Hunt: Showdown fights camping in first major update
Crushing campers so you can mash monsters
While the PvPvE monster-hunting FPS Hunt Showdown continues its journey through early access, developers Crytek today launched what they're calling its "first major content update". It adds new scoped guns and new character traits to improve your monstermashing, and also takes a crack at solving the problem of camping. It's no fun to slug it out with the big bad and walk away with its guts in your trophy bag, only to be picked off by the real monsters: campers. The solution is two-pronged, providing extra incentive to banish the beastie and reworking the map to add cover and weaken campgrounds.
"A completed banishing will now fully restore your health, and give your Hunter additional health chunks (if your Hunter has room on their health bar)," Crytek explain in today's patch notes. "Additionally, killing, banishing, and extracting with at least one bounty token from a target now provides a post-mission bonus of 25 bounty, called Clean Sweep."
Rewards for killing the boss are higher now too, and kept even if you do snuff it afterwards.
As for map tweaks, Crytek say, "Compound layouts have been changed to make boss arenas harder to successfully camp and provide more defensive options for players who take out a target. Some spawn areas have also been adjusted to provide cover and reduce your chances of being seen at the mission start."
And the guns, hey, they're rifles and pistols with scopes. They do sniping. Pew-pow.
Loads more changes in today's update, so do see the patch notes for everything.
I've not gone Hunting yet myself, but I am keeping a curious eye on it after reading Fraser Brown's Premature Evaluation.
"It's not quite what I thought it was going to be," he said, "but Hunt: Showdown is still a clever competitive shooter and an excellent source of emergent stories. And disasters. Mostly disasters."
I like monsters AND disasters so hmm. Ah, maybe I'll wait to see if the game settles down and players stick around. I really do want to meet that terrible skittering spider.
It's £26/€30/$30 on Steam Early Access, if you're interested.