The Makingg Making Of… Hunt: Showdown
Game developers are used to a complicated sense of ownership. The designer who conceives a game in preproduction might not be the same who sees it to completion; the publisher to whom the IP legally belongs may never touch its code. Yet for the team at Crytek Frankfurt back in 2013, the answer was unusually clear: Hunt wasn’t theirs.
Hunt: Horrors Of The Gilded Age, as it was known then, lived on another continent. As THQ collapsed, Crytek’s Cevat Yerli had swooped into Austin, Texas to hire Vigil head David Adams, and subsequently many of the studio’s former staff. Hunt would be the next step for the Darksiders team: an action-RPG reshaped by the added contemporary twist of four-player co-op. It was even developed on the same computers as
Darksiders – in a practical gesture of continuity, Crytek had bought those too. “We received updates through monthly team company meetings,” recalls Crytek Frankfurt’s Dennis Schwarz. “I was always curious to see the next steps and how this whole thing evolved. But obviously, we weren’t a part of the development process.”
Until, that was, Hunt’s dramatic origin story took a further turn. 2014 turned out to be the most traumatic year in Crytek’s history. After a period of rapid growth that peaked with nearly 1,000 staff across nine studios, the company was entering a phase of painful contraction. With employees left waiting for pay, Crytek sold off
Homefront: The Revolution and its veteran UK developer. The former Vigil team, meanwhile, was stripped to the bones, reduced to providing engine support for local CryEngine licensees.
There’s a more likely version of this tale, in which Crytek cut its losses and Hunt was simply cancelled. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the company brought the game back to the mothership in Frankfurt. “We spent a lot of time investigating,” Schwarz says. “Going through the assets, understanding the gameplay, and seeing what the potential of the game was.”
Those assets had been built for a thirdperson shooter; a ‘grind game’ with a traditional RPG loop that sent players from safety to the swamps and back again. But the Frankfurt team was given the freedom to remake Hunt in its own image. Far from the unwieldy giant that entered the 2014 crisis, Schwarz paints Crytek as a family, with all the unspoken faith and familiarity that word implies. “We’re a small company and we’re very close when it comes to understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” he says. “It was almost a given that management would give us room to explore, and the trust that we could bring our own skills and experiences to bear.”
Horrors Of The Gilded Age had been a reflection of Vigil’s DNA, rooted in retro, Resident Evil- like exploration and creature killing. But the Frankfurt team has its own history, stretching from Far Cry through three instalments of Crysis. These were games that simulated wideopen environments, which players navigated from a vulnerable firstperson perspective. Almost instinctively, these elements became a part of Hunt too. “We took the game that others started,” Schwarz says, “and made it our own.”
Under Frankfurt’s direction, Hunt gained a map populated by powerful monsters with ears attuned to player transgressions. Stealth became the default mode; as in Far Cry, any skirmish was best dealt with quickly, since it risked attracting further attention. The ‘wide corridors’ of Crysis became a true sandbox, a square kilometre of space defined by its changeability: every match altered the placement of objectives, monsters and, most crucially, other players. “It’s fun to play in a co-op environment, but it can get repetitive much faster than if you introduce an unknown element, like a player that’s working against you,”
Schwarz says. “If it’s a game that’s supposed to be entertaining people for hundreds of hours, other players are a system you almost get for free.”
Thus, Hunt earned a new subtitle: Showdown. Up to 12 players now joined a given match, all competing to bring home the same bounties – either by wrenching them from the corpse of a monster, or from another human being. Crytek kept the RPG continuity the US team had been shooting for, allowing players to attach beneficial traits to characters as they levelled up, and arm them with stronger weapons and throwables. But the idea took on new volatility in a different context: permadeath.
Schwarz says the team was chasing the constant pressure of DayZ. “There needs to be something at stake,” he argues, “to get that feeling of imminent danger.” To this potent mix, then, Crytek added ever-present extraction points to the map. With distant gunfire in the air and bandages dwindling, players always had the option of turning tail and saving their character.
Hunt: Showdown had become a delicious, unending calculation of risk and reward. As the scene faded to black on a lucky escape, a legend would appear onscreen: ‘You live to die another day.’
Despite all this change, the new Hunt was still steered by the setting the former Vigil staff had picked for it – Louisiana in the late 19th century. Atop the swamp, on rotting wooden planks that failed to keep the damp at bay, walked swarthy men in brimmed hats. The lumber mills seemed not to have made a dent in the dense greenery, which blocked one’s view in every direction, swallowing the light and making travel without maps impossible. “It’s a busy environment, by definition,” Schwarz says. “It’s hard to find your bearings. We wanted to translate that into an eerie feeling of not being fully aware of what’s going on around you.”
At first, those claustrophobic surroundings seem anathema to Crytek Frankfurt’s design philosophy. This was the studio that practically invented climbing towers in open worlds: not to trigger an automatic sweep of the surrounding terrain, but to gather visual information about the dangerous situations you were walking into. In the
Crysis games, binoculars evolved to tag enemies, identify weapons and outline potential points of entry. With that line of sight cut off by the bayou’s thick-rooted trees, Hunt’s setting appears to work against the studio’s very nature. But in the event, it prompted a fruitful switch of the senses, from
“THERE NEEDS TO BE SOMETHING AT STAKE TO GET THAT FEELING OF IMMINENT DANGER”
sight to sound. “Our creative director, Magnus [Larbrant], came up with this formula set of player awareness driven through audio cues,” Schwarz says. The team began to experiment with distinctive sounds, like flocks of birds flapping and squawking when disturbed by hunters. “By getting these additional audio cues, the player forms a mental map of what’s going on around them.”
A focus on sound didn’t just replace the visual information players were used to getting. It also provided them with a new skill to master, that of close listening – something few shooters had asked for before. “It’s very important, if you want to play Hunt, to be able to take in all this [aural] information and then draw up a better plan from that,” Schwarz says. “It’s only achievable through the deprival of other information, so that the player feels they’re clinging onto these things.”
There were other benefits. By stripping away the gadgets players lean on in stealth games, Crytek strengthened Hunt’s setting. Although, Schwarz admits, the team originally went too far in its eagerness for period equipment, prototyping an in-world map that players would open in their hands. It worked for Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2, but Far Cry 2 wasn’t a competitive game. As anybody old enough to have used an A-to-Z knows, maps are fiddly, and nobody wants to be caught folding one away when a firefight breaks out.
The period weaponry, by contrast, worked in Hunt’s favour. Its armoury of crossbows and shotguns promotes a deliberate pace to combat: shrewd players tend to open fire only once they’re convinced the shot will meet its target. “You go into the swamp with a revolver and you have to make do,” Schwarz says. “You don’t run around with a big machine gun and pouches of ammunition. We made sure that players have to be making a conscious action to fire the gun, and not just spray and pray, because that actually gets you killed.”
To that end, the team built a default control scheme that departs from shooter convention. In ‘Hunter’ mode, it’s impossible to fire without holding down the left trigger first – the FPS equivalent of an ‘Are you sure?’ computer prompt. “We do offer alternatives,” Schwarz says. “We introduced the ‘Gunslinger’ mode, which is much more traditional, for people who have problems with these barriers. But we have encouraged players to question and challenge themselves a little. It’s all about making sure that with the limited resources you have available, you can get the job done.”
Some of the players Crytek are retraining in the art of patience came straight from modern battle royale shooters – in fact, Warzone, Call Of Duty’s iteration of the battle royale genre, exploded midway through Hunt’s development. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between the two: as in battle royale, Hunt’s effective play area gradually shrinks over time, as players determine the location of the map’s bounty. “It didn’t really change our core vision, which is meant to be hightension due to the unknown, and the fear of loss,” producer Fatih Özbayram says.
Once again, the setting came to the rescue. As battle royale games began to homogenise, Hunt was kept on course by the particularities of 1800s Louisiana. It’s just as well: in the years since Fortnite’s rise, battle royale modes without a distinctive voice or style sank as quickly as they peaked. “We were not yet another game with a Kalashnikov,” Schwarz says. “We had our own gameplay formula that we discovered on our own. But it would be a lie to say we weren’t influenced by these games. You always get influenced by the competition. Obviously we took a close look.”
That inspection led to the development of Hunt’s Quickplay mode, which spawns the player as a random hunter with a basic weapon. Each hunter is damned, and a single ‘wellspring’ can save their soul; ultimately, only the player who finds and successfully fights for it can survive. “It’s the closest to a royale-ish experience that we can offer in Hunt,” Schwarz says. “But it’s still very different.” That’s in part down to Crytek’s commitment to deprive players of information, which extends to Hunt’s structure. There’s no remaining player count visible on-screen, and without that certainty, Bounty Hunt matches tend to take peculiar shapes. The odd hunter sometimes lingers long after the climactic shootout, scavenging for scraps in quasi-singleplayer.
Which begs the question: could Hunt work that way, without the ‘free system’ of other players? With launch behind it, Crytek has already committed to a dedicated PvE mode. “We want to make it easier for players to enter the game and stick with it,” Özbayram says. “For us, the PvE experience is reaching out to players who might feel they’re not ready for PvP. They can explore the universe and get familiar with it, and we can show them a path to the rest of the game.” This won’t be a singleplayer campaign along the lines of Crysis or Far Cry, but nor will it be mere tutorial. “It gives veterans a chance to explore context in new ways they haven’t thought of, because they are so focused on their objective. They don’t appreciate certain parts of the map and the design, which this mode can bring to the foreground.”
It may tease out Hunt: Showdown’s lore, which for now lives in snippets of period-appropriate journaling. “With all things relating to this case,” writes a researcher in the game’s Book Of Monsters, “I am inclined toward belief in the most outlandish and bizarre theorisations one day, and incredulous the next.” It’s a fitting reflection of Crytek Frankfurt’s time in Hunt’s swamp, which has seen unease and uncertainty seep into the studio’s bones, and left its games the better for it.