Last Thursday, Hunt: Showdown came out in early access. This is a new game from the German Crytek studio. In less than a week, the audience of the game reached 100 thousand players. We talk about the project, its features and the first indicators.
There has been no good news from Crytek for a long time. 2018 changes everything
For the last couple of years, it seemed that Crytek had one foot in the grave. The company regularly got into scandals. Then she delays salaries for six months, then closes and sells studios.
The fire was added by Crytek’s plans to sue the authors of Star Citizen and the dislike of third-party teams for CRYENGINE. One of the company’s main products still fails to compete with Unity and Unreal Engine, which for the second year in a row seems to be building muscles on creatine.
Until recently, Crytek’s salvation from bankruptcy remained: the Warface free-play shooter and a financial cushion of $ 70 million. According to rumors, that’s how much Amazon gave to the founders of a German company for a license for CRYENGINE.
2018 opens a new, bright page for Crytek.
First comes the Kingdom Come: Deliverance developed on its engine. The game from the Czechs from Warhorse today is called nothing else than the new “Witcher” and Skyrim. In a week, its sales reach one million copies.
Only a couple of weeks have passed and Hunt: Showdown, Crytek’s own development, which has not had major releases since 2014, appears in early access on Steam.
Hunt Showdown is a mix of Dead by Daylight and PUBG
A year ago, it would have been difficult to describe the concept of Hunt in a nutshell. There are no problems with this today. The novelty is a competent synthesis of Dead by Daylight and PUBG for two players, where both other users and the environment act as opponents.
From the point of view of mechanics, Hunt by and large does not offer anything new. Rather, he successfully composes solutions that have long existed and are actively used within the framework of the MMO-action genre.
Up to ten players are sent in pairs to a large map where monsters roam. The task of each pair is to find and kill the boss, and then leave the map as quickly as possible before other players have taken away the loot that fell from the main PvE opponent.
From the Canadian Dead by Daylight, the novelty got horror elements, being sharpened for a small number of players during the session and the need to complete a number of tasks to win (including getting away after completing them).
From the Korean PUBG, the Germans borrowed a large map, the rivalry of players with each other within the same role model and a lot of space in terms of implementing tactics and strategy.
The project also took the concept of research from survives. The map presented in the game is not a static battle arena, but a kind of ecosystem with numerous monsters of various types that behave differently, as well as interact or simulate interaction with each other.
Live players are the most difficult and unpleasant, but at the same time they are far from the main opponents. You may not cross paths with them at all. They may not make it to your exit point, they may get lost on the map, they may be killed by ordinary monsters. But a lot depends on the adequacy and experience of the player that Hunt will pair you with.
Hunt: Showdown can generate stories
The ability to create unique situations, vivid gameplay stories is one of the most important conditions for high organics and overall success of any multiplayer game on “big” platforms. And Hunt: Showdown can do it.
They turn out to be especially juicy in the game, because there is always another live player next to the player, who often pulls to blame all the mistakes and over whom you so often want to make fun. Then “that jerk” went into the thick of enemies for some reason, then he didn’t know how to deal with a monster sending bees, then, the infection, used you as bait or you saved him all the time. Every time a narrative. Each time everything depends on the style of the game and the character of both users, on the ability of the players to coordinate their actions not at all within a large group, where each has a clear role assigned in accordance with the rules.
The atmosphere of the game also plays a big role here. Depressive, gloomy, creepy. In a sense of hopelessness, the world of Hunt: Showdown is not inferior to the world of Darkest Dungeon.
The main potential problem is raw meta and irregular updates
Version 0.1 has been released for early access. It is comfortable to play. There are understandable friezes, there is a long loading, but at the same time the game finds players very quickly, shows a good picture and does not give the impression of something very raw or made on the knee at all.
The nuance is in one real and one potential problem.
The real one is the strong penalties for a bad game. At the start, the player receives a certain amount. It is spent on the purchase of game characters, the loss of which is permanent, and weapons.
Let’s say you bought a mustachioed man in a wide-brimmed hat that you liked, played a couple of skating rinks safely, pumped him, and then you were killed. That’s it, after that it’s lost to you. You should buy a new hero.
You get little money in case of death, the characters cost a lot, so at the moment it is very easy to achieve a situation where money runs out and you can’t buy characters.
So far, the developers have come up with a crutch that solves this problem. If the money runs out, the player is given very weak characters for free, which he can then upgrade to stronger ones. But, again, they will be with the player until their first death.
But even this crutch now works with reservations. If a player does not have enough money for standard characters, but the score is not zero, he will never see that he can get weak characters. To do this, he needs to spend all his capital on consumables.
A potential problem that can only still hit the project is the irregularity of updates and fixes. Players will be in the project exactly as long as the game is maintained and developed. If this does not happen, we will witness the death of a strong product.
I mentioned this because such a development is very possible. Hunt: Showdown has been in development for a very long time. Initially, it was made by the now closed American division Crytek. And in 2014 it showed a working alpha version. After that, the game was assembled almost from scratch for four years in Frankfurt.
If updates, new maps, new types of weapons, etc., etc. will come out just as slowly, the project can be safely buried. Summarizing: the release of Hunt: Showdown is just the case when a lot depends on the operation of the project.
The launch of Hunt: Showdown can be called successful
But now the project is doing well. This is evidenced by the first results that the game shows in terms of sales and online.
In a partial week, according to SteamSpy, the game received an audience of 110 thousand players. This is at the price of a game of essential early access $29. However, PUBG started with the same price tag in March last year.
The number of online players present in the game at the same time is stable. The indicators depend on the time of day, but so far every day they reach 7 thousand.
Online Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege, for example, the first year was lower. About the same parameters – around 10 thousand – Dead by Daylight started (then its metrics grew). But, of course, Hunt is still significantly behind PUBG in terms of online, which in the first day broke the mark of 20 thousand players.
Hunt: Showdown finds a niche between MMO action movies and MMO survives
Today, you can enter the market with your own “battle royale” or survival. A high-quality and original project will always be noticed. A good game will always have its own audience.
However, all the majors are doing their own PUBG today (while there is still no original rethinking of the concept proposed by Brendan Green), and the survivalist market is overheated. Therefore, it is more difficult to release such projects, their risks are higher.
In this context, Hunt Showdown is a very successful project. On the one hand, this is a session MMO shooter with classic PvP, where you need to stay alive as long as possible. On the other hand, it complicates the “battle royale” model, including adding the need to explore the world, learn to survive in it in order to compete on equal terms with other real players.
Thus, the game finds a niche between two trending, very popular directions today.