Crytek is hoping to go beyond its hit Crysis series with a new game, Hunt: Showdown. The company, which has struggled in recent years, said it’ll show this new multiplayer shooter at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade event in Los Angeles in June.
Crytek is always ambitious at producing triple-A, or high-end, games. That’s probably why it got into financial trouble in recent years. Crytek didn’t say what platforms it would be on, and it did not yet respond to our requests for comment on that.
The Frankfurt, Germany-based game publisher and maker of the CryEngine game engine recently had to sell off its Crytek Black Sea studio in Bulgaria to Sega and its Creative Assembly division. It also cut jobs in Frankfurt, and in 2016, it shut down five game studios after complaints that it hadn’t paid employees. Hopefully, the company has pared back its staff enough to get its costs under control. Hunt: Showdown looks like a smaller budget title. From what I can tell based on the video, it looks like 2-versus-2 multiplayer game, where two players hunt each other in a forest.
The new game is based on the previously announced Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age. It takes that original concept in a different direction under a new development team. A teaser for the upcoming the Hunt: Showdown player-versus-player monster hunter, went live on the game’s website recently, and more details about the game will be revealed during E3.
Crytek still has studios in Frankfurt, in Kiev, Ukraine; and Istanbul, Turkey. The company has a rich history as the creator of the original Far Cry, the Crysis series, Ryse: Son of Rome, Warface, The Climb, and Robinson: The Journey. The CryEngine is now available on a “pay what you want” business model.