Hunt: Showdown 1896 News

We are thrilled to unveil Garden of the Witch, the first live in-game Event of 2025 for Hunt: Showdown 1896! The Event comes alongside the highly anticipated Update 2.3, kicking off a year of improvements, fixes, and performance updates for the game.

Step into a world where cursed nature and Corrupted metal collide as the mystical Bruja duo and the industrious Welders wage war against the Corruption, armed with their own unique powers.

The update signals a bold new direction, placing a laser focus on fixes, gameplay improvements, and quality-of-life enhancements to elevate player experience throughout the year. Prepare for a thrilling adventure and a redefined Hunt: Showdown 1896.

[h2]Garden of the Witch [/h2]

Garden of the Witch sees cursed nature and Corrupted metal clash. In the story of the Bruja duo and the Welders, each group fights against the Corruption with their own strengths. The Brujas bring organic mysticism to the table, while the Welders are armed with industrial occult practices and fire.

Players will earn Event Points and Pledge Marks like in previous Events, however instead of a vow pledging a Hunter to a Pact or a Troupe, Garden of the Witch brings three Event-exclusive Sealed Trait Rewards, which have been selected from past Events.

The following Traits will be exclusive to Garden of the Witch:

• Blademancer: Use Dark Sight to quickly retrieve launched projectiles.
  
• Corpse Seer: Receive a Dark Sight Boost when looting Hunters, even without a Bounty Token.
  
• Gunrunner: Allow your Hunter to equip two large guns at the same time.
  

Garden of the Witch also introduces Rare Supply Points to Hunt: Showdown 1896, which will appear in addition to normal Supply Points. At Rare Supply Points, Hunters will find rare rewards, such as one of the Event-exclusive Sealed Traits, a Sealed Cash Register, and all types of Sealed envelopes that can be unsealed in exchange for Pledge Marks.

[h2]Update 2.3 [/h2]

Based on our commitment to refining the game’s core experience and listening to player feedback, we’re refocusing on quality-of-life improvements, bug fixing, and performance throughout 2025.

Ahead of Update 2.3, we rolled back and adjusted several changes done in the past year. This included balancing Traits such as Lightfoot’s silent crouch, the Bear Trap’s damage, and stuck projectile mechanics. We’ve also addressed community-reported issues such as concertina wire damage through floors, hanging chains blocking attacks, lingering poison effects, and UI bugs.

Performance, stability, and quality-of-life features for our players remain our top priority, each with their own planned improvements throughout 2025. A lot more fixes and tweaks are upcoming, along with bigger changes.

Update 2.3 brings exciting new changes, including:

• Recruitment Revamp: New Hunters now come with 10 Upgrade Points to freely spend on unlocked Traits, offering greater customization options from the get-go.
  
• Trait Adjustment: Poltergeist and Blast Sense return as regular Traits, with Blast Sense now also detecting silenced shots.
  
• New Compounds for Bounty Clash: Arden Parish and Darrow Livestock join the pool of possible Bounty Clash compounds, alongside refined spawn points and item locations.
  
• Gameplay Tweaks: Syringe use has been improved, and Dark Dynamite Satchels can now be disabled and picked up.
  
• Bounty Clash Tweaks: Following community feedback, the number of teams has been reduced to four in order to ease the pressure at the start of the clash. The “Nighttime” Time of Day has also been removed from Bounty Clash Missions to ensure better gameplay flow.
  
• Stealth Adjustments: Stealth mechanics have been rebalanced to better reflect their value. Silenced weapons now suffer a 10% damage decrease, and throwable melee Tools have been adjusted to emphasize specialization.
  

Gunplay changes reflecting community feedback:

• The Bolt Thrower Trait now works with the Bomb Lance and Bomb Launcher for faster reloads.
  
• The Maynard and Martini-Henry now also benefit from the Fast Fingers Trait.
  
• New Weapon Variants: Introducing the 1865 Carbine Silencer, Obrez Match, and Obrez Sharpeye.
  

[h2]Looking Ahead [/h2]

Update 2.3 and Garden of the Witch kick off a year dedicated to listening to the Hunt: Showdown 1896 community and delivering meaningful improvements. We are excited to hear your feedback and encourage you to let us know your thoughts in our surveys, to make sure developers hear from you directly. We can’t wait to see you visit the Garden of the Witch!

Hunters,

This weekend we’re celebrating International Women’s Day! It’s a simple fact that Hunt wouldn’t be what it is without our female Partners, players, and staff. As part of our celebrations, we’re taking the opportunity to spotlight some of the women in our community as well as some of our female Hunters.

Our Partners are a huge asset to Hunt. By providing so much visibility, feedback, and support, what they do helps hugely with our efforts to consistently push the game forward. As a thank you to the women in the Partner program, their exclusive codes will get you 50% off selected products in the Crytek store from today until March 9th (10 am CET), with a larger revenue share for your chosen streamer. Whether it’s a DLC you’ve had your eye on, or you want to get a friend into Hunt, there’s something for everyone—and you’ll be supporting the fantastic women that make up the community!

Check them out below – their discount codes can be found on the Partner website here

Angejia

Azuki

Failish

Holthe93

JacJac

Jenntacles

Justbree

Kerrty

Kiteera

LeafLit

Lunarfelis

MelPlaysAround

Morgan

NerdyNetty

Sigma

Rxysurfchic

TameHotPear

WhiskyFrizz

YaSmithe


We would also like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the iconic female Hunters in our ranks, as well as share some insights from the team about how these characters took shape.


[h2]Felis[/h2]
Beloved by the community, Felis has become an icon of Hunt—she’s been part of the game for a long time. When it finally came to find a voice actor for her, we were torn; she is an eccentric character, a child of the wilderness, and it was important to get it right. In the end, we settled on her having Appalachian roots and a taste for travelling far and wide. She values her primal side, and this is reflected in her design as well as her name, which means ‘cat.’ She had a significant impact on the lore of other Hunters too, and prefers her wilder peers… but of course she would!


[h2]Prescient Night[/h2]
The Prescient is another beloved Hunter found in the bayou and beyond. She is part of an inquisition order, meaning her background is somewhat stranger and more rooted in the occult than the other Hunters. If you didn’t know, Prescient Night is blind. This was designed intentionally as we opened up the lore around Dark Sight from a narrative perspective. She has a heightened ability to exploit Dark Sight written into her character, although this is of course not represented in-game. We hope to show a little bit more of this lore in the future.

[h2]Marshall Brewer[/h2]
This Hunter’s name is an homage to Phoebe Couzins, the first female US Marshall. The real Phoebe was more of a lawyer, temperance advocate, and suffragette than a gunslinger. The second name—Brewer—is a vague reference to when Couzins left the movement in 1897 to join the United State Brewers Association. It is assumed that she left due to financial reasons, and in our homage we saw an interesting parallel between someone leaving a life enforcing the law (i.e Marshall) to pursue her own idealistic ambitions (Brewer), hence the name Marshall Brewer was born.

[h2]Frau Perchta[/h2]
Frau Perchta was based on a goddess of Alpine Paganism and was the first of our Hunters to come with two variants: Dusk and Dawn. For her lore, we wanted to represent how mythology could come into the darker, more grounded setting of Hunt. Since writing her character story, we’ve implemented this idea in a lot of other characters.


We once again want to wish a happy International Women’s Day to all the women that have contributed to making Hunt: Showdown 1896 what it is today. Our team is beyond proud to support and celebrate you!

Hunters,

Last week we shared that we had been making adjustments to matchmaking, and today we want to talk more about what those changes were and what our plans will be moving forward.

We saw that high ping players were presenting as an issue for the community regularly, and as a result we began collecting and analyzing player data around ping during matchmaking. Our goal was to investigate potential solutions, and this data allowed us to work on identifying an ideal cutoff point for "high ping" on a per-region basis. This means that we have been able to experiment with refining the matchmaking experience to ensure fairer connections for all players.

To begin with, we investigated region locking for various servers, but we found the system too easy to circumvent using a VPN.

Two weeks ago, we tried introducing a new system that would separate any players with a ping above a certain defined threshold from the rest. Here’s how the high ping separation works:

• When matchmaking begins, teams are evaluated based on the highest ping player on the team. If that highest ping player crosses the threshold, the entire team is considered "high ping."
  
  
• High ping teams are then placed in a separate matchmaking pool, where they will be matched against other high ping teams.
  
  
• Normal ping players continue to match in the standard player pool, improving connection quality across those matches.
  
  
• If a high ping player is matchmaking solo or with randoms, they will also be sorted into the high ping pool.
  

What counts as "high ping" isn’t set in stone right now. We are experimenting with a starting threshold of 125 ping, but we will be testing slight shifts and variations as we gather more region-specific data. Based on what we’ve seen so far, we expect the final cutoff to sit somewhere between 100 and 150 ping, depending on the region.

Although these changes are proving effective so far, there are still improvements to be made and we plan to continue tweaking the system, monitoring results, and refining matchmaking overall. With that in mind, we have a few changes in the pipeline that we will be trialing:

• Deactivating this matchmaking separation in Russian and South American servers—we have seen that due to location, infrastructure, or other reasons, some players can’t achieve better ping, so we will try creating safe space regions for those unable to improve.
  
  
• Raising the initial high ping threshold from 125 to 140 as a pure experiment—this will help us better understand how small adjustments to the threshold impact matchmaking quality, player distribution, and queue times across different regions.
  

Making these improvements means you may notice changes to your matchmaking experience over the coming weeks, but rest assured that these fluctuations are intentional and with good cause.

It’s also important to keep in mind that these changes will have the most impact during periods where active player count is at its peak. Although the system may make wait times for some players slightly longer at the moment, we will see more improvements when many players return for the next Event.

Any issues that may arise as we continue to test and tweak the system will be closely monitored and resolved quickly as we fine tune performance. As always, we appreciate your patience and hope that the new high ping separation system will improve the overall Hunt experience for everyone.

Thank you,

Your Hunt: Showdown 1896 Team

The sprawling, eerie lore of Hunt: Showdown 1896 is something we hold near and dear to our larvae-riddled hearts, and we want to assure you that it will not be abandoned. As a part of the greater goal of making past content available to our players again, the first step has been focused on returning all legacy lore to the “Mythos” section of our website. You may have already noticed that the original Book of Monsters has been added, filed under “Corrupted Monsters.”

Check out Mythos on our website.

Today we are also excited to bring you a new category of lore: Shocking Events, allowing you to relive every twist and turn of past Event narratives from the Tide trilogy onward via the original texts and, where applicable, the audio recordings that accompanied them.

Oh, to be a fly on the Corrupted walls of the bayou’s darkest corners...

To sit undetected on the upper deck of the Delphine as its presence in the Land of the Dead worked to corrode the minds—and bodies—of all who were unfortunate enough to be on board.

To witness the moment The Kid and The Rat returned as Drowned, their new minds heavy with secrets and rot.

To watch in fascinated horror as a man sick with greed found out what happens if you stuff Bounty Tokens down a human’s throat and toss them down an oil well.

Your support means the world to us, Hunters, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to work on making all the Library content available again.

So head over to Mythos and relive the legacy lore of Hunt. Become the fly on the wall and bear witness to the stories which helped to make Hunt what it is...if you dare. Do the stories told here represent the whole truth? Have they been embellished, or twisted to leave out key elements? Are they the testimonies of sound minds, or the ramblings of folks gone mad? While the answers may be unclear, one thing is for certain:

To stare into the face of Corruption is to open your mind to its workings.

Hunters,

We rely on your feedback with every update, and the main way we take action on changes based on community response, is through feedback submitted to us via our surveys. A big thanks to those of you that have participated in surveys so far, and for those yet to take part, we encourage you to take the opportunity in future.

Many of you have requested that we discuss the results of those surveys, so today we want to go over the responses that you shared after Update 2.2.

Let’s dive into some of our key findings and the actions we are taking in response to your feedback.

[h2]Future Development Survey[/h2]

We conducted a survey that focused on future developments, and the main message we took from your response was the need to focus on performance and bugs.
While some changes were already in the pipeline, survey results showed an overwhelming priority for UI improvements and bug fixing, so this has become our focus for throughout 2025.



[h2]Performance[/h2]

As you can see in the graph below, there was an increase in the game’s performance and how it ran from the community’s point of view. We are pleased to see a positive trend here, but we have tons more coming down the line this year to keep pushing performance forward.



[h2]Gameplay[/h2]

Our team put a lot of effort into this update, and we were pleased to see that many of the gameplay additions were well-received. Here are some of the results.
First up is all about the circus compound, as well as the new items in and around it. Overall the compound, the possible locations, Grunts, and the activities all scored well, and we will keep this in mind for future Events.





For the Dark Sight Boost changes, we were pleased to see that the majority of you were ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with these changes.



[h2]Weekly Challenges[/h2]

In Update 2.2, we introduced some new Weekly Challenges for the Event, and the results showed that some players felt frustrated with how they influenced weapon usage, sometimes leading to an unbalanced meta for extended periods as well as feeling repetitive.



In Update 2.3, we have announced that we will be introducing a randomized set of Weekly Challenges for each player. With this change, we hope to encourage more diverse weapon choices in matches as players tackle a variety of different challenges.

[h2]Event Weapons [/h2]

When we asked your opinions on Event weapons, we saw that different variations of the same weapon had varying results.

In the graphs below you can see community preferences, and some of the results showed that some of the 2.2 Event weapons did not have the impact we hoped for.



While players liked the idea of weapons being obtainable in a Mission, we also recognize that the Shredder didn’t meet player expectations for balance. Both the Fragblade and the homing mechanic of the regular Sawblades were two major pain points from the community, and we agree with this.

We released a mid-Event balance change to the Shredder, and while this improved some aspects of gameplay, it failed to address the primary concern of our players, and the increased cost resulted in players seeking out the Shredder less overall. You can see this demonstrated in the graphs below.







[h2]Event Traits[/h2]

The Trick Shooter Troupe saw the highest positive reaction, while The Mystic Troupe saw the lowest.



The Mystic Traits were perceived as weaker and more situational compared to the Traits provided in other Troupes. We have taken note of this, and will be adjusting these Traits to deliver a better player experience for upcoming Events.





[h2]Kill Trade Experiences[/h2]

We recently discussed changes to kill trade windows that were implemented late last year, and our telemetry data showed an overall decrease in trades. We wanted to verify if this aligned with player perception, so we polled you during the 2.2 Event survey. It was encouraging to see that the results confirmed players noticed this reduction.



We are continuing to monitor kill trades and windows as we refine key elements of gameplay, and we may include this question again in future surveys.

[h2]Closing Thoughts[/h2]

We deeply appreciate your participation in our surveys, and the feedback you share plays a crucial role in shaping future updates. We are committed to making meaningful improvements based on what we learn from the community, and we will share more results with you in the future. Thank you for being part of our journey.

See you in the bayou, Hunters!