'If you want to think of it as Hunt 2 you're welcome to, but I'm not going to charge you': Hunt: Showdown manager on the extraction shooter's impending engine upgrade, and the pitfalls of declaring a sequel

pcgamer.com:

Live service games are evolving. The major multiplayer shooters of the 2010s are starting to show their age in the 2020s, leaving their stewards to answer an interesting question: How do you move a service game into the future without disrupting its active player base, or starting completely fresh? In the cases of Overwatch 2 and Counter-Strike 2, Blizzard and Valve decided to make a spectacle of it, packaging revamped maps, reworked balance, and engine upgrades as official sequels that effectively overwrote the old games.

Hunt: Showdown, an unexpected hit in the burgeoning extraction shooter subgenre, is taking a different approach. Although it's five years old now, there will be no «Hunt 2» anytime soon, according to Hunt general manager David Fifield, but Hunt will enter a new era of its own when it upgrades to the current version of CryEngine in 2024.

«That has been a conversation internally about when or if we should rename or rebrand the product with some major update or when we launch with the integrated engine update to run native on the latest generation of consoles,» Fifield told PC Gamer in an interview. «Watching how those transitions have gone with other service games, we decided on continuing Hunt: Showdown and to not set expectations of replacing it.

»Declaring something to be a full sequel to a service game does create a lot of buzz certainly, but can also carry a backlash when it involves rebuilding the player base, migrating to an entirely new installation of another title ID, or a significant branch of core mechanics or progression resets. If it also carries a new price tag or could be described as a routine update instead of a whole new product, that also creates more friction and controversy."

«Frict