Steel Hunters Q&A — Talking with the Wargaming devs

At The Game Awards, Wargaming had a special announcement. A new IP is here in the form of Steel Hunters, a mech-based extraction shooter. It has a lot of unique qualities, and we had the chance to speak with the Wargaming team ahead of this reveal and ask a few questions. Below are these queries, answered by various members of the team: Creative Director Sergey Titarenko, Head of Player Interaction Luke Nicholls, and Marketing Director Laurent Lartisien.

Our first question had to do with the hunters themselves. Are they completely unique or can you mix and match gear and abilities?

Luke Nicholls answered this one, mentioning that the hunters are unique, but with a set weapon. This allows them to fulfill a specific archetype, meaning if it looks big, angry, and armored, it will play big, angry, and armored. That said, each of the abilities, along with your hunter and weapon, can be modified. You’ll be able to switch between these modifications, which allows for fun combinations for your hunter, but also for you to use in coordination with other hunters.

With the uniqueness of hunters and said modifications, that leads to another question. Will there be augmentations you can pick up during the match? Specifically, ones that will be smaller in scale than the Colossus ability that was mentioned during our presentation.

Luke told us there will absolutely be additional augmentations you’ll find as you play the matches. These take the form of consumables, like a shield dome which comes in a few different sizes, or reactor charges that reduce your cooldown abilities. Starfall is the element powering your suit, and by guarding and taking one of the Starfall towers you’ll receive damage buffs or debuffs on your enemies.

The Colossus ability was brought up again, mainly in that it isn’t a “win-all” type special. As the name suggests, you turn into a giant hunter with a lot of capabilities, but Luke believes the right players can take it out as they learn to play against it. Using this Colossus ability is more on the right situation and timing, so it’s nice to see we won’t be running into something gamebreaking right at the start of the game.

Given these are big characters (several stories tall), they need a big map to play on. With only six teams of two though, we wondered if that makes the scale smaller compared to other games. Just how big are the maps in reference to games like Warzone or Fortnite?

Sergey Titarenko followed up on this question, stating the square mileage was about one and a half. This works out to two kilometers. Now, the hunters are eight meters tall, so the size will work out differently than normal human sized characters.

We’ve seen plenty of varying styles when it comes to battle royale and extraction shooters. With this being a mix, it brings up this thought. Are there plenty of smaller side contracts on the map besides the main objectives? Or are the matches built to be a bit faster compared to normal extraction shooters or battle royales?

Fielded again by Sergey, his response was very informative. This is a quasi-quest system, featuring PVE and PVP encounters. Each match should run for about eight to fifteen minutes, with different phases that will arrive as you work your way to extraction with different objectives littering your path. Luke also added that their experience with World of Warships and Tanks helped them see that these were good lengths for matches, allowing for plenty of games to be played in an evening.

Our final question came due to the intriguing and unique hunters. Some are simply a bi-pedal humanoid unit, befitting of a third-person shooter, but others have multiple legs and fight similarly to a tiger or spider. What brought the idea of bringing animal-type mechs into the picture?

Sergey was more than happy to comment. Originally Wargaming was prototyping Steel Hunters as a third-person mecha, meaning having a human pilot inside the giant robot. As they played around with the ideas, they didn’t feel like it elicited emotional connections between you and the characters. Changing these machines into human beings that endured a process which transformed them into these hunters was born, which is an intriguing concept.

Building upon that, they could add backstories behind these hunters. These backstories are connected to cultural archetypes, fantasy, myth, and animalistic avenues. This allowed for more quadrupeds, and that brought mecha characters that were more unique than you sometimes find in these kinds of games.

There’s a lot more to Steel Hunters than just the questions we’ve had answered, so stay tuned for more! Steel Hunters will have a closed playtest soon which you can sign up here for on PC.

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