A significant part of the complicated appeal of Crytek’s bounty-hunting FPS, Hunt: Showdown, is to be found in its immense, highly detailed maps.
Rivalling single-player FPS spaces in their density, authenticity, and inventiveness, the first two maps, Lawson and Stillwater, provided the game with the lurid stage set for its grim atmosphere. Crytek’s environment team artfully compressed boss battle spaces and wide-open watery deltas into a gameplay-facilitating landscape filled with horrific details and eye-rolling Easter eggs. Without the high-end achievement of these slices of 19th-century desolation, the game would not have had the same sense of gravity or, arguably, longevity – learning maps of this size takes time. Mastering them is an ongoing prospect.
Related: Hunt: Showdown Remains The Best Multiplayer Shooter That No One Is Talking About
The third of these maps, Desalle, has arrived via the test server client with surprisingly little fanfare for obligatory testing of the 1.6 patch. We can expect the real noise to come, I think, when the map goes onto the live servers. For now it is available in this limited way, and it is extremely satisfying to finally play.
Hunt maps are broken up into “compounds”, which are roughly evenly spaced areas of interest with a number of buildings where bosses might spawn. Identifying these, killing the boss, banishing it, and then escaping with the bounty constitute the overarching gameplay loop. Desalle does not change any of this, and indeed it sticks to all of the main conceits of the original two maps in structure and intent. Everything is built around a water-table that runs across the map, meaning that encountering streams, rivers, and pools is a constant hazard. The first two maps are swampy. You’re able to move freely, but sometimes at the cost of wading through mobility-restricting bogs. It’s a clever use of the game mechanics to divide the maps into heat areas without restricting player freedom. However, they are also fairly flat as a result.
Desalle does the water thing too, but it also plays with verticality. The surrounding wilderness features great rocky mountains and mesas, in the classic Wild West style, while the game space itself features hills and hugely craggy canyon spaces that are entirely unlike the previous maps. This use of space is also reflected in the compounds themselves, several of which sprawl immensely across the landscape and up into the sky. The prison – set on a huge hill – offers massive vistas across the map, dwarfing the couple of high towers the previous environments had to offer.
The 1.6 update plays up to these increased sightlines, too, with the two heavier ammo types now benefiting from increased effective ranges. As someone who has a weakness for sniping, the idea of headshots being possible from even more extreme ranges – both due to the environment and thanks to gameplay changes – fills me with trollish joy.
Speaking of Trolldom, I have seen a little uncharitable and even bad tempered griping in Twitch chat about the new map being too similar to the previous two, with its reuse of location types – a prison, a church, a mill, an abattoir for pigs – and the reappearance of a number of major assets. This seems to me to both miss the point of creating another map that shares thematic coherence with the existing two, while also underestimating the challenges of game development. Desalle could not stray too far from the template without being in danger of seeming like it was from a different game, and the challenge – absolutely met by Crytek – was to make it feel different without betraying the original motifs. Moreover, there are practicalities to making such a thing, for which sharing some of the atlas of assets was going to be essential: Desalle took long enough without having to hand-craft everything from scratch, and I am not sure the community would have been happy to wait any longer.
The truth is the new compounds are as richly furnished and keenly imagined as I could have expected. Desalle itself – a classic Wild West saloon town divided into two compounds by a river – is the star of the show, boasting a multi-level bank in one part and saloon complete with show stage and swing doors in the other. Battles across this new compound are chaotic and wild, fuelled partly by the shared discovery of the space across all players, and also by the sheer number of places you can get into, clamber on, or shoot from.
The problem with Desalle, if it really is a problem, is that it is likely to diminish the appeal of the older maps, at least for a while. It feels more colourful with its autumnal vegetation, and – perhaps this is over-familiarity talking – it also seems richer in detail. That will be hard to do much about without an overhaul of the other two immense environments.
A friend in the industry recently asked me whether Hunt: Showdown was actually popular, given that only I seem to ever be talking about it, and whether it was successful. All I could really say is that the numbers for the game have only gone up. And yes, it hasn’t troubled the really big monsters of FPS. Still, I feel like the live game has been handled as well as might be expected, with the events being fun and most of the changes being either quality of life or rebalances that have been heavily griped about beforehand, and then readily accepted by the ferocious community. Crytek has never lost the purity of its vision, and arguably only improved on it.
Moreover, perhaps it is destined to be niche. Hunt feels to me like one of those games, many of which I have written about extensively over the years, that I would argue is a masterpiece, and yet cannot unreservedly recommend. EVE Online was one of those, Stalker is another. I love those games like members of my own family, and yet there are many clear reasons why others cannot love them. Despite the recent matchmaking changes, and 1.6’s attempts to make the entire process less opaque, Hunt remains a formidable, forbidding game that many people will simply bounce off. I recommend it, with that warning. Desalle and 1.6 do nothing to change that. It is brilliant, almost objectively so, but your mileage will vary.
The 1.6 patch has, I should also mention, finally nerfed the game’s most overpowered weapon, the Dolch 96 pistol – a horrible creation that I complained about on this very website, in another concluding paragraph, just a few months ago. Despite the changes I am sorry to report that the Dolch is still totally OP, and – for the purposes of journalism only – I took the opportunity of unlimited funds on the test server to arm myself with four of them and spam the hell out of my opponents. Back on the live servers, I will continue to curse their use.
So it goes. I suppose we can’t have everything.