Hunt: Showdown wants to create a completely 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 big titles made.
Hunt: Showdown is not only an unexpected success among extraction shooters, but also takes a completely new approach to advance the game and enrich it with a new engine.
However, there will be no sequel, i.e. a Hunt 2. David Fifield, general manager of the game, gave his colleagues at PC Gamer some insights in an interview. Among other things, he said that a new name was considered, but ultimately not implemented.
While Fifield said anyone who wants to is welcome to watch it as Hunt 2, no one will be taking away anything they’ve already purchased. Nobody should incur new costs because everyone should have the opportunity to continue playing.
As he says, the official sequel to 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, there are new costs for players, the game would have to be reinstalled and previous progress would be lost.
Hunt: Showdown has already thrilled fans with a DLC trailer
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The upgrade is intended to fulfill the community’s wishes more quickly
What does Hunt: Showdown want to do differently? The way Overwatch, Counter Strike and Destiny did it, for example, Hunt: Showdown doesn’t want to do it. In this case, the sequels Overwatch 2 and CS2 could almost be described as pseudo-sequels. Just like Destiny 2, they had to deal with enough negative criticism after their release.
Instead, the team is planning an upgrade to the current version of CryEngine in 2024. The engine is being developed by CryTek, the developer, itself. This gives you the opportunity to adapt it exactly to your own needs and the needs of the players.
So the upgrade won’t come with big news headlines and a new name. However, it will allow the team to work faster, produce updates and try things out. It’s about giving the team the opportunity to develop what the community wants: new bosses and new maps.
With this approach, the developers hope to maintain continuity for existing players, but to offer them a new gaming experience with technical improvements. They hope to attract new players with a modernized version of the game and thus unite 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 some difficult but necessary decisions when upgrading to the new engine. The hardware requirements are slightly increased by the upgrade and this also means that the new version of the game is no longer supported on the PS4 and Xbox One.
This is a decision that could be made because only 10% of players currently play on one of the old consoles. The players left behind should therefore receive some free updates for their state of the game.
As Fiefield says, Hunt can’t always use the same technology if it wants to compete in the market. He also admits that there are certainly some things in the game that bother everyone and that are deep in the core technology. In order to fix this, the step to a new engine seems unavoidable.
Hunt: Showdown’s upgrade is scheduled for 2024 and the game will get its first new map in three years.
What do you think of this approach? Would you have hoped for a proper sequel? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
Players believe Destiny 3 has always been the answer to the crisis because Destiny 2 is “bloated and lacking in content.”