Gnomie

I think it's time to address something head-on, particularly given some of the feedback we've received from players coming over from Hunt during our closed beta. Fundamentally, Hunger is not a response to Hunt, nor is it designed in opposition to Hunt or even intended as an alternative to it. Hunt is an incredible game and one that is cherished and treasured by most - if not all of our dev team - myself included. Hunger is our response to the loot-driven extraction genre more broadly, and our attempt to use the extraction mechanic as the foundation for a fully fledged multiplayer RPG. Anyone familiar with Hunt will recognise that it's actually quite unique within the extraction genre. Beyond its extraction mechanic, Hunt is fundamentally an objective-based PvP game. Its progression loop revolves around pursuing objectives that nearly always require the fighting of other players and then extracting. Obviously, this is an observation - not a critique. Beyond a shared historical Gothic sensibility (and the letters "Hun"), the principal similarity between Hunt and Hunger is that both games use extraction as a gameplay mechanic. What they do with that mechanic is fundamentally different. Hunger is designed as an RPG. It has character levels, equipment progression, masteries, professions, an economy, PvE activities and a plans for an extensive endgame. PvP is an important part of the Expedition experience, but it is not the singular objective around which everything else is designed. You can progress through Hunger - including reaching the endgame - without being forced into PvP encounters. This distinction has enormous implications for how the game is designed and balanced. We've seen quite a lot of feedback suggesting that equipment should be flattened, that fights should be broadly equal regardless of progression, or that a player with substantially better equipment shouldn't enjoy a significant advantage. However, that is precisely how Hunger is intended to work. In an RPG, someone who has spent considerably longer developing their character, acquiring equipment and building their economy should be more powerful than someone who has just started. That's not an oversight in our balancing - it's a fundamental feature of the genre. You might be able to overcome someone significantly better equipped than yourself, but the odds are deliberately not in your favour. At the same time, we believe that they shouldn't be. If the time you've invested in developing your character, acquiring better equipment and progressing through the game makes no meaningful difference to your effectiveness in combat, then we've fundamentally failed in our ambition to build an RPG. Progression has to mean something, and that necessarily means that players at different stages of their journey will not always meet on equal terms. Equally, the entire progression structure of Hunger is designed around a substantial journey towards the endgame. That is intentional, and it isn't something we're looking to change. Of course, we're going to continue tightening matchmaking brackets to reduce the extremes between players who encounter one another. However narrowing those differences is not the same thing as removing the advantages of progression or gear altogether. Where balance becomes considerably more important is at the endgame. When players are operating within comparable equipment tiers, wearing Epic and Legendary armour, using high-end weapons (or lower end weapons that have been tuned via our coming “weapon specialisation” system) and participating in activities such as PvP Battlegrounds, that's where we want much tighter competitive balancing. At that point, we're comparing mature characters and established builds, rather than trying to make a level 17 character equivalent to a level 70 character. We know already that it's also where a great deal of the long-term balancing discussion will be focused. I appreciate that this is a nuanced distinction, particularly when two games share an extraction mechanic, a historical setting and a degree of visual similarity. We've spent a considerable amount of time communicating these design decisions through our development vlogs, and they're reflected throughout the systems we've built. Some of the feedback we've received seems to assume that we've misunderstood or overlooked the things that make Hunt work. In reality, many of those differences are deliberate decisions about what kind of game we want Hunger to be. We're not trying to make Hunt with more loot or Hunt with character levels. We're trying to make a multiplayer RPG with a persistent economy, meaningful character progression, consequential equipment choices and a substantial PvE and PvP endgame (more coming on this soon), all built around an extraction loop. There is plenty of room for improvement in Hunger and we're listening closely to feedback about how well our systems actually achieve their intended goals. However there's an important distinction between a system that isn't working as intended and a system that is working as intended but doesn't align with someone's expectations of a very different game (one might even say a different genre). We're very interested in improving the former. We're not going to redesign Hunger around the latter. I appreciate if that means that Hunger isn't for you. That's totally fine too, as many excellent titles exist to serve a different preference.