Howdy hunters,

Let’s see what we’ve got for you today.

Testing of our precious scent hounds is in full gear and they’re starting to look more and more promising and inspiring each day. We hope to be able to release something truly amazing this time!

Our client programmer Carl-Oscar and his loyal hound called Debugger with their first track and first kill

Scent Hounds – Pre-release Livestream

On Monday you’ll have an opportunity to see the new scent hounds in action, during our traditional pre-release livestream. This time our streaming resident and theHunter veteran Pratze will be joined by Johanna, who by the way has recently swooped into a full-time position at Expansive Worlds as Marketing Coordinator. Congratulations Johanna! Please join us on Monday 30th at 19:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel to enjoy some scent hound action.

As Johanna is busy preparing the livestream, there was no Lock&Learn today. Sorry to all the fans, hope to see you all on Monday!

Sound Recording

As you will hear soon enough, our scent hounds have new sweet sounds. To record those, one February morning our sound designer Greg travelled all the way to a little Swedish village called Gränna to visit a lovely family of hunters who are also experienced dog trainers. Here’s a short photo report of Greg and the man of the house trying to trigger the typical bark of Gunnar, the Bluetick Coonhound, by hanging moose heads and fox skins off the trees. The family was super friendly and welcoming and helped Greg put Gunnar in good condition to get the best recordings possible for a great hunting experience. Thank you so much!

You will soon hear Gunnar and the results of Greg’s successful work in theHunter 😉

While in Gränna, Greg also tried to record some new Moose sounds, but the results were not as successful as the ones with Gunnar. Sadly, he didn’t manage to record anything worthy of adding to the game, but he still wanted to share with you a couple of pictures from the process:

The Bow

Yesterday we released a new bow with a cosmic name, Pulsar. It’s our third compound bow, some say it’s somewhere in-between the Snakebite and the Parker Python, some say it eats them both for breakfast. We say give it a try and make up your own mind. Luckily there’s a nice little “bowndle” in the store with the bow, the 5-pin sight and a two person tree stand, on sale at a nice discount. And before you start testing out your new bow, be sure to activate the Compounds n’Treestands competition. You never know when the biggest turkey of your life might saunter by 😉

A Classic Showdown

One week of our Classic Showdown event has passed by and although we know that the top Roosevelt Elk by R1Maddin (on the picture) is pretty intimidating (it’s also a piebald, oh my) we’ve seen bigger ones in this game 😉 The main battle is still to be won and you have another week to bring your team to fame and glory. Go hunt some elk!

The current leading Roosevelt Elk for all the rifles:

• Team .30-06 – 408.111 by KCROWE
• Team 7.62x54R – 417.679 by prohunter93
• Team .303 British – 389.134 by Marteau1245
• Team 8×57 IS K98k – 421.261 by R1Maddin

Free Species Rotation

For free species rotation we’re exchanging Arctic Fox and Roe Deer for Feral Hog and Bison. You can hunt them for free until next Thursday, June 2nd.

That’s it from us for today, see you all on Monday for the pre-release livestream!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another weekly status update.

Multiplayer Issues

I’d like to start today with a couple of tidbits about what’s been happening in the game recently. For one, we had multiplayer connection issues at the end of last week and over the weekend. Sorry about those, they were fixed on Monday and you should now be able to join your friends’ games without any problems.

Server Disconnects

Over the last couple of days we’ve had some server hiccups that interfered with your games. Our backend team did some digging and identified the cause. We’ve been moving your old hunting data to a new database. As you might expect, it’s a significant amount of data and it created more load on the servers than we anticipated. Our apologies to those affected. We’ve now paused the data transfer and we’re looking into a more stable method of completing the task. Once we resume the process, game stability will not be affected.

Contacting Support

Several players have reported problems logging into our support page, as well as sending emails to our customer support address. This should be fixed now, if you’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get in touch with support and received no reply, please open another ticket at support.thehunter.com and we’ll help you out as soon as possible. If you are still experiencing this issue, email us at contact [at] expansiveworlds [dot] com.

New Spotting Scope

Yesterday we released a new spotting scope which generated a certain amount of mixed feedback. The general consensus appears to be that the gameplay advantage it offers doesn’t justify the price. Fair enough, that was a misjudgement on our part and we are happy to admit it. In an attempt to rectify this, we’re going to increase the magnification of the spotting scope from 12x to 16x. Thank you for your valued feedback as always!

The Exciting New Feature

Now let’s move on to the exciting stuff. It’s time for us to shed some light on our next feature! We dropped some sound hints in one the Lock&Learn recap videos as well as “forgot” to remove a paper from the whiteboard from Sacha’s intro picture. Yes, as many of you correctly guessed, it’s going to be a new dog. A scent hound! Woof!

Following the release of the retrievers, we released a survey in which we asked, among other things, what type of new dog would you like to see added next. Bloodhounds (or tracking dogs) won the vote fair and square. The new dogs have a totally different model (based on a Bluetick Coonhound), animations and, of course, functionality than the retrievers. We’ve learned a lot from our first dog’s successes and fiascos and tried to incorporate all of that experience in our next dog.

Scent hound is a tracking dog that will help you to find wounded animals (we all know the frustration when after that poorly executed shot you search for your downed your prey for half an hour, sometimes having to come back to the beginning of the tracking cone again and again). We’ve also worked to make them better hunting companions, give them a bit more heart and soul as well as make them more discreet so they won’t scare all the animals around (which our retrievers sometimes do).

We’ll be telling (and showing) you more stuff about our scent hounds as we continue working on them, but today we wanted to give you a first sneak peek of this beauty (still a work in progress) as well as share some brilliant animations Dick made. Enjoy!

Closed Beta: Scent Hounds

We’ve started testing the scent hounds and would like to invite those of you interested to join us in a closed beta programme. If you want to be amongst the first ones to take your scent hound with you on your hunts and also help us to find bugs, please fill in this form before the end of the week (please note that you need to have an account on theHunter forum and write in English fluently to be able to participate in the beta.) The chosen hunters will receive an email from us early next week.

Free Species Rotation

Lastly, today Red Kangaroo and Roosevelt Elk are jumping into the free species rotation. From now on, three species (Whitetail Deer, Pheasant and European Rabbit) will always remain free to hunt, whereas the other two will rotate on a weekly basis, Thursday through Thursday.

Lock&Learn Livestream

That’s it from us for today, don’t forget to catch our Lock&Learn livestream today at 16:00 CEST and watch Johanna exploring Bushrangers Run on the hunt for kangaroos. If you missed last week’s stream with ForstHeld (was a blast) you can watch the recap here.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

PS: Just a reminder – the Polar Bear is in a huntable state right now and will remain so until we communicate it otherwise.

Hello good hunters, it’s status update time.

Yesterday we discovered an issue with hunting stats. Currently there is a delay with registering them after a hunt is closed. Our backend guys are working on fixing it.

On the more positive side of things, we released a new weapon. The sleek and powerful .45-70 Buffalo Rifle – perfect for big game. There’s a sweet Redfeather Falls competition running right now too, for you to try it out. You can join it here.

For this week’s free species rotation we’ll be exchanging Alpine Ibex and Wild Boar for Canada Goose and Blacktail Deer. There will be a slight delay so that the change will take place tomorrow on Friday. As previously announced, the free species rotation will change every Thursday. Please check back tomorrow. Once the free species rotation kicks in, we’ll notify you via our banner image and also on our social media channels.

The Sneakathon event, which finished yesterday, has been a blast. Congratulations to the winners! If you didn’t have much luck this time around, stay with us. We’re soon starting a May event with quite a different format. More on this very soon.

The team has been busy working on a new, pretty big feature. It’s currently in the testing phase and we are hoping to be able to tell you more about it next week. We’ve actually dropped some hints in the previous status update, see if you can find them 😉

And finally, onto the survey results. This year saw an absolutely amazing participation from you. We had an all time high with 11 090 respondents. Thank you all, for sharing with us your thoughts and opinions. Due to the large number of participants we’ve decided to hold a random draw for 5 participants, instead of 3 participants, as originally proposed. Here are the winners: nicomorco, Kache, Babibouchette, TheFinnishMoose, DexterPL. Congratulations guys, go check your em$ wallets.

Player survey results

We’d like to share some of the survey results with you. Although we can’t make all the survey data public, we can assure you that every single response will be evaluated and all serious answers will be taken into consideration when we plan our future roadmap of content and features.

• 64.56% of the respondents play the game a couple of times per week and more often.

• For almost 57% of people, the main focus when playing the game is to enjoy the experience, followed by “Improve my HunterScore and stats” (38.5%).

• Single player seems to be slightly more common than multiplayer at 69.08% compared with 58.41%.

• 76.58% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 23.42% often or almost every session. Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 6.73 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10.

• Almost 90% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our communication; we’ll do our best to make this number even higher by implementing some of the ideas suggested in the survey. The same number for our customer support is almost 80%.

• More pleasant numbers. 90.72% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and about 88.52% think that the value for the money was either good or alright.

• The share of hunters vs. non-hunters in real life stays consistent with about 56.06% belonging to the first group.

• Players who are hunters in real life have evaluated the level of realism of theHunter as high as 6.84 on average on a scale from 1 to 10:

And lastly, 94.34% would recommend theHuntet to a friend – thank you, we appreciate it incredibly much <3

Meet Sacha

Finally, today we’re welcoming yet another new member in the team! Meet Sacha, our new User Acquisition manager.

Hey hey!

I’m Sacha Karsenty and I joined theHunter team this week as User Acquisition Manager. Part of my work here will be to get more people to start playing theHunter and seeing how active and passionate the community is I can’t wait to get going!

As a short intro into my life, I’m 25 years old, I’m French but I lived 8 years in the Netherlands and 5 in Sweden. Stockholm is really a great place to live even though it gets really dark in the winters. You have great people and a great quality of life, so if you have the opportunity to move here, my two cents are GO FOR IT.

For as long as I can remember I have been a fan of games, but if I have to pinpoint to one memory it has to be playing the NES with my two older brothers.  After that, many titles have shaped the way I like to play games such as the Zelda, Mario and Shenmue series. Besides gaming I love sports (mostly football), food, movies, TV shows. So yeah a perfect week for me is one where I get to play football, watch TV, play games and eat great food.

I’m really super excited to start and I’ll be keeping an eye out on what you are saying.

That’s it from us for today, happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Here is our weekly status update, including what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.

Sneakathon 2016

So, yesterday we launched a new hunting event which we’re planning to run every year – Sneakathon 2016. We combined a couple of tough challenges, featuring some of our most spooky species, into a set of missions for all non-competitive souls as well as a final Roe Deer competition. The feedback for the event has been very positive so far, which makes us happy campers. To help you out in the Sneakathon, we reduced the price on all Sneaky 3D clothes by 50%, which is even cheaper than our regular bundles. In the spirit of sneakiness, there’s also a brand new fall leaf camo variation of our favourite Ghillie suit, designed by Gostwind in our 2014 outfit competition!

Player Survey

Here’s a reminder that the player survey we launched last week is running until the end of this week. The number of entries so far has been overwhelmingly high, but we’re still missing a couple of thousand opinions. Your opinion counts, so please take the opportunity to share it with us. You only have one opportunity per year, and we’re looking forward to discovering the results.

Lock&Learn – Deer Diary

As you may remember, two weeks ago we started a regular live-streaming project, Lock & Learn. Our community intern Johanna is learning the ropes of theHunter and sharing her journey with everyone in weekly Twitch streams. Without question, theHunter is a challenging game with a rather steep learning curve, which can be overwhelming for new players, so with this project we wanted to show (in an entertaining way) how one takes their first steps in the game, learns from their mistakes and evolves into a bad-ass hunter. Johanna has already completed two streams, you can catch a recap of her first episode, The Moose Karma, here, and here is the recap of her second one, Deer Diary – watch it carefully and enjoy it thoroughly 😉

Unfortunately there will be no stream today, but next week Johanna will be joined by our veteran hunter ForstHeld, and a little birdie told me they will take to the fields of Hirschfelden where Forst will give Johanna some Red Fox hunting lessons. Anyway, hope to see you on next Thursday at 16:00 CEST on Expansive Worlds’ Twitch channel.

Next week’s free species

We are continuing our experiment with free species rotation, and tomorrow Brown Bear and Moose will become premium again, while Alpine Ibex and Wild Boar will be free to hunt for the next 7 days. From next week onward the free species rotation will occur from Thursday to Thursday.

Team news

And now on to some team news. In the last few months, theHunter squad has undergone many changes. A bunch of people have left us and many more have joined. So, today we’re saying goodbye to our awesome animator Hampus, who has been with us for three years and has done some amazing work. The best of the best including the ibex fighting and labrador retriever animations. Good luck Hampus, you’ll be missed!

No goodbyes without hellos, and today we’re also welcoming a new member into the theHunter family. His name is Kristoffer and he’ll be working with us in the capacity of tools programmer, a completely new role for Expansive Worlds. Kristoffer’s work will be happening deep down behind the scenes, as he’ll be optimizing our engine tools to make the jobs of our programmers, artists and designers more efficient. Read Kristoffer’s intro below and say hello to him, although you won’t feel the direct impact of his work, what he does is extremely important and had a significant impact on the end result.

Hello there!

My name is Kristoffer Bergman and I’ve just joined Expansive Worlds as a Junior Tools Programmer.

I come from a small village near Lund in Skåne and just recently moved to Stockholm. At the age of 16 I made my first “game”: a console based “Hangman” in Java that I made during summer vacation, and seeing my brothers play around with it and having fun just felt amazing. The “I made this, they like it, they are happy because of me” feeling was absolutely addicting, so naturally I was gonna spend the rest of my life at my computer, programming.

Fortunately for me, this didn’t come with a particularly big life change. Spending unhealthy amount of time by the computer has for a very long time been a big part of my life, and I have been playing video games ever since I got my first Gameboy Colour.

Until I found a job to have as an excuse for programming 24/7, my path was unclear. During my early school years, I was the go-to-guy before any math or natural science test to explain things, and I ended up really enjoying to help people understand how stuff works. I love programming just as much as helping people, so I dreamt of becoming a teacher as well as becoming a programmer.

Then I found The Game Assembly, which had a program in Game Programming. I didn’t even realise that “Game Programmer” was an actual job. When I got in, my dream of becoming a programmer was about to be fulfilled. The only downside was that this meant I wasn’t gonna become a teacher and help people. However, one day at one of our school projects, the content creators were annoyed because their tools weren’t working. I helped them solve it and ever since then I know that til the day I die, this is what I want to do.

We are finishing this status update with a short video about our parent company, Avalanche Studios, in which some members of the Expansive Words’ team have been spotted. I thought it would be interesting for you guys to see where we work and put some faces to names of those who work on the game, and who you (hopefully!) love 🙂 Enjoy!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Before you plunge into your weekend hunting, we wanted to catch a couple of minutes of your time to share some news.

On Tuesday we released a small patch with some fixes and a nifty new item. Two Person Tree Stand. Following its release, some people asked us to add the functionality to change sides in the tree stand, and boom, your wish is granted (well, it will be granted in one of the next game updates, right now Patrik is hard at work coding it ;))

Player survey – Tell us what you think!

As I announced last week, today we’re launching our annual player survey. We collect your feedback every day from what you share with us in the forums, support and social media channels, but once per year we launch a bigger questionnaire asking you all sorts of things about theHunter, the universe and everything. Such surveys help us reach as many of you as possible and collect a vast amount of community data, to make sure that we are developing the game you enjoy.

The theHunter 2016 survey will be open for 10 days, from today until May 2nd midnight CEST.   It will take you no longer than 15 minutes and we would appreciate your honest and detailed replies. Naturally, you can only participate once, but please ask your hunter friends to complete it as well. If you answer all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled in our em$ draw, where we will randomly choose five players and gift them 1000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Introducing free species rotation

Many of you probably remember that back in January we added an additional free species, Pheasant, and exchanged Mule Deer for Whitetail, which made it possible for guests to hunt five species for free. Today we’re adding another little tweak to the free species portfolio, a.k.a. Rotation of Free Species. As a part of this change we’ll rotate two of the five free species every week to bring more variety to guest hunts. The weekly rotation will occur on a Friday to Friday basis, and we’re starting today with exchanging Pheasant and Snowshoe Hare for Brown Bear and Moose. Free animals will be announced in status updates, via banner images, and social media. Please note that this in an experimental feature, nothing is set in stone yet, we are trying this out to see how it will be received and reserve the right to roll it back at any time. The information about the free species on our website and Steam store page will remain unchanged for now.

Hunting friends IRL

This sort of news always make me super happy. Last weekend there was another real life meetup of our awesome German community Jagdfreunde (Hunting Friends in English). We wrote about their first meet-up last year and it looks like the bonds are only getting stronger! 23 hunters travelled from different parts of Germany, some of them as far as 500 km to spend quality time together in the German community Willingen/Upland. The joint Hunter Score of all the participants was a whopping 37276, the average 1775.05 (wow) and the honourable hunters present were: babba01, barbarillo, CZ75Mamba, ForstHeld, Harry91220, KlausDieterMeyer, Lennox1983, Lobo78, Lou24, markus84, Meradim, michi1259, Onkel666, Pratze, Schwungi, schwungijunor, sepp201167, Silvano1, stoiba3, Tarismo, TonyRaptor.

Having great time in a picturesque place with like-minded people, sharing some wurst, drinks and theHunter stories, all spiced up with some fishing and bow shooting. Not much can beat it, wish I had been there too 😉

Here’s to the next year meet-up and Waidmannsheil!

Hunting Horn bonanza – Results

It’s time to announce the results of our Hunting Horn Bonanza video challenge! The amount of entries for this one hasn’t exactly been overwhelming, but we want nevertheless to thank the guys who put efforts into creating their videos and everyone who watched and commented on those. The team has been unambiguous when choosing the winner. Congratulations RegimentsTyp2! Your video is awesome, we showed it to the whole Avalanche Studios team during one of our meetings and everyone loved it.  Please contact me and let me know a prize of your choice (5000 em$ or a “Pathfinder” Membership Bundle).

We also wanted to celebrate blendy who took the second place in this competition and offer a consolation prize of 1000 em$ or a 3 month membership. Get in touch with me to claim it, and thank you for your participation!

Welcome Mattias!
Finally, here is the introduction of our new 3D artist Mattias, say hello and welcome!

Hello everybody, my name is Mattias Nordin.

I’m a 3D artist, previously worked on titles such as Little Big Planet and The Division.

I’ve just joined this awesome team of digital hunter-makers a week ago, and I’m looking forward to working here!

A little about myself, I’m originally from Hässleholm in Sweden where I was born and raised. I decided that I wanted to make games in 2007, so I got into the school called Sofe (School of future entertainment) in another small Swedish city, Karlshamn. While studying there I worked on Little Big Planet up until 2015. After a short stay in Malmö (at Massive game studio), I’ve now moved to Stockholm, where it all happens!

My hobbies and interests are mostly related to playing games. Right now I play a lot of BG:Siege of Dragonspear, Dota2, Cs:go and Factorio. I love to travel and spend time with my girlfriend. Everything from hiking to big city weekends and lazy beach holidays. I watch a lot of movies but not that many tv series, even though there’s always time for Rick and Morty!

I’m excited to be here and to (continue) make an awesome game.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s Thursday and it’s the status update time.

Goodbye Tomas and welcome Mattias!

To start with, we’ve got some team news for you. Our 3D artist Tomas, the creator of many an outfit, reserve, weapon, trophy and whatnot in theHunter, has left Expansive Worlds. It’s with a heavy heart we see him go but wish him only amazing things on his new roads and adventures. Say goodbye to him in the forum – he will appreciate it 🙂 Tomas’ place in the team will be filled by Mattias. He is a fully fledged 3D artist with a bunch of gaming projects under his belt and we’re excited to see what he’ll bring to theHunter. Check our next status update to get to know Mattias!

Get better twice as fast!

The double XP weekend we promised a couple of weeks ago, after we’d fixed the issue with stats not being registered properly, is happening! From tomorrow, Friday 14:00 CEST lunchtime until Monday 14:00 CEST you will get double points for increasing your tracking, spotting and weapon skills. Good chance to catch up on your numbers, so don’t miss out!

Lock&Learn with Johanna

Today we’re starting a new live-streaming project, “Lock & Learn”. Our wonderful community intern Johanna will be streaming from our official Twitch channel as she learns the ropes of theHunter, sharing her journey with you! She will be streaming every week on Thursday at 16:00 CEST from our official Twitch channel. Make sure to join, share your tips with her and of course ask some questions. We hope you can make it!

Hunter score update

Here is a heads-up from our backend developer Emil. If you’ve noticed that your Hunter score doesn’t get updated immediately after you’ve finished your hunt, don’t fret! Emil has deployed a small adjustment to make it easier for our servers, so achievements are now cached for one hour, so it will take some time for you to see your updated Hunter score.

Odds and ends

Next week we’ll be launching our large annual player survey, this will be your chance to share with us the good, the bad and the ugly 😉 Make sure to check our next status update for more details.

Here is a small reminder about our hunting horn competition. You still have a couple of days to make your video and win a nice prize!

And finally, you can now buy the premium .45-70 Lever Action Rifle Engraved. Grab that piece of art and set off to our most challenging reserve, Settler Creeks, to try your luck in this special big game challenge.

Happy hunting!

Discussion