Hunt: Showdowntakes the title of the game I enjoy the most despite being bad at it.

It’s a no-holds-barred PvPvE game that I often play, even when I’ve come to expect failure.

(Hint: It seems likely.)

GameSpot: Hunt: Showdown recently celebrated its seventh anniversary.

What have been some of the game’s biggest milestones or moments through the years?

One of the first in 2021 was As the Crow Flies.

This was the first event where the community had to work to unlock Scrapbeak.

This event was beloved by both the community and the development team, and weve built from there.

Hunt’s audiovisual experience is clearly a focal point for the team.

Can you talk about the process of finding and expanding on Hunt’s specific style over the years?

Every move you make produces a sound that risks giving away your position.

A live-service game often changes based on player feedback.

How has the Hunt community helped reshape the game over all these years?

Schwarz: Definitely–community feedback is a huge driver for us.

With this update, we have implemented changes, especially to game balance.

Another good example was the crosshair, which we implemented with our 2.0 update.

Since the beginning of Hunt, the crosshair was always lowered.

Some players really liked this about the game, but others were vocal about it changing.

Surely the community for any game isn’talwaysright, yeah?

Hunt has changed shape a lot, especially in the 1896 update last year.

How satisfied are you with the game’s onboarding of new players right now?

I find the game extremely unforgiving, but I also love it for that.

But maybe some are turned away by this.

If you are still addressing that, how might players expect to see it change in the future?

Schwarz: Onboarding is a very important topic for us.

Moving forward, we expect to have further improvements here to better ease new players into the game step-by-step.

Hunt, in its core, is a hard game.

After all, this longstanding relationship with our players is what has helped keep us focused year after year.

The Garden of the Witch event kicks off today and revamps the weekly challenge system.

What went into the decision to change those and how will they alter how players approach the game?

This event also adds more to the story that’s always underlying every action in Hunt.

Live-service storytelling is an interesting, relatively new facet of games.

How much weight does the team give to its overarching mythology?

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