It’s honestly been a while since I’ve logged on, because my friends don’t play anymore. But some of the changes (which may be different than when I played last) that seemed like a departure in my eyes were:

• Faster burn speed – this, in my eyes, was the turning point
• Necromancer solo trait (though I’ve heard that’s been reworked since I last played)
• Adding silencers to tons of guns (on one hand I like this, but on the other hand part of Hunt Showdown was always balancing clear speed with loudness, at least in lower ranked lobbies). I understand that they have subsonic ammo now, which I imagine balances it out.
• Multiple ways to restore health chunks – it used to be that you could only restore them by killing the boss, which made it easier to make mid-match decisions on whether to push people or not
• Fast Fingers trait, while cool in its own right, homogenizes guns like the Martini Henry, Springfield, and Sparks. It used to be that when someone missed me with a sparks, I knew I had 4 seconds to push.
• Surefoot trait allows you to sprint while healing and crouchwalk faster, thus speeding up gameplay and reducing the punishment of poor positioning
• Firebeetles allow people to not only scout from a higher position, but also force enemies to go loud with guns or have one of their healthchunks torched
• Levering was made faster and more accurate for some reason

Also Bounty Clash mode, while fun, seemed like an odd decision. It sped up the gameplay quite a bit and shook up the meta in ways that made it feel like an afterthought or an experiment. Though I didn’t give it too much of a chance.

All of that being said, I still had a ton of fun with the game the last time I played it. I know others have a propensity to shit on all of the decisions that the devs make, and that’s dumb. I’m glad it’s still around and people still play it, but it’s becoming less of my cup of tea. I also put like 1200 hours into it, so maybe I’m just a little burned out.

Yeah, Hunt Showdown was peak multiplayer for my friends and I about 2 years ago, but it’s continually gone in a direction that has erased its identity. It used to be about map knowledge and patiently waiting for opportunities to punish opponent’s mistakes. Now they’re trying to make everything more fast paced. On one hand, I get it, because it was never going to break out of its core audience of veteran players. On the other hand, that core audience was what was keeping the game alive.