Hello hunters,

I am back, and so are our weekly status updates and newsletter (coming right into your inbox starting with next week onwards). Phil and Pär have been doing a great job keeping you in the loop about new releases and patches (and even a competition of a questionable quality), sweet, but now back to serious business! 😉

In the last week we had some server issues, which affected people trying to join each other’s multiplayer games, plus trophy shots were not getting uploaded to the gallery. Those were fixed on Wednesday. The current bug which makes guests’ dogs visible in a ground blind is also resolved and we’re releasing a patch with a fix for it, alongside more bug fixes and goodies, next week.

After the last patch some people got upset that their dogs barking started spooking animals which hadn’t been the case before (this was a bug). It was our bad for not being able to fix it right at the release and for that we apologize, however, we said in the release notes that the dogs would have a spooking effect, as this is the only realistic way to go with handling a hunting dog in a game such as theHunter. Having said that, we’ve listened to your feedback and will continue tweaking and fine-tuning dog’s visibility and noise effect on different animals to find an appropriate balance.

Summer Fiesta 2015

It’s today that our last year’s favourite Summer Fiesta is making a comeback! We’ve taken the inspiration for this year’s event from the idea of the Ultimate theHunter championship by our community member and acclaimed competition creator caledonianblues. When first announced, it was highly anticipated by the community but unfortunately never took place, so, with the permission of caledonianblues, we have taken the idea and Pär has elaborated it into something truly grand. This will be the largest official event we’ve ever had, by the time period, the amount of missions, competitions, trophies and prize pool (over 36,000 em$). We’ve tried to cater to both competitive and non-competitive hunting souls by dividing the event into a tournament and missions, so we hope you’ll be able to join! The three tournament winners, alongside some pretty awesome prizes, will become happy owners of the new, yet unreleased, premium weapon – 7mm break-action rifle “Bouquetin”. You can find all the rules and rewards in this forum post and if you have any questions – ask away!

The Fiesta starts today and we are kicking it off with a free species hunt for all the animals featured in the competitions of the first tier (Roosevelt Elk, Moose, Whitetail Deer, Brown Bear, Feral Hog, Canada Goose, Pheasant, Red Fox, Mallard Duck, Mule Deer). They will be free to hunt for all guests until Monday morning, July 13th.

That’s it for today, in the next weeks’ status updates you can expect to hear more about our loadout competition, great debate and the dog survey.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

One week has passed since the dogs were released and it’s time for a postflight analysis. All in all, our labs have been a huge success. Both the devs and the community love them and we feel that we’ve achieved something very unique and special. Having said that, persistent game crashes following the release rained a bit on the dog parade, but from what we’ve seen and heard, people have still managed to spend some quality time with their hunting buddies. All major game crashes were fixed on Monday and, to compensate you for lost game time and membership money, we’ve decided to prolong all the events, sales, missions and memberships respectively. Here are the adjusted deadlines:

• Bird fest (free Pheasant, Mallard and Goose hunt + bird equipment bundles) – until 22 June 21:00 CEST
• Dog 20% discount + dog / founder collar bundles – until 19 June 21:00 CEST
• Dog missions – until June 24
• Non-typical Mule Deer missions – until June 24
• Non-typical Blacktail missions – until June 25
• Extra membership days – 5 will be added to all existing memberships

Our apologies to those of you whose weekends were affected by the crashes. We’ve discussed the matter internally, learned some valuable lessons and we’ll take measures to avoid a repeat of this incident.

Naming your dog

We’ve been monitoring dog naming stats and wanted to share with you some interesting stats on the most popular names. The good ol’ Rex is topping the charts with 88 labs having been called this name. Here are the top 10 most popular names:

1. Rex 88
2. Max 53
3. Rocky 44
4. Jack 43
5. Buddy 39
6. Bella 37
7. Duke 36
8. Lucky 30
9. Charlie 29
10. Sam 27

We’ve also started to receive reports of offensive or inappropriately named dogs, so we wanted to remind everyone that dog names should be in compliance with our terms and conditions, paragraph 3, which means you may not use sexually explicit, harmful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, obscene, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive language when naming your dog, otherwise we’ll have to rename it and you will be prompted to pick a more appropriate name.

Our awesome voice artists

Tomas Sibo, sound designer, with the voice artists

Voice artists

We thought it’d be cool to introduce you to our three exceptionally talented voice artists who gave their voices to all the labs in theHunter. Please meet Oskar (yellow), Smilla (black) and Sacke (black). We met these three guys during a field recording in the north of Stockholm with the help of Marilois, who works in the working dogs society. With a wireless microphone attached to the dog’s head and with shotgun overhead mics (like this) we recorded audio material such as navigation, commands, barking, searching and many different presence sounds.

“Own limit” for items

After releasing bird equipment bundles last week we’ve been getting a lot of requests to remove the “own limit” for items, which was preventing people from buying bundles if they already owned one of the included items in their inventory. We’ve had an internal discussion about this and decided to take some action. So, starting from next week, you will be able to buy multiple items in the store, be it in a bundle or otherwise. Next to each item you’ll see the quantity you own highlighted in red. Please note that with the “own limit” removed you will now be responsible for taking conscious decisions about what to buy and in which quantity, since we don’t provide refunds for multiple items bought. We’re looking into the possibility to manage duplicate items.

Great debate – Let’s take it to the polls

Our first stab at a community debate with the topic “Realism vs. Fun” is over and it has been a blast! The contenders Knut and TundraPuppy have fought all the way through and the community contributed immensely. Great job, everyone! There is an ongoing poll right now to judge who is the winner – so, go cast your vote! I am going to prepare a short recap for everyone later, but you can always read the full debate here. We are planning to hold more debates in the future, so if you have a good suggestion for a topic or want to become involved, give me a shout.

Pim for president

Last week EW’s own Pim Holfve was appointed CEO of Avalanche Studios! You can find an official announcement here. As Pim will be moving to his new role heading up the whole studio, our producer Hannes will take over production at theHunter. We’re planning to organize an AMA with Hannes in the next months, so you will get a chance to get to know him better.

Summer break

On a final note, several team members, including me, are leaving tomorrow for summer holidays. The weekly status updates and newsletter will be taking a two-week break also, and will be resumed week commencing July 6. In the meantime the remaining team members will keep you posted about eventual game updates and releases via this blog, banner images in the launcher and the website, and our official Facebook and Twitter.

See you in two weeks and happy hunting!
Discussion

Howdy hunters,

The time has come and our beautiful Labrador retrievers are finally here!

Before rushing to the store to get yourself a new hunting buddy, make sure to read the release notes carefully and watch the accompanying tutorial video. As you must have seen in our pre-release livestream, your lab comes with new features and new gameplay, so this info put together by our game designer Daniel which covers commands, skills, stamina and more tips and tricks about your lab will sure come in handy. Right now your labs will help you retrieve Canada Geese, Mallard Ducks and Pheasants, but, following community suggestions we’ve also decided to add rabbits to the list of retrievable species. This’ll be implemented further down the line.

We’ve prepared a tasty offer that you’d be barking mad to refuse. If you buy a dog before Wednesday 17th 12:00 CEST you’ll get a 20% discount and receive a cherry on top – an exclusive leather collar which won’t be available in store afterwards. Please note that the free leather collar offer is only available in the Bundles section in the store. You can however buy dogs separately in the Dogs section. If the leather collar is not your dog’s cup of tea then there is an array of multicoloured collars available to suit every lab coat.

While we’re on the subject of special offers, we have another one for you – since this is a bird retrieving dog, there’s a sweet deal for those of you who haven’t indulged in the fine art of bird hunting yet – until the end of the weekend you can buy everything needed to hunt Mallards, Geese and Pheasants, at a very generous discount. These three species will also be free to hunt until the end of the weekend – real bird fest!

An important note; although we’re releasing the dog today, in the next weeks we will be closely watching your feedback and further tweaking, fixing and fine-tuning our retrievers, so we’d really appreciate it if you could share with us everything and anything about your new dog. We’ve created a special forum for all dog-related discussions in which you can report anything good or bad, and we’ll make sure to jump on bugs and issues on the fly. In a couple of weeks we’re going to release a short survey focused on dogs for you to share your feedback on the Labrador retriever and make suggestions for future breeds.

And last but not least – Pär has prepared a special package of 6 dog missions for you to hang out with your new buddy and try to win this lovely trophy (will be released a bit later today). These are time-limited missions, and you have until Wednesday 17th at 12:00 CEST to complete them.

I won’t hold you any longer. Now it’s time to … Sit! – Get out the blind! – Fetch!

Happy hunting with your dog!

Discussion

Hey hunters,

First and foremost, a short update on the Labradors. They feel good and healthy and are starting to look and, most importantly, behave as we want them to. We’re adding some final touches and tweaks with the intention of releasing them next week!

If you want to see the Labrador retrievers in action, make sure you pop by our pre-release livestream tonight at 19:00 CEST, on this Twitch channel. Our popular and much-loved YouTubers Pratze and ronMctube will be joined by our game designer Pär, who will be able to answer your questions. We hope you’ll be able to make it.

While you’re waiting for dogs, we thought we would revisit a rather old chestnut.

One of the most debated topics in our community is the “realism” aspect of theHunter – whether we should focus on being as realistic as possible, or whether realism should take a back seat so the gameplay can remain fun. Followers of both sides are rather vocal and have been known to fight tirelessly about it. So, we think the only reasonable way to publicly settle this once and for all is to stage a debate. We asked two community members, representing both camps, to be debate the subject and they gladly accepted. The debatable motion will be “theHunter should be developed with the main focus on realism, with fun as a by-product”. Knut will represent the assenting side, speaking on behalf of realism, with TundraPuppy representing fun gameplay. You can follow the debate in this thread, which will last for 2 weeks. Everyone is welcome, and in fact encouraged, to pitch in! At the end the winner of the debate will be determined by public voting.

That’s it from us for today, until next week – happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

This status update is going to be a wee bit shorter than usual, as the whole team is busy working on the feature we’ve hinted and teased you about. Yes, it’s dogs! Almost all of you deciphered the carefully hidden canine sounds in last week’s video. We’re glad you picked up on it!

Dogs being added to theHunter has been one of the most sought after features within the community since the game’s release, which makes sense given the fact dogs are logical companions for hunters in real life. In our last community survey as many as 63.13% of all respondents prioritized dogs in first or second place as a new feature, and we saw similar numbers in our previous surveys as well. The dog was the winner, hands down. They’ve been asked about in an AMA and in the forum and we’ve always stated that the implementation of dogs is a huge project since the feature has so much potential, so we really wanted to do it properly. So, we finally decided to take a stab at it. As we’ve mentioned, there has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears poured into it and we are now in the final stages of development. The release date has not yet been decided but let us say soon. Here is a sneak peek render for you.

As you can see, our first dog will be a Labrador Retriever and his function will be to help to retrieve your birds (Canada Geese, Mallards and Pheasant). We’ve decided to introduce the retrieving dog first, since it was the most common suggestion when the discussion about dogs came up, but we are open to developing different breeds with various hunting functions if the feature proves successful and we can see that you like it and want more. When working on the retriever, we wanted to create a loyal companion who would follow you wherever you go and do all the fetching work while you’re shooting. Apart from the new bird retrieval gameplay, your dog will also have its own name will feature his own XP and stamina systems, skills, interaction with the hunter, etc.

We’ll leave all the details for later, but so far we’re excited about this new addition to theHunter. We hope you enjoy these screenshots (remember, this is still a work in progress) and let us know what you think!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Long time no hear! There was no status update last week, so this one will be a bit longer than usual. But make sure to read till the end, you won’t regret it 😉

Recent releases and other stuff

In case you’ve missed it, on Monday we released non-typical antlers for a Blacktail Deer and last week a Ground Blind in Arid camo. Speaking about the latter, the wrong price slipped into the store at the release (450 em$ instead of 420 em$). It was corrected on May 15th at 9:37 CEST, so if you bought this blind before that (you can check that in your em$ purchase history), please contact our support and we’ll refund you 30 em$.

There is one thing we forgot to mention in our last game update – the old time bug that made it impossible to fast-travel or heal oneself is now fixed! Falling in Val-des-Bois should be more enjoyable now.

Reserve set-ups are in the store

Today we’re starting to release the winning set-up bundles from our recent competition. We’re kicking it off with JackRbbt’s “Turkey Slaughter” set-up for Whitehart Island and will add the remaining 4 over the next weeks. With these bundles you have a great chance to get all equipment featured in the winning set-ups (except for deployable hunting towers) at a lovely 40%-50% discount.

A small update on our reserve load-out competition – we received over 80 entries and are still going through them and preparing for the voting phase.

Password sharing warning

Recently we’ve been receiving quite a few reports about players asking for passwords and login details. Please be wary of such activity. Once you give someone your login, they can easily change your password and lock you out of your account forever. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do in situations like this as often it’s impossible to prove who the account initially belonged to. That’s why we are reminding you to never give away your password but instead to report players asking for this to support.thehunter.com.

“Plinkington” spook radius update

There has been a lot of talk in the forum about the .22 “Plinkington” spook radius  pre and post its tweak on Monday. We’ve discussed all your feedback and decided to tweak it further. Here are some notes from our game designer Daniel which shed some light on this decision and the reasoning behind it:

When the .22 Plinkington was released it had the same spook radius as the .22 Air Rifle. This was a mistake on our side (not some evil marketing trick, like some suggested) and the need to increase the spook radius was obvious. With such a low spook radius it made not only the Air Rifle obsolete but also every bow in the game. Taking into account that the .22 Plinkington is a semi-action rifle it effectively turned the game into sort of a carnivalesque shooting range: Game balance was thrown out the window. So some tweaks were made; the .22 Plinkington spook radius was increased to a little less than half of that of other rifles in the game. The bows and Air Rifle may be slower and have a shorter range, but they have a huge advantage in being more silent. It was apparent from your reactions that the tweaks made were too harsh in comparison to what you players had experienced when the rifle was first released: A completely reasonable reaction. You had fun with the gun and we basically took that fun away. With the new spook radius we’ll hopefully bring you some of that fun back without making the Bows and the Air Rifle redundant. The spook radius will be larger than at the initial release but not as large as after the first tweak. Bows are still superior when it comes to noise, but the .22 Plinkington has an advantage when it comes to speed and range.

There are also a couple of other factors that might be good to remind you guys of:

• Turkeys are among the top three animals when it comes to spookiness. Hunting Turkeys is always going to be a challenge and judging a weapon’s spook radius based on how Turkeys react can be very misguiding. The bows are the optimum choice for gobblers.
• Animals spook other animals. If there is a high scoring animal in a group of animals, chances are that it will react to the noise and spook the other animals even though the shooter is seemingly outside of the spook radius. So, as stated before: Spook radius alone is only one part of what determines animal flight behaviour.
• It is also worth pointing out that albeit we’re striving for realism in everything, theHunter is a system in itself: A system we must try to keep in balance. Even though someone has real life experiences with a gun affecting animals in a certain way, these exact conditions and reactions do not exist in the game as the game has its own reality. In the game, conditions can only be measured and compared within the game itself. Who in real life has done the kind of crazy long range shooting we see in theHunter? Who has seen Pheasants as large as those in theHunter? The game is a world in itself. A world we hope you can judge as reasonable even though, in the end, it is just a game.

Finally…

Despite the outrageously cold weather in Stockholm, the summer is in the air; at least here, in the EW headquarters it starts to feel like it. Hoggy has been shedding his winter fur, our artist Tomas changed his avatar to a pup in a T-Shirt, and Hannes, Daniel and Pär went to the refreshing Rougarou Bayou and made a short video for you guys to put you in a summery mood too. Enjoy!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion