Does it exist?
Drop 50 players onto a map, no PVP, only survival vs the hazards of the map.
Have the world difficulty scale with player rank.
Does it exist?
Drop 50 players onto a map, no PVP, only survival vs the hazards of the map.
Have the world difficulty scale with player rank.
Hunt: Showdown is kinda-sorta like this. There is PVP and don't get me wrong it's the focus of the game, but there's not a huge incentive for it game mechanics wise. The point of the game is to kill one or two AI boss monsters, loot it, and leave. The only reason you fight other players is for the right to kill the boss monster and/or because they'll probably shoot you first if you don't. The AI enemies around the map are brutal and absolutely will kill you if you don't respect them. The very best players just kind of run around slaughtering them and dare you to do anything about it, but even with ~400 hours I still slip up and get eaten by dogs every once in a while.
Definitely not what you meant, I'd really like something of this sort with no PVP at all. But it gets close sometimes. There's even proximity voice chat, and it's not that uncommon to make peaceful deals with other players. Sometimes it amounts to "hey buddy we're kind of in a stalemate here but I see somebody else sneaking up on you, you oughta go deal with them first" but sometimes it's straight up like "hey im alone out here, i just want one of them boss tokens, maybe we can share?" and then you end up working together. which also means you sometimes randomly run into teams of up to like 6 or 7 people who just spontaneously formed during the brutal pve-pvp match, when the maximum number of players who can actually go in together is 3. which is pretty cool.
Hunt is really cleverly designed. Most battle royale games use a big blunt stick to force the players to fight each other - there's a circle that gets smaller (or bigger in CoD DMZ) and forces everyone closer and closer to each other. In Hunt there's no circle. You can go anywhere you want, dick around, farm monsters, whatever. But the goal, most of the time, is to find and kill hte boss monster. To do this you have to find and interact with "Clues". Clues are game objects on the ground scattered around the map. When you interact with it it greys out part of the map where the boss is not, narrowing down the areas where the boss might be. Each boss has three clues. The first two grey out parts of the map, but once you have all three you'll be shown exactly where the boss is. The map gets greyed out in the same way for all players as they collect clues, nudging the players to search a smaller and smaller area for the boss. Since every sound you make in the game is audible to other players, and EVERY SINGLE GUNSHOT CAN BE HEARD FROM ANYWHERE ON THE MAP, Players can often located each other by sound and deduction. Instead of having a big blunt instrument forcing the players in to conflict the game flow is structured such that by pursuing the PvE objective you're organically brought in to PvP conflict.
The game is notable in that you're actually allowed to negotiate, team up, and cooperate with other teams as long as it's done organically in the match. It's not common, but every once in a while two teams will meet and agree to work together instead of killing each other. Since each boss drops two tokens that you can extract with for money and XP it's possible for two teams to "win" if they're willing to accept half the reward. This might happen just for fun, or because both teams have been mauled in prior PvP battles and don't have many resources left. Sometimes it'll happen becaues another team reached the boss first and fortified the boss layer and the two attacking teams agreed to work together to negate the defenders home field advantage. Sometimes solo players will team up with each other to have a better chance against teams of two or three. It makes for a very dynamic game that can be very unpredictable.
Yeah, I truly think Hunt is the best designed battle royale. On top of that, over the years they've released a lot of massive updates, and have somehow managed to avoid killing these cleverly designed elements. With most successful games, over the years you start to get the impression that the strengths were "accidental" or at least that the people responsible either don't work on the game anymore or have forgotten the reason behind the way it was designed that way, but Crytek seems to have a very thorough understanding of why the systems work and how to make them better. They've never released an update that made me think "well, fuck, they ruined it." The worst they've ever done is just adding guns / tools / whatever that change the meta in ways I don't like. For example the addition of slug ammo for shotguns kind of just made them the unambiguously ideal weapons for some scenarios which previously would've had a few different contenders.
And yet, even the update which added slugs, which I think are an overall negative change for the game, also added a bunch of stuff that I think was great for the game.
It's one of those games that I know someday I'm going to look back on and be like "I miss that game." When the servers are gone and maybe if you're lucky there's a fan project to play custom matches but there's not really a big playerbase for it. It's something really unique and special.
Most BR games are just trying to capture PUBG's explosive rise to fame and fortune, and PUBG was an ARMA mod working within the limitations of being an ARMA mod. Hunt is it's own weird thing, carefully and artfully designed around a innovative core gameplay loop that is supported by it's weapon design, art design, level layout, and even it's setting in the 1890s and the aesthetic of the bayou.
Like Apex? For all it's popularity it was supposed to be Titalfall 3, and was re-tooled over time as someone decided that Titans and the fast, free-form movement of Pilots was too much for the schlubs in the general public.
Fortnite was supposed to be a zombie base defense game and they pivoted almost literally overnight when PUGB exploded.
Hunt was always supposed to be Hunt, it was designed to be Hunt, and every piece of it, as far as I know, was made for hunt. Even the goofy full-auto Mosin-Nagant was there in some of the earliest promotional material. I'm not 100% on this but I think eve the "Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age" incarnation that was sort of the pre-development concept was still a PvPvE game with the same rough gameplay loop that Hunt ended up having.
It stands out from all the other extraction shooters and BRs in that it was designed to do what it does from inception. The only other one that can really say that is Tarkov, which AFAIK has always been Tarkov. All the other entries in the genre were adapted from somethhing else and it shows, whether that's PUBG's origins as an ARMA mod or CoD's DMZ being chained to the albatross of CoD.
Funny CoD DMZ story - There's a mission in DMZ that requires you to get kills from 100m+ with a rifle not suited to engaging at that range. 100m is generally further out than the AI spawn radius, so you have to do silly shit like sending one teammate ahead to force AI to spawn while other team-mates stay back to do the actual shooting. CoD is just bizarre bc so much of it is very deliberately, intentionally bad design and it still manages to dominate the space.