Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age

Given the recent stories coming out of Crytek of unpaid wages (over at Crytek UK), walk outs and rumours of bankruptcy (though that has been refuted by the company), it's easy to forget the studio had a strong showing at E3 in Los Angeles just a month ago. There was the streamlined and accessible MOBA offerings of Arena of Fate, Crytek UK's Homefront: The Revolution and then there was Crytek USA's Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age - a free-to-play co-operative offering that fooled us into believing it was a boxed game.

The concept for Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age is that of co-operative missions with major boss fights. Not unlike the concept of Left 4 Dead, but seen from a third-person perspective. The game also retains some of the Darksiders DNA even though it's a shooter, enemies and bosses appear to carry the same weight and patterns you'd expect in an action-adventure. And bosses are really at the core of what this game is about.

It's Penny Dreadful or League of Extraordinary Gentleman as a video game, with emphasis on hunting down supernatural beings and taking them out. Naturally it uses CryEngine and looks gorgeous with plenty of visual delights as we were treated to a brief pre-recorded playthrough of a level at E3.

The map we saw took place in a Louisiana swamp witch hunt where players were tasked with taking down a witch and dealing with her minions. Maps will be procedurally generated in game offering up variation as you gather your fellow monster hunting friends for a co-op session.

"The game is all about hunting down mythological folklore and creatures like that," says Adams. "Looking into the different areas of the world, and we do plan to have areas all over the world that's the longterm plan, but the first area where... we want to pick somewhere... steeped in folkore and there's just a lot of cool stuff in the swamp. It's not something you really see in a game that often. It's not explored that much, the whole voodoo culture and all the stuff that's going on there so we said 'hey, let's start with that and make some cool bosses there'."

When THQ went under Vigil Games, makers of the Darksiders games and the cancelled Warhammer 40,000 MMORPG, were just starting up production on a new IP. As opposed to studios like Relic who were in the closing stages of development on Company of Heroes 2 - Vigil Games simply didn't make sense for a buyer to spend money on as the assets of THQ were auctioned off. Crytek, meanwhile picked up the rights to Homefront as the sequel was being developed at their UK studios, and after the dust had settled they met with the Vigil Games leadership and agreed to set up Crytek USA from the remnants of Vigil.

"Most of the team came from Vigil, we worked on Darksiders - so all the core leads and I was one of the founders of Vigil and after that went down we pretty much joined the club with Crytek and became their USA studio," says game director David Adams.

Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age is not the concept Vigil were working on at the time of their closure ("the rights to that resides elsewhere") and the team had to start from scratch. It was one of many games at this year's E3 to be set during the late 19th century with supernatural and alternative history spins. We saw games like The Order: 1886, Bloodborne, The Devil's Men, BattleCry and others approach the time period with very different results. Adams took a stab at explaining why this era appears to a favourite with game developers.

"It's an interesting time period, because a lot of stuff was being developed like electricity an steel, and skyscrapers and railroads, but at the same time the world was still very primitive," says Adams. "There wasn't a lot of good communication. There were still very backwater parts of the world where there's a lot of shadow and creepy stuff lurking. So you can kind of play up that dichotomy between advancement and primitive and it's still together in one world."

Interestingly having had to rush out towards the end of a presentation of the game we hadn't fully caught on to the fact that like Warface and Arena of Fate, Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age is one of many upcoming free-to-play offerings from Crytek. It's being developed for PC, PS4 and Xbox One (PC closed beta scheduled for later this year), and looks every part a game you'd expect to pay full price for in a shop.

"Our goal is we want to make a AAA game that you would normally pay 60 dollars for and our intention is to give that entire experience away for free," says Adams. "No pay-to-win. No artificial blockers. And all you really pay for ancillary stuff. But honestly most retail games they have that ancillary stuff for sale anyway. So, really we look at it as you're getting a retail game for free. And it's a bold move on Crytek's part, but I think when people play the game they'll be like 'wow, this is pretty awesome, I can try this out and I don't have to risk 60 dollars'."

Unlike many similar games Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age won't feature set classes, instead the players will get to customise their own classes using weapons and abilities.

"If you've seen something in a movie or read it in a book in that time period. If you want to play a Sherlock Holmes type character or if you want a Clint Eastwood type gunslinger. Or Annie Oakley. Or a Witch Hunter from Eastern Europe. You can. And you have full control over how they look, the weapons they carry, the abilities they have. And that's really where a lot of the RPG aspects come in to play."

Given the troubled past of Crytek USA we seriously hope Crytek comes out of their recent troubles in good health and that Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age sees the light of day. It sure looks promising and could have fooled us into paying full price for a boxed version.