If you've been following along as Hunt progresses through Early Access, you know we've been working hard behind the scenes to optimize, optimize, and optimize some more. Our goal continues to be improving the performance of the game and catering to an increasingly wider range of hardware over time and fix the issues that have been causing problems to the quality of your experience.

The first big step in that direction will be coming next week with the introduction of the test server running with Performance Patch 1, where you will be able to download and test the performance patch before we roll it out to everyone.

We have been focusing on a number of areas, primarily:

CPU optimizations (Hunt was CPU bound, which was a major limiting factor in many cases)

Reducing the overall memory footprint of the game

Addressing the stalls and stutters (during movement, ADS, and other in-game interactions)

With this patch, the general smoothness and response of the game should increase and in many cases overall framerate should also increase. In addition, this patch should fix the freeze that occurred when players were fighting in the Stillwater compound, as well as address the missing vegetation issue at the start of the game.

We received a huge amount of feedback and helpful data from the community in this regard, and we would like to extend our thanks to all of you for your patience and feedback.

We know we've been a bit quiet lately. Originally our plan was to release a hotfix the week before this performance patch to introduce changes to our backend that will pave the way for improved stability and lessen the frequency of server restarts. But during testing some issues came up that required further tweaks (and then more testing), and we decided to include those fixes in the big patch. Between testing the hotfix and the patch and moving office to the other side of town, we've been putting all our efforts into making this happen as quickly as possible.

We will provide more details around playtimes on the test server early next week. Hope to see you there, Hunters!