Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown 1896 team posted survey results and telemetry after running a live test of increased lobby sizes earlier this month, focusing on Duos and Trios queues because most players did not get a chance to test the Soul Survivor mode.
The developer said around 57% of Trios respondents were satisfied with the larger lobbies, while reactions in Duos were much more mixed. Crytek reported several clear patterns in the survey: players on Russia, South America, and Oceania servers rated the change more positively than those on Europe and U.S. servers; lower-MMR players viewed the change more negatively, where console players were slightly more positive about Duos than PC players, and longer-time players tended to be more critical. The post noted sample-size differences across those groups could have affected the results.
The most prominent gameplay complaint was an increase in fights around spawn areas. Crytek said telemetry showed the average number of deaths during the first three minutes of a Mission rose after adding more teams to lobbies, and 56% of survey responses flagged the early stage as where the change had the biggest impact. That spike in opening engagements hit newer and lower-skilled players hardest and often left surviving teams far from Boss Target compounds, prompting calls from players to retain double Boss Target Missions in larger lobbies to spread fights out.
Crytek said the increased player count also encouraged passive and ambush-driven play. As more teams clustered on a location, rotations and disengagements became harder, resources were depleted faster, and many teams adopted a third-party strategy to conserve supplies and loot defeated Hunters. About 37% of players reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of opponents or teams in Duos, and 32% said the extra action didn’t add meaningful gameplay.
On rewards, only 24% of players felt satisfied with the current value of the Bounty Token when extracting. Crytek’s data showed a drop in average Hunter Dollar balances after the test, with Trios experiencing the largest losses. Players increasingly relied on the Vulture Trait to loot defeated Hunters, and many said extracting a Bounty Token felt insufficient compared with the risks in busier matches.
The post laid out a number of next steps Crytek plans to test. To reduce spawn-area fighting, the team will explore better control over team spawns in higher-player-count maps and try to shift encounters toward mid and late game. The studio also intends to link minimum and maximum player or team counts to MMR brackets and to double Bounty Target Missions. For Duos specifically, Crytek had already implemented a maximum limit of seven teams prior to the survey and said telemetry showed that limit decreased Hunt Dollar economy drain and reduced deaths and fights near spawn.
Additional plans include designing more flexible combinations of minimum and maximum player counts, scheduling those settings by region and time to match server populations, improving visibility of how many players or teams can be encountered when selecting a mode, and reviewing world resource availability so teams can engage multiple opponents without needing external resupply. On rewards, Crytek said it will look into increasing the value of the Bounty Token while continuing to evaluate non-Bounty Token reward adjustments.
The findings and action points came from the team’s survey and telemetry work and will feed into a future playtest. Crytek said it was not ready to announce the next playtest date but will notify players in advance via Discord and other social channels. The full developer post is available on Steam.
Please share whether you prefer larger lobbies or tighter Duos matches in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.
Hunt: Showdown 1896
Developed by Crytek Frankfurt
Hunt the corrupted in backwaters lost to history. Fight back against a timeless evil that pits you against twisted monsters and other desperate Hunters – solo or in a group – in a high-stakes, tactical, PvPvE, first person shooter. There are no heroes here. Risk everything as Hunt consumes you.
- Genre: Shooter, Simulator
- Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5, Xbox One
- Modes: Single player, Multiplayer, Co-operative
- Release: 2019-08-27
- Publisher: Crytek
-
Age Rating:
CLASS_IND 18 / ACB MA 15+ / GRAC 15+ / ESRB M / PEGI 18
- IGDB Rating: 74.6/100
