40% of Hunt: Showdown players have never killed another player, says Hunt: Showdown's general manager
When a group of people working on some of the biggest games in the first-person shooting genre gathered for a roundtable hosted by our own Evan Lahti at GDC, the subject of rookie retention came up. The most popular shooters today are competitive—with extraction shooters and battles of the royale variety maintaining their dominance—so is it an issue that the first experience many players have is getting demolished by veterans?
David Fifield, general manager for the Hunt franchise at Crytek, called this «the brick of getting in», making it sound appropriately like a heavy blunt object just waiting to fall on the heads of fresh meat playing their first games of Hunt: Showdown.
«We have an achievement in Hunt called Debut,» Fifield said. «It's 'kill your first enemy Hunter', 40% of our players never get it. We're a PvP game where you come in, you do some things, and 40% of the people trying Hunt have never killed another player.»
Hunt: Showdown is a PvPvE game in which haunted gunslingers dodge dying horses while crouch-walking across the weird west, hoping to take down monstrous bosses for their bounties then escape with the loot. Standing between them and safe extraction are other actual players who would quite like to shoot them and steal their stuff. It's a tense game where you might go an entire match without bumping into another human, and then be dropped by a headshot from an enemy you didn't see in the next.
«Balance is tricky,» Fifield admitted. «In chess, somebody has to move first and so chasing that perfectly fair, perfectly balanced thing? The most skilled person will always win and it actually isn't that interesting to watch now. Not to disparage the chess world, I love chess.» Fifield, however, prefers it
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