Hunt: Showdown’s first wild target is a massive gator boss who looks like mean business

Player-versus-player-versus-nightmare monstrosity shooter Hunt: Showdown has patched in its latest boss, a flippin’ great big gator called Rotjaw who looks as nasty as she sounds.

Rotjaw is Hunt: Showdown’s first ‘wild’ target, meaning instead of squatting inside a dilapidated barn/prison/sawmill/whatever, the female alligator will be encountered outside in the bayou map’s open water during the Thundershower, Serpent’s Night and night times of day. While the boss won’t roam the entire map, she will be fought in a much wider open space than the more tight-knit encounters of typical boss targets.

Given the more vulnerable encounter, the gator will take half the time to banish compared to a usual target, rewarding you with a single bounty token. Like usual, everyone on the map will know when you start to banish the defeated boss.

Rotjaw’s arrival comes alongside Hunt: Showdown’s latest live event Tide of Shadows, which adds three new hunter pacts – primal, smuggler and grounded – tied to new legendary weapon and equipment unlocks. Like previous event Devil’s Moon, players can pledge their character to one of the factions and earn up to three pledge marks during a match, which can be exchanged for event traits at pledge posts.

To unlock rewards, you’ll need to earn event points by completing challenges and interacting with (or shooting) ship altars around the map. New in Tide of Shadows are burn traits, single-use effects purchased from pledge posts that offer unique effects depending on your character’s pact.

Tide of Shadows will run until August 23rd, bringing with it a new battle pass with premium and free unlocks. The PC update accompanies a variety of smaller additions, changes and fixes in patch 1.13, including the addition of a shooting range for testing loadouts, the rebranding of the quickplay solo mode to Soul Survivor – along with some tweaks to the mode itself to separate it from Bounty Hunt – and changes to audio, ammo supplies, the in-game Blood Bond economy and various damage/buff tweaks.