Hunt Showdown 1896 - Black Screen and Cursor Issue Explained

Source: Hunt: Showdown 1896, Developer: Crytek

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There is a lot going on when it comes to extraction shooters subgenre. This derivative of FPS games has seen many interesting events recently, like the rise (and fall?) of Arena Breakout: Infinite or Delta Force: Hawk Ops successful alpha tests. There is also a veteran making a comeback with a whole new update, and even a refreshed subtitle – Hunt: Showdown 1896. The patch put a lot of steam in this production’s metaphorical wheels, as it set a new all-time peak of players just yesterday (via SteamDB). However, there’s no rose without thorns. In fact, it seems like it’s mostly thorns for this title as many people have problems after the new update went live, reporting that they can see black screens with only cursor visible. If you are also affected by this, here we will try to analyze what is going on and if there is any remedy.

Black screen with cursor in Hunt Showdown 1896

It is nothing new that updates can break games. The latest one for Hunt: Showdown 1896 achieved at least three things – reached a new all-time high concurrent player count, at the same time it was a reason for players to review bomb Hunt for UI changes (at the moment only 38% of recent player reviews are positive on Steam), as well as made the game not work completely for a group of fans who can only see a black screen with cursor while launching the title. The biggest question now is – can anything be done about it?

Sadly, there is no silver bullet solution that will work for everyone, however there are reports that it can be solved in some specific scenarios:

1. If you have an Nvidia GPU and experience this problem, you might be in luck as many fans say that updating the graphics card drivers alleviated the issue for them.
2. You are less lucky if you have chosen team red (AMD). Many players reporting this matter are using Radeon GPUs and so far, there is no good fix for them. Additionally, there are a lot of fans who say that only shadows look pitch black. Unfortunately, also in this case there is nothing to be done. The game asks to update the drivers at launch, yet many players claim they have the newest and nothing helps.
3. There are Linux users who also experience this issue, too. Though they are more fortunate as in their case using Proton Experimental with “bleeding-edge” option in beta section of application properties fixes the problem.

This whole situation seems to stem from the fact that the update for Hunt: Showdown 1896 includes a major game engine version change. There was an overhaul done to the visuals, audio, performance, and others. Let’s hope that Crytek will quickly address this situation, but also improve the UI experience, which sparked very lively (to say the least) debate among fans. Good luck!