It’s an absolute shame the Hunt: Showdown hasn’t seen the same success as other battle-royales; Crytek has added more than a few new mechanics to the same formula that has been stomped into the mud in the past five years, with ethereal horrors and bounty hunting taking a nice detour from the standard ‘loot and murder’ approach of other battle royales.
Yet somewhere between the up-front price tag and over $70 worth of DLC, it seems to have been lost in the sauce as it competes for elbow room with other titles that similarly try to breathe new life in the tired format.
Not to mention the permanent loss of any hunter that is killed in a game, meaning that new players consistently get ran through by experienced veterans of the title with innumerable hours and unlocks that are gated for newer players, meaning that while Hunt: Showdown does experience a resurgence or two, there is still the same core group of players within the title, leading to inevitable stagnation of the player base.
Not a simple fix by any means, and it’s something that Crytek has been looking at studiously over the life of the title that originally released on August 27, 2019. Today, however, is for the long-term fans of the beautiful masterpiece that is Hunt: Showdown.
Crytek has just released update 1.4, and it’s bringing a couple of gameplay changes as to how damage works, along with one new trait and one new piece of equipment.
Firstly, the trait is a big deal: called Serpent, it allows bounty hunters to interact with clues from a distance, avoiding unwanted fights with hostile NPCs in all of their grotesque horror. It also allows users to snatch bounties and clues that are otherwise contested by enemy player sightlines, yoinking them from a distance with the enemy watching none the wiser.
A new piece of equipment also comes with the release called Poison Trip Mine, which works about as you’d expect it to, but it comes in tandem with a reworking of how the poison works in the title.
Poison now increases damage done to bounty hunters based on how much the hunters have been afflicted by poison, meaning that it scales the longer you’re within the area of effect. Bleeding now similarly works, with increased levels of blood loss being afflicted depending on how many times your flesh has been scored.
Finally, fire damage is less of an ‘all or nothing’ equation: with light, medium, and intense fire damage levels, players will no longer burst into flames on their first contact with Prometheus’ storied bounty. The medium-burning stage is what players were used to from fire damage prior to this update, with the two outliers affecting less and more damage, respectively.
Along with the update comes a plethora of various weapons that you can add to your arsenal in the shape of Legendary Weapons, and small alterations to how weapons work. The primary shift would be with shotguns, which no longer inflict bleeding damage to enemies that it strikes.
Finally, players can opt to hide their statistics from public view, opting out of leaderboards in the process. There is also now a cooldown when you leave a randomly created group using matchmaking, which increases every time a player leaves the match.
Crytek finishes their update patch notes with a staggering list of known issues that are now unfortunately likely to be compounded by the addition of content of 1.4, which has frustrated multiple fans of the title. Here’s hoping that the next update will tackle some of the bugs that can, in some cases, make the game unplayable.
