Hunt Showdown Crossplay: How To Play Cross-Platform With PC, PlayStation, and Xbox

“Is Hunt Showdown crossplay a thing?”, you may rightfully ask your friends. It can be difficult to find games to play together and with your social group scattered across many different platforms and with more friends joining gaming as a form of social interaction during a pandemic, finding the right game can be challenging.

Can Hunt: Showdown fill that void?

Hunt Showdown Crossplay - What Is Hunt Showdown Anyway?

Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown has been around the block and has come a long way since its early access in February 2018. An eschatological zombie setting meets Wild West, producing a uniquely tense atmosphere in which the player doesn’t just have to beat other gamers in a shootout but also has to best a wide range of NPCs, from weak zombies to challenging bosses, and make it out alive. 

To do so, weapons from bows to revolvers to bolt-action rifles can be equipped. Moreover, your character can gain levels after each match, giving you points to allocate to skills that might make the difference in the next game. If your team is killed, you will lose it all and will only gain some measly experience points and dollars to help you in the next game. 

As such, Hunt: Showdown is a more palatable approach to a hardcore loot shooter than a game like Escape from Tarkov as it forgoes a lot of bloated systems such as weapon attachments, varying vendors, and unintuitive quest items. Instead, it tries its hand at much more dynamic gameplay (though it falls victim to clunkiness at times), allowing aim to be a serious difference-maker while also giving tacticians plenty of tools to work with. The sound design is outstanding but will also require the player to pay attention as sound queues are a major part of information gathering. 

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The stakes in Hunt: Showdown never get quite as high as in similar games. Even the most expensive loadouts and characters can be gained back in an evening. Dying will suck, but a single death won’t ruin your evening. It also won’t annoy you with a lot of the hyper-realism features that many competitors in the genre have as part of their core design.

The gameplay loop stays satisfying even after hundreds of hours and it excels as a team game when your group of friends are fine to focus on high-intensity gameplay every couple of minutes but also leaves room to have a chat about other things in life.

Hunt Showdown Crossplay - How Does It Work?

So does Hunt: Showdown have crossplay? Kinda. First and foremost, you won’t be able to play Hunt: Showdown on PC and match against console players. 

Given the nature of the gameplay and the requirement for accuracy in long-range battles, most players wouldn’t enjoy the experience very much either as it’s incredibly hard to get the balance between controllers and mouse players right.

With stacked stakes in every match as your character’s permadeath and loss of equipment is looming, such competitive asymmetry would likely not result in very fun gameplay. While that’s a solid enough reason not to match PC players against console players either in quickplay or matchmaking, it isn’t the only reason. There are also technical hurdles that Crytek has yet to overcome.

As of right now, you are able to be matched against players on other console platforms when you are playing on a console yourself. The platform will be denoted in the form of an icon next to your player name on the scoreboard and inform you which platform everyone has been playing on.

Unfortunately, Hunt Showdown Crossplay on console does currently not support cross-platform play meaning that players on the PlayStation can not invite players on Xbox or vice versa. However, inviting friends to your lobby between the console generations like PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox One to Xbox Series X/S does work.

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There is a tricky workaround for you and your friends who are stuck on different console platforms but it’s not a great one. Given the relatively low number of players on console, queueing into a game at the same time will sometimes result in you being thrown in the same match as your friend. Much less frequently will this put you into the same party though, so you will have to lose out on the group features such as being able to resurrect your friend.

Overall, it’s not a satisfying solution to the problem but it’s, unfortunately, the only one for now. 

While the way Hunt Showdown crossplay works is a little convoluted, it makes sense given the style of gameplay and the technical limitations on the different console platforms with the latter being more likely to be solved eventually.