Some significant – and possibly contentious – changes are on the way to weird west survival game Hunt: Showdown. Update 1.9 is now available on the Hunt: Showdown test server, and it includes changes to weapon balance, spawns, matchmaking, performance, audio systems, and more.
One of the biggest updates in 1.9 is improvements to player movement. Crytek has been making some changes to both the Hunt: Showdown servers and game clients that should reduce the amount of desync players experience in the game.
Update 1.9 also includes some performance improvements for both servers and clients. On the server side, Crytek says it’s fixed some dedicated server crashes and made other improvements that should reduce the frequency of disconnects. In the game client, the developer says it’s made performance improvements that should address some stuttering issues and framerate drops players have been reporting for the past few months.
The Hunt team says it’s also testing out some improvements to the sound of gunfire – the goal is to make it easy to tell whether a shot was fired indoors or outdoors, even at long distances, just by the sound it makes.
A potentially controversial change in patch 1.9 is the introduction of a ping limit of 225. Servers above that will appear in red and be locked out, but Crytek says it’s working to make sure all players have at least one region where they’ll be able to play. Further, player groups will still be able to play together even if one or more members has a higher ping, but the game will warn the group that they may not get an optimal experience.
The full patch notes are available on Steam, and they include some more pretty impactful changes: on the DeSalle map, for instance, there’s a new minimum distance of 110 metres between player spawns, and Bounty Hunt match time has been reduced from 60 to 45 minutes – Crytek says only 1% of matches last beyond 45 as it is, though.
There’s also a round of weapon rebalancing, although you can probably expect some adjustments to this while the patch is on the Hunt: Showdown test server.