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.
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.