HUNT: Horrors of the gilded age
A co- op shooter surprise from Crytek.
Crytek tries its hand at a cooperative shooter, with randomly-generated levels
This was one of the most pleasant surprises of E3. Hunt is made by the team that worked on Darksiders, the THQ-published Zelda- alike that was such a Frankenstein’s monster of various game ideas that I never felt it had an identity of its own. This feels a little more personality-driven.
Hunt is a four-player co-op shooter set in randomly generated levels, with an emphasis on boss battles. While the art direction is a little bit Time Splitters and the basic idea of a co-op horror game is on Left 4 Dead’s turf, Crytek Austin is doing things a bit differently where it counts.
The randomly generated levels are probably the strongest evidence of that. The one I saw was set in a swampy bayou and filled with enemies and buildings straight out of Resident Evil 4’ s similarly-colored musty villages. You can see the similarities in the screenshots above. I’m assured that this is just one set of enemies in a globe-spanning selection of settings, each with various otherworldly creatures to take on.
As a team, you have to search for your objective—in this case, hunting down and killing a witch. Levels last about 10-15 minutes. Director David Adams explained the structure: “As an RPG, it has cool progression systems, a metagame—it’s about forming groups of monster hunters
The basic idea is on Left 4 Dead’s turf, but Crytek Austin’s doing things a bit differently
and tracking down and hunting these bosses of the world. It’s a boss-fighting game at the end of the day. We plan to make a ton of bosses, a whole bunch of cool mechanics, so what we’re showing you today is one of the bosses.”
Are you always fighting bosses? “You’re not always fighting bosses. You spend a lot of time doing other missions, to gather information to find their whereabouts so
you can kill them.” Hopefully there are some more exciting objectives in the non-boss missions as well.
Watching the team searching for the witch was the most exciting part of the demo, as they ventured into the unknown with no clear idea of what enemies will be waiting for them. Hunt looks like it could get super tough, considering how freeform the maps are—what if you get stuck looking for the witch, and instead get swarmed by endless villagers while your search fruitlessly goes on? The systems on show in
Hunt can make that happen. One of my favorite ideas is the way respawning is handled, which isn’t as simple as just coming back to life and diving back into the fray. You need someone else’s help on your team. The examples I was shown were of a player respawning inside a coffin with a tiny peephole, unable to get out unless a friend shot the lock off, and a player coming back to life while hanging upside down, who had to wait to be freed. In both cases you can observe in first-person while you wait for help—it’s the sort of fun thinking that makes me think Crytek Austin has something new to add to the co-op shooter oeuvre.
The boss battle with the witch is underlined by another really smart idea: one of the four players is drawn into her dimension, while she’s invisible to the other three. The only way to make the witch visible to other players is for the realm-bound player to shoot her, triggering a temporary visible outline of the boss for the other players to take out.
The available weapons will start out as your basic shotguns, pistols and so on, but killing bosses will eventually open up the
Respawning isn’t as simple as just coming back to life and diving back into the fray
opportunity to craft more occult devices for dealing with monsters. No specifics yet, but upgrading your armory clearly fits into Hunt’s progression curve. Hunt is also free-to-play, which I actually didn’t find out until after I left the demo (it didn’t seem to come up during the 22 minutes I was sat talking to Crytek). The business model is at least partly from the Valve school of not-shit free-to-play economics, in that the plan is to sell customizable bits and experience boosts while making the levels free. This is potentially good, as long as non-paying players aren’t stuck in grindy limbo. If I can spend a smallish fee making a flamboyantly purple Van Helsing then spend hours mainlining the random levels in search of fun variables with three friends, Hunt sounds kind of spot-on for me. It depends how customizable these characters are going to be. “It’s a blank slate,” Adams says. If you want to be Sherlock Holmes, or a city-slicker doctor, he says, you can be.
Longer term, Hunt’s durability hinges on how many killable bosses will actually be in the game. “We want to make a game where it’s all about killing bosses,” Adams says, “so we’ve built a system where we can generate bosses really quickly. Left 4 Dead, they’ve got the total ‘swarm gauntlet-style, kill a bunch of monsters’ thing, Evolve’s got cool PvP —there’s no cool mission-based fourplayer co-op games, where it’s about going out and killing a bunch of monsters. It’s a pretty unique proposition. We had a ton of cool bosses on Darksiders, it’s what we’re good at.”