With this little guy, I’m continuing to sting a lot of bounty campers.
Two most recent Twitter posts from Hunt: Showdown’s Twitter account have convinced me that the next feature and creature added to the game will be a flying surveillance bug that players can use to spy on opponents. And I present it could show up as soon as next month.
The above image, which has been shared yesterday, was intended to highlight the return of the promotional skin Billy Story, a delightful home age to Daniel Day Lewis’s character from Gangs of New York. Even so, observers (those with at least one eye) can reap more from Billy’s nervously glancing silhouette, a flying beetle we’ve never seen before. If scarab isn’t just for the exhibition would be strange for Crytek to show detail such as this without supporting it with something concrete?
And it happened very quickly. Crytek’s team shared this short video exactly 24 hours and 1 minute later:
It portrays a first-person camera hovering over one of Hunt’s prison compounds. An unnerving creepy-crawling exoskeletal sound can be heard. The heavily vignetted vision pulses at the moment with the heartbeat, blackened like a modern security camera. This is our bug.
The video’s lore blurb even did mention a newly discovered creature: “As current findings are relatively new, and scientists have yet to finish their research, we can only assume that further information regarding this species, and their origins, will be revealed shortly.”
To be clear, neither Crytek nor the Hunt: Showdown team have explicitly announced the existence of a bug or feature. Even so, several facts reliable backup this educated guess:
- For years, Crytek has talked about camping as behavior in Hunt: Showdown, one which probably doesn’t want to destroy entirely but has taken steps to limit in the past, like when the studio compound layouts in 2018. Aerial drones would be another incremental way to biologically try to force campers out of their comfort zone.
- On September 5, the studio shared a piece of in-fiction sketchbook depicting a flying beetle with the headline “…an erratic, unified movement—a so-called “hivemind behavior”—between the beetles and their keepers.” With the context of today’s video, this has seemed to be a lore explanation for how players will control the flying beetles: through some variability of the existing dark sight ability.
- A flying surveillance camera, including that shown in the video, would be a Hunt-equivalent of an action seen in games including Rainbow Six Siege, where the character Audio has an aerial RC drone that behaves similarly to the one shown in the video.
- Previous Billy Story sales promotion from the summer of 2020 did not contain this insect.
Members of the Hunt community had previously postulated that Hunt’s next, the unannounced boss was going to be a beetle monster. On September 9, Hunt YouTuber HomeReel laid out the case, pointing to patch notes and bug fixes that had reduced “the performance overhead of idle AI,” suggesting that Crytek has been laying the groundwork for a bug or swarm-themed boss made up of many.
The Assassin, a behavior of a high pile of crawlies shifts in and out of humanoid form, dividing into copies of itself, and every so often covering the player’s screen in insects is already a bug-based boss in Hunt.
Hunt’s 60-day Serpent Moon event is ending soon, and with Halloween being a perfect thematic match for the player’s creepy, horrific environment, releasing a new creature to accompany the Twitch drop-exclusive Billy Story character promotion (scheduled for October 12) would be a good way to kick off the summer.
