight allows other players to track down the player holding its bounty, giving a general idea of where in the map the bounty holder is. Meanwhile, while playing in a team, if a player dies, they can also be revived by their teammate, so long as that teammate is still alive.

Players can also track other players through sights and sounds. In-game voice chat is three dimensional, and the closer players get to each other, the better they’re able to hear them, allowing them the chance to pinpoint where they are and take them out. Players can also use weapons or sounds to lure out, distract, and kill other players, as well as PvE elements in the maps such as other monsters and hostile NPCs. NPCs can also use sound to lure out and ambush players.

Hunt: Showdown also features a day and night cycle. While it doesn’t bring about any mechanical changes such as changing the monsters’ behaviours, the time of day has an impact on visibility. Each hunt in the game also has difficulty parameters, going from Regular, to Hard, to Nightmare. The higher the difficulty, the greater the reward handed out.

Progression is done through the Bloodline experience. Experience earned through matches levels up the player’s Bloodline level, with each new level upgrade offering rewards like gold or unlocked weapons and gear. After reaching the maximum rank of 100, players can either choose to stay at that rank, or they can choose to prestige, which resets their progress back to level 1 of the Bloodline.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.