HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age was announced at E3 2014 as the next major project by the same guys who created DarkSiders & DarkSiders 2, hitting this Fall 2014 for Xbox One, PS4 & PC. HUNT is an 1800s setting, free-to-play, 4-player cooperative third-person RPG shooter.
Check out the official E3 2014 trailer for Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age.
— HUNT TOGETHER. DIE ALONE. —
A Grave New World… In HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age, our world stands on the brink of untold prosperity… But deep in the shadows, something is stirring. As the 1800s prepare to give way to the Gilded Age, monstrous horrors once thought to be myth are rising and threatening to emerge from the globe’s murkiest recesses.
Mercifully, there are those who know the truth; brave hunters willing to step beyond the brink of what is seen and stand against the encroaching darkness. We can only pray their courage remains when they come face to face with the most twisted contortions of evil that await them.
Key HUNT: The Gilded Age Features
* Track Evil Together – Steady your hand and brace yourself for pulse-pounding 4-player co-op action. Crytek’s third-person thriller turns you into both hunter and hunted as you unite with up to three other players and face an onslaught of bloodthirsty creatures together. As bullets dwindle and lamplight flickers, you’ll have to work strategically as a team to stay alive – especially when you trackdown jaw-dropping bosses with the brains and brawn to send you and your friends to an early grave. Hunt together or die alone, it’s up to you.
* Deadly Diversity – In HUNT, you never know what lies around the corner. A special content generation system means the map and enemies you encounter could be different each time you play a level; keeping you on edge whenever you hit the trail. Adding to the game’s rich variety are extensive character and weapon customization options that make every member of your hunting party distinct from one another. Just be sure the homebrewed weapons you’re packing make the creatures you encounter as horrified to see you as you are to see them.
HUNT takes elements of Survival Horror and RPG, and blends them with an online co-op experience (four-players) with a unique 1800s setting, similar to that of Sony’s PS4-exclusive, The Order 1886, but more based on realism in comparison (or so say the developers. Your Mileage May Vary).
One cool aspect of HUNT is that all of the bosses and monsters you huntdown (pun not intended) and slaughter are actually based on real-life myths & legends of the actual location you are in from all around the world (South America to London to the U.S.), all beautifully brought to life on the small screen!
Gameplay-wise, the game is very different looking from The Order: 1886 in how it plays.
As you can see in the videos, the game reminds one of Resident Evil 4 or Resident Evil 5, where swarms of vicious enemies come at you from all angles, breaking through doors and windows and coming at you from the shadows, with the player shooting & attacking from a third-person perspective, where there is a focus on attacking rather than hiding behind cover (which immediately makes it wildly different in terms of gameplay than The Order: 1886).
You then use all manner of various firearms and blunt weapons to take out foes quickly before moving onto the next enemy. And since this is an RPG, you’ll also level-up and unlock new abilities.
Here is 15 minutes of solid gameplay from GameSpot’s E3 2014 Stage Demo of HUNT.
The enemies in HUNT: The Gilded Age have been purposefully built to be hard to kill, and since all of the weapons are period-based, they have a slower rate of fire than what you’d find in most modern titles, adding to the tension of facing off against monster hordes with slow-to-fire guns.
To make matters worse, resources are also limited. So you gotta be somewhat careful and make use of your melee weapons as much as possible. And although blunt weapons are deadlier, they are more dangerous for you to use because you have to get in close to the fearsome enemies.
Also…
YOU.WILL.DIE.
A LOT.
Thankfully, the developers at Crytek USA came up with a very cool respawn mechanic to make things interesting after you die.
When you respawn, you’ll come back to life from a unique macabre perspective; such as hanging from a rope on the ceiling suicide-style, where all you can do is watch your friends from below until they cut you free (and in a VERY COOL touch, when hanging from your feet, you’ll see the whole fight upside down from your vantage point! Ha!).
Or you’ll respawn from within a chained-shut coffin, where you can see out through the cross slit in the top of the coffin, watching your friends in the killing fields, until they come along and break the chains to set you free! Very, very cool!
Here’s an interview with the game’s developers discussing the co-op aspects & free-to-play nature of Hunt.
Co-op comes into play in many spots as well, you can heal your teammates when they get wounded, and when they are hurt they’ll move slower. There’s also friendly-fire, so you have to be careful not to accidentally attack your teammates, which is hard in the Left4Dead-style chaos that pervades.
It’s worth noting however that the game is one-through-four players, so you can play the game single-player if you like, although certain high-level bosses & such may only be tackled with more than one player.
Because there are no classes and no defined archetypes, players also have free reign in how they want to design & build their character, all the way down to how they look & what skills they’ll have.
One big difference between HUNT & The Order: 1886 is how the developers went far to allow for full character customization based on the various costume choices, weapon choices and skill choices available, so you can create the character you want to create and play how you want to play. Even though there are no classes, If you want to build an archetype, like say a tank, you are perfectly free to do so. And the developers purposefully allow you to build say, a Sherlock Holmes style sleuth to a Western-style John Wayne to an Eastern European Witch Hunter, male or female.
Another cool feature is the ability to see a silhouette of your teammates even when they are inside of buildings, so you can easily tell where they are at all times. Because it is co-op, it’s fantastic to take on enemies Resident Evil 4-style, but being able to shoot them down from all sides!
A number of very cool weapons are at your disposal, from shotguns to pistols to axes, but one of the coolest is the flamethrower. Even though all of the weapons are from the 1800s, eventually you’ll unlock “future-tech” that includes much cooler stuff like the Flamethrower, stuff that wasn’t invented until early in the 1900s. Additionally, Items also can be equipped and include all kinds of cool stuff, like supernatural-style weapons. One shown off was a vial you crush in your hands that lights a path showing where you need to go next.
You’ll also carry a lantern to light your way through the mostly dark environments, and in addition to finding ammo for your weapons, you’ll need to find oil to use your lamp.
Here’s another interview with the developers behind HUNT.
Thankfully, oldschool gameplay elements that the team at Vigil was known for when creating DarkSiders, will also show up in HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age, one of which is a very large cast of enemies to fight (less repeating than in a lot of games) along with lots of awesome, hulking boss fights to conquer.
Boss fights will actually be a key feature of this game, as they are a clear highlight & focus for the team, who intends to build many impressive bosses to defeat, all based on myths & legends. One of them shown off is the Nightmare Witch, who highlights how the developers are building co-op mechanics into the gameplay and boss fights that require you to work as a team.
For example, the Nightmare Witch can ensnare a player in her Nightmare Realm, at that point she vanishes for all the other players, who can’t attack her until the player in the Nightmare Realm is attacked by her, at which point she briefly flashes. However she won’t fully reappear until the player in the Nightmare Realm successfully damages her enough. Cool stuff!
Other unique features of HUNT include procedurally-generated Maps and Objectives, ensuring that players have completely different experiences from each other, and the fact that HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age is a free-to-play online title, although the developers contend it is AAA in every respect.
Microtransactions (small purchases you have to buy with real money) will be available in the form of cosmetic items, equipment, weapons and experience boosts. However, the team states that the game will avoid having “artificial gates or time limits or impediments on your ability to play the game” in terms of microtransactions. Definitely a good thing.
HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age is the newest game from publisher Crytek (creators of the Crysis & Far Cry franchises) and the first game from a new studio called “Crytek USA” in Austin, Texas, the first official American arm of the German studio Crytek; Who runs 7 other studios across the world, including in Kiev (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Nottingham (United Kingdom), Sofia (Bulgaria), Seoul (South Korea), Shanghai (China) and Istanbul (Turkey).
Crytek USA is made up of developers formerly of Vigil Games, who created the DarkSiders franchise for THQ. When THQ went under, Crytek approached studio head David L. Adams and the rest of his team to lead Crytek USA as an all-new company based on their track record with the DarkSiders franchise; as the publisher had already been interested in establishing a United States arm based in Austin.
However Crytek was unable to successfully win back the DarkSiders brand (now owned by the Australian-based Nordic Games), and thus work begun on an all-new project now known as “HUNT”.
It’s also worth noting that HUNT runs on the latest CryEngine: 4th Generation.
Here’s the HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age image gallery.
Click on any of these image thumbnails to see the full-size photos:
I’m very, very excited for HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age. The game looks absolutely awesome, and I love the Resident Evil 5 vibe I’m getting from it, in the way that enemies swarm in from everywhere. The team-based co-op similar to Left 4 Dead 2 (but third-person instead of first) looks slickly done as well.
I must say, I got flashbacks of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for N64 when they were showing off the Nightmare Witch, hahaha. Remember the witches you had to hunt down in the River of Souls level? Man I loved that game…
I can’t say whether I am more excited for HUNT or for The Order: 1886. Both games look amazing to me.
I’m actually more of a single-player guy, so I think I’d have to choose The Order: 1886, as I’m especially digging that games slower, Resident Evil Remake-style pace to the absolute chaos of HUNT, but both games are looking fantastic.
Fall 2014 can’t come soon enough!
How excited are you for HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age? Do you think this is the next Left 4 Dead?