Crytek wants Hunt: Showdown to avoid live-service's sequel problem

Hunt: Showdown has no sequel in the works, and developer Crytek wants things to stay that way. 

In a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, general manager David Fifield stated that no immediate follow-up was in development, in part because the studio doesn't want it to impact the original game's player base. Right now, Crytek has "no plans for Hunt 2. We just plan to keep going forward." 

Hunt: Showdown is a multiplayer first-person shooter that's been around since 2019, and such titles eventually hit a point where a sequel is introduced. This has already happened with Bungie's Destiny series' and Overwatch from Blizzard, and will happen with Studio Wildcard's remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved.

Such sequels (namely Overwatch 2 and Counter-Strike 2) end up fully replacing their predecessor in some way, to the dismay of players. That's something Fifield intentionally wants to avoid, as he noted Blizzard's hero shooter eventually became "a reskin of Overwatch 1" following the reduction of its planned PvE mode. 

"It was [a] cool reskin," he acknowledged, "and it's still a cool game! It just felt like Overwatch 1 in its next evolution of service."

Crytek's plan is to treat Hunt like how Epic Games handles Fortnite, where new chapters (and the three-month seasons within them) essentially function as sequels unto themselves. "[Epic]...radically overhauled a whole, giant part of all its systems, but they just called it chapter two. That seems to be more the trend that we'll follow when updating Hunt."

Even as the game will soon be dropping support for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, along with some older PC hardware, Crytek doesn't plan on abandoning Hunt. It wants to "keep growing the player base that we have" and ensure as much as possible carries over with growing technology. 

Anything new that plans to come after Hunt will be "brand extensions," said Fifield, in the vein of a new game in the same universe. But those titles "wouldn't be meant to replace Hunt: Showdown, the thing people play."