Restart of Crytek's shooter Hunt: Showdown 1896 upsets players
Crytek has relaunched its PvP shooter "Hunt: Showdown" with a new engine, map and menus with the name suffix "1896". Criticism rained down on Steam.
German game developer Crytek (Crysis, Far Cry) has updated its 2019 multiplayer shooter "Hunt: Showdown" to CryEngine 5.11 and relaunched it with the new map "Mammon's Gulch" and numerous changes to menus and gameplay on August 15 under the name "Hunt: Showdown 1896". The game is free to play on Steam until August 19, which has given it an all-time high of 60,124 concurrently active players, but also numerous reviews. Previously rated as "very positive", the shooter is currently listed as "mostly negative" in the Steam reviews. Hunt: Showdown 1896 can currently only be played with the new map, the other three maps are still being adapted to the current CryEngine.
Most of the reviews relate to the redesigned user interface and severe performance problems, including crashes. Crytek recommends an Intel Core i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor and a graphics card with at least 8 GB of RAM (Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, AMD 6600 XT or better) for the graphics-heavy game. This hardware, some of which is seven years old, is a recommendation, not a minimum requirement, and is extremely moderate in contrast to previous Crytek games. However, the main problem seems to be the game servers, which cannot cope with the onslaught, and numerous players from Russia and China, who are notable for their high latency.
Hunt: Showdown is a so-called extraction shooter: the players, a maximum of 12, compete in pairs, threesomes or alone against other players or teams. The task is to find and kill a monster and take the trophy to an extraction point without being killed by zombies, hellhounds and other players. The western and horror theme, combined with the attractive graphics, numerous contemporary weapons and exciting gameplay, makes Hunt: Showdown one of the best shooters on the market for many PvP players. One reason for this is the CryEngine, which actually enjoys a good reputation as it has comparatively low hardware requirements with high graphics quality. The current version 5.11 is supposed to provide improved performance with upscaling technologies such as DLSS (Nvidia) and FSR2 (AMD).
The free-to-play phase of Hunt: Showdown 1896 ends next Monday, after which the performance of the servers should at least improve. However, Crytek still has some work to do to pacify fans disappointed by the UI changes.
(rop)
