Crytek have no plans to make a sequel to sweaty monster-culling FPS Hunt: Showdown, and will thus hopefully avoid the publicity problems currently faced by Activision-Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 and Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 – both presented as sequels with fancier technology, but in practice, more like service-game content seasons arbitrarily upgraded into replacements, with the ‘previous’ games, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, being taken offline to avoid splitting the playerbase.
Speaking to me in an interview about Hunt’s evolution since its launch out of early access in 2019, the game’s general manager David Fifield observed that while Crytek may yet make another Hunt game it won’t be a straight Showdown follow-up – and it certainly won’t come at the expense of your ability to play the original game.
“I would say we would even be less aggressive than Overwatch or, you know, Destiny 2,” Fifield told me, when I asked whether Crytek have thought about making a Hunt sequel and if so, whether they’d approach it in the same way as Activision-Blizzard and Valve. “No, we have no plans for Hunt 2. We just plan to keep going forward.”
Fifield had a few words of constructive criticism for Activision-Blizzard specifically. “Overwatch 2 made a little bit of sense when it had a giant PvE component that it was going to have, but when it didn’t have that PvE component to make it different, it was just a reskin of Overwatch 1, with everything you already had,” he noted. “Like it was cool reskin – it’s still a cool game! It just felt like Overwatch 1 in its next evolution of service.”
Crytek’s plans for Hunt are closer to how Epic has developed Fortnite, Fifield went on. “You could say that chapter two of Fortnite was Fortnite 2 – they made a new island, they radically overhauled a whole, giant part of all its systems, but they just called it chapter two of a game called Fortnite. So that seems to be more the trend that we’ll follow, when updating Hunt: Showdown.”
Which is not to say that Crytek won’t ever make a new game in the Hunt universe, of course. “If we talked about other products in the Hunt franchise, they wouldn’t be replacements to Hunt: Showdown they’d be brand extensions,” Fifield added. “Here’s another game you could make in the Hunt universe, but that game wouldn’t be meant to replace Hunt: Showdown, the thing people play.”
The obvious difficulty here is ageing technology. When you’re running a service game for (in this case) half a decade, there comes a point when the launch tech needs an overhaul, whether to introduce spangly new visual effects or in the interest of compatibility, which means that the developers might have to drop support for older versions of the game. Crytek recently announced plans to stop supporting Hunt: Showdown on PS4 and Xbox One, while raising the game’s minimum specs on PC, in the course of updating the game to run on the latest iteration of CryEngine. The developers are working on a new map and biome to show off the associated bells and whistles.
Still, Fifield and Crytek plan to avoid excluding players with older systems as much as possible. “Our plan is to keep growing Showdown keep growing the player base that we have,” Fifield said. “Everything carries forward [even though] we are dropping the older generation of consoles, but there is a free upgrade path, where if you are registered for that, we will bring you forward to the next generation for free.”
Look out for the full piece on all things Hunt and Showdown-flavoured in the coming days. In other news, Fifield also told me that Crytek are keeping an open mind on the subject of a Hunt single-player campaign.
