It’s likely no exaggeration to state that Hunt Showdown was Crytek’s saving grace. The Frankfurt based game development studio hadn’t launched a successful game in years, and this relatively small project did wonders for them, having carved a sizable niche of highly dedicated aficionados. There’s even a live-action series adaptation on the way, though we haven’t heard any news about that in a while.
One of the most acclaimed examples of the Extraction Shooter genre, Hunt Showdown recently celebrated the fifth anniversary since its release. Shortly after that, just a couple of days ago, Crytek revealed the upcoming roadmap for 2023 and beyond. Some of the main additions include roaming bosses, improvements to the server backend, and new Wild Card conditions. All of these should appear with the Summer update, while the latter half of the year will bring a Shooting Range and some much-needed technical enhancements.
We’ve transcribed the full quote from Hunt Showdown General Manager David Fifield since there are more than a few noteworthy tidbits.
Hunt Showdown last integrated the mainline CryEngine back at version 5.6. That’s from four years ago, so Hunt is running on a four-year-old version of CryEngine. This year we’re going to start that integration to take it up to the latest 5.11 version of CryEngine. That’s going to bring with it a bunch of things. The big thing is it paves the way for the proper Gen 9 version where we can have the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, where we have DirectX12 running natively.
We’ll be pushing graphics fidelity on the PC as well as those consoles after we get to the latest and greatest version of CryEngine 5.11. When the work is done, consoles and PC should benefit from HDR, AMD FSR 2.1, and DirectStorage at release. That will be an enhanced experience visually and just in the terms of loading and where the assets are and how you get into matches. It’s another long view initiative, so we’ll come back with more details later in the year as we make progress on it, but it’s definitely a big part of where we’re putting our resources this year as we prepare Hunt Showdown to go on for years and years and years. We have this roadmap we’re talking about for this year, but we have a plan for the franchise that extends well beyond 2023.
Hunt Showdown currently has no upscaler, so a performance uplift is all but guaranteed with the addition of FSR 2.1. However, Fifield’s mention of DirectStorage is perhaps even more interesting, as that would make Hunt Showdown the second game to support Microsoft’s API after Forspoken unless some other game can materialize out of thin air. It’s doubly intriguing because we didn’t think existing games would go to the trouble of supporting DirectStorage.
Needless to say, as we get closer to this big Hunt Showdown tech update, we’ll reach out to Crytek to get the lowdown on everything that will be added under the hood. Stay tuned.
