The Bayou Burns: Hunt Showdown 1896 Drops the Massive Devil’s Trail Update Today!

If you thought the bayou was already an unforgiving nightmare, Crytek is about to make your extraction a lot more complicated. The highly anticipated Update 2.7 is officially live today, kicking off the massive Devil’s Trail event for Hunt Showdown 1896!

Running from today until June 10, this is not just your standard cosmetic event. The developers are completely rewriting the rules of the extraction shooter genre by taking away your most valuable asset: information. Let us dive into the madness waiting for you in the scorching Louisiana swamps. 🔥

Trust No Map

The absolute biggest change in Devil’s Trail is the brand new hidden extraction mechanic. You can no longer just spawn in and immediately chart your escape route.

• Blind Drops: Both Supply Points and Extraction Points are completely hidden from your map at the start of the mission. You have to physically explore the world to find your way out.
• Scout Towers: To help you survive, Crytek added two massive Scout Towers to every map. Climbing these will reward you with interactive Scouting Maps to reveal hidden locations, along with custom ammo and brand new Tarot Cards.
• The Chariot: If you do not want to climb towers, you can reveal extraction points the old fashioned way by picking up a Bounty Token, banishing a Boss Target, or using the new Chariot Tarot Card.

The World Remembers

Crytek is heavily leaning into the actual hunting aspect of the game. They just introduced a brand new passive tracking system that makes the environment tell a story. Every single thing a player interacts with now leaves a permanent trace. Open an ammo crate or a first aid kit? It stays open forever. Kill a random animal in the woods? The corpse stays there. If you have a sharp eye, you can literally track an enemy squad across the entire map just by following their garbage trail. 👣

Firebreathers and New Blood

Of course, it would not be a Hunt event without some terrifying new additions to the lore and the monster roster.

• The Firebreather: There is a terrifying new monster roaming the gulch. This former pyromaniac spews fire from a distance, and if you make the mistake of slashing him with a melee weapon, he violently erupts into flames. Bring your fireproof gear!
• Corrupted Scouts: We are also getting an incredible new storyline featuring One Who Flies and Red Raven. These two former military scouts were tricked into taking a corrupted inoculation by a cannibal known as The Cook. Their descent into madness is going to be central to the lore drops this season.
• Audio Upgrades: The new All Ears trait is going to be incredibly controversial. It essentially triples your forward facing audio pickup while in Dark Sight, letting you hear enemy footsteps from nearly a hundred meters away.

Between the scorching Inferno weather returning and the massive weapon balance tweaks (shoutout to the Romero Alamo getting a huge reload buff), this is shaping up to be the best update Hunt has seen in a very long time. The tension of not knowing where your extraction point is until the very end is going to create some unbelievably stressful shootouts. 🤠

For BREAK THE META, this is WILD SURF. Catch you on the next drop!