Crytek have "discussed" a Hunt: Showdown single-player campaign - "we do like narrative"
But no solid confirmation for the moment
Crytek's Hunt: Showdown may yet receive a single-player campaign, if the stars align, as the developers dig ever deeper into the asymmetrical multiplayer shooter's wonderfully plague-ridden narrative backdrop. Originally released out of Steam and Xbox early access in 2019, the game introduced single player PvE trials back in June 2020, much to Alice0's enthusiasm. It also now sports a scripted, voiced tutorial in which you stalk around farmhouses, learning the ropes and murdering wooden dummies at the behest of a leathery dude in the bushes. Could some kind of proper story component follow? Crytek have certainly thought about it.
"Campaign-style narrative - we don't have anything that we've announced yet," general manager David Fifield told me in an interview this week. "And it is, again, one of those things - we've discussed what it would be like, we've started a little bit more world-building, and doing stuff with our scripted tutorial, and having some narration and voices.
"Our marketing campaigns have started incorporating voices into some of the new Hunters and those trailers, giving them a little more personality and backstory," he went on. "But as far as like, a dedicated single player campaign, or an entirely extra product that's a single player thing, we don't have anything to announce there.
"But we do like narrative, we do like the backstories. And obviously, we're going to keep leaning into those parts of the game. That's how far we've gotten on those types of discussions."
Much like Alice0, I am exceedingly keen to play a fully featured solo yarn set in Hunt's dreadful, swampy Louisiana, with its gorgeous menagerie of killer crocs, zombos and demon spiders. That's despite acknowledging that much of the game's sweaty, unforgiving atmosphere is owing to the constant suspicion that there's another player lurking below a windowsill or in the long grass, poised to axe you down and nab your bounty. Perhaps they could make a campaign with player invasions or phantom drop-ins, akin to Dark Souls?
Current concrete plans for Hunt: Showdown include a new map and biome, which will be launched next year alongside an engine upgrade to CryEngine 5.11 (and increased minimum PC specs, alas). Fifield is excited for the engine update, noting that Crytek are known for "having an engine that's pushing the edges of graphical fidelity, especially for outdoor large environments".
"The engine upgrade is largely a tech and visual effort," he said. "So that's just like, it can be the experience of load times for maps, some of the fidelity of the different things that go on, what we do with water, what we do with weather, things like that, which will be increased there."
The update will accompany a new UI designed to win over new players across PC and console. "The whole thing is a little more approachable, it makes more sense to new players, and making it more universally applicable to both PC and console as far as the UI goes," Fifield told me. "So those things are all tied together, because the UI technology that we're moving to is also part of the new engine. So that's another kind of generational upgrade that will be happening at the same time."
Look out for the rest of my chat with Fifield next week. He had many thoughts on the subject of live service games and how one should go about making sequels for them, which is certainly A Topic At Hand.