Hunt: Showdown stands alone in an industry full of battle royale-style shooters. Rather than parachuting players into a map and forcing them to fight to be the last team standing, it asks you to track deadly monsters, kill them, and extract with the bounty before the other teams do. Or you can simply let another team do the hard work, spring a trap on them, and loot the bounty from their cooling corpses.
It’s a tense game – especially since characters grow stronger whenever they survive a mission. When they die, you feel the loss because you lose all of that progression. Guns are also antiques – slow-firing and slower to reload, you have to make every shot count. Making things tenser still, audio plays a huge part in Hunt. A cracked twig, startled birds, the crunch of broken glass, a gunshot, or the behavior of the various AI enemies littering the map are just some of the things that can give your position away to an enemy team.
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GLHF sat down with Dennis Schwartz, lead game designer, to talk about the challenges of creating a game like Hunt, as well as what’s coming in the future.
GLHF: I wanted to ask about the audio because it plays such a big part in Hunt: Showdown and that makes it distinct from other games. I was wondering what kind of challenges arise from creating a game where sound is such a big component of it?
Dennis Schwartz: Our biggest challenge was in how we populate this world with sound. Gunfire is the easy one, right? The decision to make sure that wherever someone fires a shot, you hear this across the entire map – that was just one of the pillars we established at the beginning. So you can see like, ‘Okay, there are people there, there are people there, I haven’t haven’t heard anything from down there.’ This mental map starts forming. How should I position? What is my best approach? The challenge came from asking how else we can make the player reveal his position, and we identified pretty early on that the AI can be a catalyst for that as well.
The AI in Hunt: Showdown isn’t the main challenge. Sure, as a new player, you will struggle against some, and if they come into a fight at the wrong time, they can be unfavorable. But they’re not really the main thing. If you were to imagine Hunt: Showdown without the AI in its current setup, it probably wouldn’t be the same sort of tension. It comes from having the players there. But what the AI does is force the player to avoid them or alert them. Dogs barking, horses making sounds, you see the birds in the distance – all of that comes together as sound traps. We call them animal attractors or sound attractors technically, but they’re basically just audio traps for the player to step into and then broadcast a little bit within a certain vicinity – not as far as the gunshots, but still within like maybe a compound. Other people can use that then to strategize. Audio is very, very important for us. But the challenge was how much variety we can put out there.
GLHF: And how do you deal with players bypassing that? Because obviously, that’s how you want the people to play the game, right? But then people will not play it that way. And you’ve also got players who will change the graphic settings and zoom in on compounds to see whether doors and windows are loading in, suggesting players are near.
DS: Yeah. By the way, that’s a bug that should be fixed in the next update, finally.
GLHF Oh, really? I thought it was just like a loading/memory constraint.
DS: We thought so as well. This is just a bit of trivia (it will be gone soon), but we actually found out that there was a bit more to it when it comes to how the doors and windows and logic entities are being populated. It shouldn’t matter that another player was there because it should be a completely local effect, right? Your proximity to a window should decide whether you see the window or not. But it wasn’t the case.
So for the most part, if you look at a compound in the distance, you will now see windows. If you get too far away – let’s say like 500 meters through a Spyglass or sniper scope – the entire compound might be invisible, but then so are other players. So there isn’t really a disadvantage. It’s more about memory efficiency.
GLHF: What are some things you can’t fix or change because of choices made during pre-production?
DS: Everything can be fixed, but is it feasible to fix it? How much work would it be? I can give you an example: centering the crosshair position. We made a very early decision in our process, and all of the animations in the game are based on that. It’s not in your way and you can focus more on the world. And since this is all about shooting at the right time, and not just like spray and pray, we always considered that the weapon can be at the lower position. Think of Operation Flashpoint, Arma, these types of games – the weapon is really not important to you unless you want to fire. We want you to consider when is the right time to shoot, or when to reveal your position. And back when we made that decision, we also accepted that crosshair would be at this lower position. If we wanted to change that moving forward – which maybe we’ll still do, we’ll give the option – it’s just one of those things that sounds easy but has all of these knock-on effects. All of a sudden the weapon isn’t aligned anymore. And you would need to change all of that. So that’s what I’m saying – sometimes you are just committed to certain decisions. And in this case, they become costly if you want to change them in the future.
GLHF: Is that where the crouch bug comes from, where the player’s head is in a different position depending on what weapon they’re using? (Sometimes this exposes them to fire even when they appear to be in cover from their perspective.)
DS: I would say this one is probably just sloppiness. We have 70 or 80 weapons in the game. And at one point, I think there was a mismatch of the upright pose for one or two of those weapons. As you do new weapons, you use the foundation of existing weapons, right? So if you have an inconsistency, maybe it was just one weapon at first, without anyone really noticing it. It can just spread across multiple weapons as it’s being used for new foundations. It’s only when you put them next to each other that you notice it isn’t right. We’re working on a fix for that as well, basically just streamlining that. In this case, gameplay trumps is there a word missing here? so we want to make sure that being concealed is the priority. When you can’t look beyond an object but someone can see your head like that, that’s just wrong.
This shows why it’s so important to get community feedback because we can’t play this game for thousands of hours. We have to rely on not only our internal QA but also our unofficial external QA – the masses who feed it back to us. Some people are very dedicated and it’s much appreciated. It’s really awesome.
GLHF: Is that the same with the left peek advantage as well? (This allows players to be less exposed when cover is on their right than they are when it’s on the left, due to the position of the player camera.)
DS: Left peek advantage is the same situation, and is also a topic that is important for us. It’s mostly a technical issue with the rig and stuff like how the camera is positioned and with the leaning animation – it just comes naturally as a consequence of how it’s been set up. And we just need to streamline a little bit to make sure it’s fair. It’s good to know that you’ve come across all of these points. It shows me you’re definitely a player, because the moment you start playing a bit more competitively and with enthusiasm, all of these small tactics become so important for you. It really can give you an advantage, being able to just expose a few pixels versus the other guy. But yeah, it’s also an example of where it sounds trivial but actually, there is a bit of work underneath in order to really clean this up.
GLHF: You mentioned some of those tactics people used to stay invisible, and one of the things that has come up in meta conversations is the Cain skin. Is he supposed to be so camouflaged?
DS: I think Cain has proven himself to be a challenge primarily because he’s dirty. If you think about camouflage techniques and the psychology behind them, like how disruptive patterns can allow you to miss certain things in the environment, Cain is a prime example of how it works very well because you cannot dissolve the silhouette. And so we want to go back to him as well. It’s something that is on the list, but it’s one of the priorities. Cain was a bit of an accident for us because really, we didn’t expect him to work that well.
GLHF: I guess it’s hard from your side as well because people paid for the skin, right? So if you change it too drastically, those people are going to be annoyed.
DS: That’s always the problem. So yeah, I’m confident with finding a good middle ground there, but I can’t tell you exactly when and how.
GLHF: On console, you sometimes get thrown into an empty lobby. Is player count an issue on console?
DS: it depends on the region. Europe and the U.S. are usually the strongest ones. They’re the most populated ones. Matchmaking might end up once in a while giving you a session where there weren’t enough people queuing. Think of the queuing process like this: It’s not like the system has five sessions next to each other and samples them all – it goes first in, first out. So it can happen that sometimes you end up in a lobby where there are fewer players. I think a good thing for the game in this regard is that even if that happens, you don’t know. So you get suspicious. You still play the same. But yes, specifically console, it’s a smaller community than PC, which has by far the largest user base.
GLHF: Have you publicly announced your player count?
Crytek PR: 3.5 million unique players.
GLHF: Have you ever considered going free-to-play to bump that player count up?
DS: I honestly can’t talk about that. But I mean, free-to-play is a model that’s out there. Games have successfully done that, but whether it’s a good fit for us or not, I can’t say at this moment.
GLHF: What about PS5 and Xbox Series X next-gen updates? Is that on the cards?
DS: I think at the end of the year we put a news post out about our plans for next-gen. We unlocked the frame rate for the PS4 Pro version and the current-gen next-gen versions. It’s an important topic for us, but we can’t really talk about the details of that.
GLHF: Do you have any plans for a fourth map?
DS: We just released one half a year ago. Maps take time. I’m pretty sure there will be more map content in the future, but when and how? It’s a bit early. Can’t expect a new map every half a year.
GLHF: I really enjoy the variance in the current maps – when it’s nighttime or foggy – because it makes things really tense. You’re looking for light, you need a torch. I’d love to see games do that kind of darkness. But is it a challenge from your side because players may just turn the brightness up?
DS: That’s one part of it. The challenge around nighttime is that it is super tense, but many people still dislike it. The community is kind of torn between it. So what we see from the numbers is that there’s a much higher chance for people to just go to an exit directly when it’s a nighttime or fog map, compared to a daytime map. And I think this is because you don’t know what you’re getting into so you can’t really prepare for it.
Moving forward, we want to see when and how we can improve that. At one point we had to disable the separate contracts so you can only choose random contracts – it’s a problem with matchmaking and queue times. We want to have a replacement for it eventually. Now what we have at the moment, it just means you don’t know whether you should bring fuses, a flare pistol, or anything that helps you with light. And as such, people can feel unprepared a little bit. And just the fact you don’t see so much – maybe scopes are rendered ineffective, or anything at this long range might be not as effective. That means some people are not feeling confident in these low-visibility environments, at least statistically.
GLHF: I know you said you’ve enjoyed working on this for quite some time, but would you enjoy working on a sequel as well?
DS: Eventually! Hunt is the closest thing I have to a child. I’m really invested in this game, I’m really happy how it turned out. Having a chance to work on this since the beginning and shaping it, I’m not getting bored of this. I play this a lot in my free time as well, and Hunt is just a very strong part of my daily activities. As such, whatever allows me to continue working on this game in the future – sure, great, I’ll take it. Maybe eventually a sequel. But then again, I think we still have a lot of things to show.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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