Hunt Showdown's 1896 relaunch is live and players are being met with cynicism over the new UI, bugs, and performance

Crytek's sweaty and excellent survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been re-released as Hunt: Showdown 1896, featuring a major technological update alongside a chronological jump to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for major 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely hate it, and recent Steam user reviews have the consensus underwater.

The 1896 revision brings the game to CryEngine 5.11. When I spoke to Crytek’s general manager David Fifield last November about Hunt’s unfortunate evolution since its early access launch in February 2018, he said that the game had been in need of a technological overhaul for a while, with new effects like rain weighing down the older version of the game (especially the PS4 and Xbox One versions). “If we’re going to keep doing things like this, we need to raise our minimum specs and move to the new engine,” Fifield told me.

Here's how the move to Crytek's new version of CryEngine has improved the game, courtesy of our good friend Monsieur Press Release and his trusted partner Senorita Blockquote:

– A leap forward in visual fidelity, including improvements to textures, lighting, environments, animations, and more.

– Hunt has been upgraded to DirectX 12, which means better graphics performance and higher FPS.

– A new light cache system and specular tracking for multi-bounce Global Illumination means higher quality lighting and greater depth and richer darkness in environmental visuals.

– Water and hair shaders bring the world of Hunt even more to life with more realistic hair on characters and better looking water and rivers than ever before, with improved foam, flow, and turbulence for greater realism.

– The addition of DLSS and FSR gives the game a performance boost with higher frame rates and sharper graphics.

– Enhanced CrySpatial audio and audio slapback ecosystem provides enhanced clarity and sound definition, further immersing you in the game.

The above “radical leap” in visual and audio fidelity and performance comes with a new biome, a new Scorched Earth live event, new non-boss munster types to kill, a new Wild Target or roaming boss, additional wilderness-era firearms and melee weapons, and new Hunter variants. The new map is Mammon's Gulch – a relatively bright and clearly defined mountain playground next to the fly-infested swamps of pre-1896 Showdown – and the new Wild Target, the Hellborn, who roam the forests and cough up fire on people. I still think Spider is the worst of the roster. Pray to God they never let him come looking for you outside.

There’s also a new UI designed to be more intuitive and less cluttered for new players to grasp. The UI has been a frequent feature in some of the negative Steam reviews I read this morning. Hunt Showdown’s 1896 rebirth saw its Steam review consensus drop from solidly positive to “Mostly Negative” overnight. Looking at the stats, it looks like the most negative reviews the game has received in a month since 2018.

The complaints run the gamut — grumbling about bugs, gripes about nuances like bullet drop, objections to the way the store ads are presented when you start the game. Some of the negative comments come from people who have played Hunt Showdown for hundreds or thousands of hours, and you can look at them a couple of ways: first, these players are expert sources of feedback, and second, these players are a more vocal and over-invested audience who, because they've been playing for a long time, probably can't see the forest for the trees.

It’s worth reiterating that the goal of the remaster is, in part, to bring new people into the game, not just appease the old guard. Still, I can’t help but think back to Fifield’s comments to me last year about Crytek not “replacing” Hunt Showdown with a sequel, since Blizzard is shipping Overwatch 1 alongside Overwatch 2. As far as I can tell, there’s no choice but to play the new version of the game. Offering the ability to reverse-engineer fundamental aspects of the 1896 build might appease naysayers, but it’s likely to be extremely difficult to implement.

Crytek developers have been putting out fires in the review comments. “Our design team has been hard at work on a long-requested UI overhaul, a major improvement that has been needed for some time,” one reply reads. “We've focused on striking a balance between simplicity and functionality, which is the idea behind the new design. We'll continue to gather player feedback and improve the UI going forward.”

The game will be free from August 15-19, if you want to give the old spider-villain a shot and make up your own mind. In other news, I'm holding out hope for Hunt's single-player campaign – Fifield said it's possible, but highly unlikely.

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