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.
