Hunt Showdown's 1896 relaunch is live and facing player derision over the new UI, bugs and performance

rockpapershotgun.com:

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

The 1896 overhaul moves the game to CryEngine 5.11. When I spoke to Crytek's general manager David Fifield last November about Hunt's unholy evolution since its early access launch in February 2018, he said that the game has been needing a techno-revamp for a while, with new effects such as rain putting the older incarnation of the game (especially, the PS4 and Xbox One versions) under pressure. "It got to like, if we're going to keep doing stuff like this, we have to raise our min spec, and we need to go to the new engine," Fifield told me.

Here's how Crytek say the jump to a new flavour of CryEngine improves the game, courtesy of our dear friend Monsieur Press Release and his trusted associate, Senorita Blockquote:

- A leap in visual fidelity, including improvements across textures, lighting, environments, animations, and more.

- Hunt has been upgraded to DirectX 12, which means better graphical performance and higher FPS.

- A new light cache system and specular tracing for multi-bounce Global Illumination mean higher quality lighting and more depth to environmental visuals, as well as richer darkness.

- Water and hair shaders bring the world of Hunt even further to life with more realistic hair on characters and water and rivers that have never looked better with improved foam, flow, and turbulence for increased realism.

- Adding DLSS and FSR gives the game a performance boost with higher frame rates and sharper graphics.

- Improved CrySpatial audio and audio slapback ecosystem provide improved clarity and sound definition, immersing you even further into the game.

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