"Hunt: Showdown" is already showing its flaws early in the year, as the closed alpha testing for the game has revealed a slew of performance and optimization issues for the horror battle royale game.

Set to be a new formula and twist on the multiplayer battle royale genre for video games, "Hunt: Showdown" has just entered its closed alpha phase, meaning it could only be a matter of months before an eventual release. The game was developed by Crytek, known for their penchant for making graphics-intensive games like the notoriously difficult-to-run "Crysis" back in 2007 and its sequels.

It seems that the game still needs a lot more development time due to how poorly optimized it was according to the testers for the alpha version. Granted, it was not the performance of the game which was being tested, but still, it could set some expectations on how the game will perform on a lot of systems once it becomes a full release.

PC Gamer magazine reported a lot of freezing and stuttering and generally low-performance metrics even when running the game on a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti. This was made worse by the fact that the most recent patches for the closed alpha version did not seem to address the problems inherent in the current version.

This could be troublesome especially in a competitive genre such as battle royale where optimization can make or break the user experience. There was also nothing that could have been done to address the issues on the user's end since there are currently no graphics setting options present at the moment, leaving a lot of testers with the measly solution of updating their GPU drivers.

In the future, fans should expect "Hunt: Showdown" to be a lot more polished than it is now, especially since its new trend for the battle royale genre looks to be something which will set it apart from others. Closed alpha began back in Jan. 31, and there is still no expected release date for the game at the moment.