The US Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has rated Hunt: Showdown 1986 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. Here’s the description of the game (which received a Mature 17+ rating):
This is a first-person monster hunting game set in a fantastical version of the Victorian era. Players use bladed bats, clubs, brass knuckles, and pistols to kill zombie-like creatures and human rivals. Combat is highlighted by impact sounds, gunfire, and blood-splatter effects. Some weapons allow players to cave in zombies’ heads or to cut off their limbs. One type of zombie explodes into blood and viscera when killed; another type is depicted wearing human skin as a cape.
Notably, this is a separate listing from Hunt: Showdown. Before you dream of a sequel, though, Crytek General Manager David Fifield told Rock, Paper, Shotgun in late 2023 that such a thing was not at all in the plans:
I would say we would even be less aggressive than Overwatch or, you know, Destiny 2. No, we have no plans for Hunt 2. We just plan to keep going forward. 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.
If we talked about other products in the Hunt franchise, they wouldn’t be replacements to Hunt: Showdown, they’d be brand extensions. 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.
So, maybe Hunt: Showdown 1896 is going to be a brand extension, as suggested a while ago by Fifield. Or, more likely, this is simply the rebrand of the game itself. The developers have hinted at such a thing, and we already know that next month, they will add proper PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X support while dropping old-generation consoles, which are indeed absent in the ESRB listing.
Either way, big changes are on the way for the game.
