Howdy hunters,

It’s time for a status update and we’ve got a nice and fat one for you today. For one, it’s …

Halloween time in theHunter Classic!

And it’s Timbergold Trails that gets haunted and hunted again. For one week we’re turning our glorious reserve into the location of utter scare and goosebumps material. Eerie sounds, howling winds and roaming Werewolves looking for lonely hunters’ souls to feast on. (Alas, we haven’t managed to develop silver bullets in time for this Halloween, so your only way to deal with Werewolf is to RUN! But we are working hard on getting the most powerful alloy in place for the next year.) There is also a mysterious graveyard next to the Everfall Lodge – you might want to check it out, but tread carefully, you never know what those ancient graves are hiding.  To start the Halloween action, head to Missions, activate the first one and be prepared for anything. The special mission pack will be active until November 1st and the bravest and most tenacious hunters getting to the end of it will receive a unique Werewolf trophy and a piece of clothing to commemorate their journey. We’ve also prepared some daily sales throughout the whole event  – shop and hunt on!

Customize your trophy lodges!

When in the middle of the unsettling Halloween missions, you might long for something safe and familiar to calm your nerves a bit, and your good ol’ trophy lodge is the place to turn to. You’ve been asking us for customization opportunities since the day of the release, and today we are thrilled to finally bring it on – unique trophy lodge styles and gun racks! We are starting with six styles, three per trophy lodge layout, and one gun rack option per trophy Lodge layout. If the interest in this feature is big, we won’t be stopping here as we want you to have as much freedom as possible turning your trophy lodge into a unique extension of your hunting self and the place where you feel at home.

Before purchasing a style or a gun rack, make sure to carefully read the store description – both types of items are unlocks, which means that once purchased they can be implemented in as many trophy lodges of the particular layout, Classy or Rustic, as you own.  Also, customization items for a Classy trophy lodge can not be used in Rustic ones and vice versa. We’ve also put together three bundles for those of you who want to have everything at a good price – Classy one, Rustic one and the Ultimate customization pack, featuring all six styles and both gun racks (please note that the bundles might take a while to appear in the store). Now, get creative with your trophy lodges and make sure to share screenshots of your refurbished hideaways with us!

Backpack giveaway winners

In the five days since the release of our new hunting backpacks we sold over 700 pieces. As promised, we raffled some nice stuff among everyone who bought one, and here are the lucky hunters, congratulations!

• Timohasan gets a cool Fjällräven Greenland backpack (please send your address to our Community manager Graham to receive your prize)
• helio2 – gets $1000 em$
• JuanCarlos01 – gets $1000 em$
• BobbySolo – gets $1000 em$

Now, we are curious to hear what you think of this kind of giveaways and whether you would like to see more similar events with real life hunting clothes and gear.

Introducing Doc’s Shed

In almost 9 (!) years of its existence, theHunter Classic has been busy producing and accumulating a mind boggling amount of content – reserves, animals, weapons, gear, clothes and whatnot. Our game truly and proudly has the richest, most abundant and diverse content among hunting games out there, which is an incredible achievement in itself. But that does not make our Doc that thrilled. Every time he looks at our bursting to the seams store, we hear him grumbling: “So much for my small and cozy Doc’s Hunting Outfitters!” He has already started putting away special event items, such as Football Jamboree caps and T-shirts, Movember moustaches and more, but now he decided to take a more serious stab at it, to clean up the store and make it easier for players not to get lost in the sheer magnitude of the stuff. All items that are a part of a special event, or promotion, or simply aren’t as popular, will be removed from the store and put away into Doc’s Shed. Once in a blue moon, for a special occasion, if the stars align and Doc’s in a good mood after receiving a particularly sweet private message from some of you, we might persuade him to open up his shed and put some things up for sale again (for example, the Halloween scary pumpkin facepaint will be available to buy for the duration of this Halloween event), but we can never guarantee that this will happen. You will be able to recognize items from Doc’s Shed by the tag “Limited” – if you see it, that item will be disappearing from the store soon. As an example, the Trapper tent we released for Thanksgiving 2014 is going to Doc’s Shed tomorrow, so today would be a good time to grab it if you like that style – luckily, it’s also on sale right now.

Say hello to Ahmed

As you might have seen in the forum, our support champion Adam is taking a farewell from Expansive Worlds. Thank you for all your hard work Adam, you’ve been a good hunter and we shall miss you! Replacing Adam in the noble craft of deleting your duplicate items and investigating any other game problems you might have, is Ahmed, our new Customer Support Manager. Check out his intro below and say hello in the forum!

Hello everyone.

My name is Ahmed Sabri. I will be taking over from Adam as Customer Support Manager. It has been an amazing start working with him, but now his watch has ended (Game of Thrones pun intended.)

I was born and raised in Egypt until I was seventeen, then started travelling 8 years ago mainly all around Asia, until I landed and settled with the amazing teams of Expansive Worlds and Avalanche Studios.

I have been working in Customer Support since 2015, although I studied Chemical Engineering. Well, both fields despite their vast differences, aim to find the best solutions for everyone using technical knowledge. For me, assisting people and solving problems bring unique sense of achievement (a feeling I also found when I harvested my first kill in theHunter!)

In my free time I could be travelling abroad, hiking or running a Netflix marathon. I enjoy the contrasts of life from lying down in a park watching the clouds in peace; to bungee jumping from a 60-meter stand. You could say I’m mainly interested in everything that is thrilling and adrenaline-rushing (MASSIVE FORMULA ONE FAN). For that reason, I’m very excited to be here and to work on such an amazing game.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy haunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

With Graham travelling, I will be taking over the status updates for a while and without further ado, let’s dive into it, shall we?

Backpack Bonanza

Today we released three new backpacks for your avatars, in some of the most requested camo varieties: Arctic Winter, Winter Forest and Summer Swamp. Not only cool and stylish, but also adding to your concealment. What more could you wish for, eh?

We’re also celebrating the release of these bad boys with a cool giveaway. Everyone who buys a camo character backpack (not the basic one) before the end of this week, October 22nd, will be enrolled in a special raffle in which one lucky winner will take home this real life backpack. Made to the highest standards by Swedish company Fjällraven, it’s suitable for all outdoor adventures. We will also raffle three 1000 em$ gift codes amongst the rest of the entrants. The winners of the raffle will be announced in the next status update. Time to go shopping!

Spooky times
It’s starting to smell like Halloween and you know what that means 😉 The team has been busy preparing a new event for you and we think, well we’re pretty sure, that it’ll be scarier and spookier than anything you’ve seen in theHunter Classic so far. We’ve done everything from beast bunnies to plagued elk, but this time the EHR will be properly haunted by a very special creature. Maybe more than one!? You will see (and feel) it all yourself as all hell breaks loose next Thursday, October 26th. Be there to get your special mission assignment from Doc’s friend Gilles Garnier, a very curious character.

Level up twice as fast
And while we are on the topic of events, make sure to clear your calendar this weekend. We will be running a double XP event, during which your spotting, tracking and shooting skills will be increasing twice as fast – whoa!

And, finally…
…we dropped some raven feather collectables in Whiterime Ridge today – enjoy the new treasure!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters

The summer and all its vacations and other distractions is finally over, so we can now focus on the stuff that really matters. Like bobcats. Which also means that our status updates are back to their regular weekly schedule, sharing with you all the good, the bad and the ugly happenings at theHunter Classic headquarters.

Bob the cat is coming!

Probably the main thing on everyone’s minds right now, our glorious felines, are being thoroughly tested as we speak. It’s going well and we will be ready to give you a sneak peek of the upcoming bobcats in our exclusive dev pre-release livestream tomorrow, during the usual Lock&Learn session at 16:00 CEST, on our official Twitch channel. A team of theHunter devs will be going after some bobcats, and if they are lucky you might actually see one. Those guys are not so easy to hunt, so I hope you are ready for a challenge!

There have been a lot of questions and musings about means of hunting bobcats. Our Motion predator decoys and Predator “Jackrabbit” Caller will work, but they won’t be as effective as what you are used to seeing with foxes and coyotes, as bobcats are exceptionally intelligent and, hence, cautious animals. We will be introducing a powerful electronic caller at the release which will lure them far more efficiently. You will learn more about this on the release day.

Also, to help you gear up for the upcoming bobcats, this weekend we will be running special sales and campaigns, so keep your eyes peeled for our announcements at the end of the week!

Farewell to Summer Fiesta

Our glorious Summer Fiesta event is – alas – over. It’s been a huge amount of fun, we hope that you all got a chance to participate and at least complete a mission or two. On Monday we awarded a total of 57 Doc’s Hunting Champion trophies to all the skillful hunters who managed to complete all three challenging mission packs, which makes this trophy even rarer than the famous crystal stag of 2014. Congratulations to all the owners, you can be truly proud of yourself! If you didn’t get yours this time, don’t fret, there will be more events and more rewards. The autumn and holidays seasons are (almost) upon us and as always, we promise you four months packed with events, trophies, sales, awesome releases and many more things to keep you loving theHunter Classic.

Team changes

You might have seen a new face lurking in the forums. Our new community manager Graham, who has recently joined the team. You can catch his introduction and welcome him properly in this thread. From next week onwards, Graham will be taking over these status updates and I am sure he will do an excellent job keeping you up to date with everything going on with theHunter Classic. I will continue talking to you in the forums, as per usual.

On another note, our community manager Stefan is leaving us this month to move on to new adventures. Thank you very much for everything Stefan, it’s been a true pleasure to have you at the steering wheel of our community, good luck to wherever life takes you next.

Game design competition winners

We have gone through the entries received for the last game design competition with a fine-tooth comb, and we are ready to announce the results! There were some fantastic entries, and we want to extend our gratitude to everyone who took the time to write up missions and competitions. We are extremely grateful for your input, and hope nobody will be discouraged if their entries are not chosen. Unfortunately, as with every competition, there can only be so many winners.

So, here are the results (the winning entries will be posted in the competition thread shortly). If there are more than one winners, the prize pool is shared, the Contributor title and the Almost DEV Jacket is awarded to all:

• Feral Goats missions – Tanngnjostr (was chosen to design this mission pack out of the competition as we decided it’d be difficult to find a better goat aficionado in theHunter community)
• Feral Goats competitions (our by far most popular category!) – 1) the number of the goat by Madrugo; 2) the Ultimate Stalker by TheSheWolf; 3) Mini Goat by Pittie; 4) Shepherd by TR_GorkemCanakcili; 5) Meat Mates by KingOmar.
• Dall Sheep missions – xOEDragonx
• Dall Sheep competitions – Ash1302
• WT ptarmigans competitions – Andhii
• Rock ptarmigan competitions – FR_Bugs (not complete set)
• Willow ptarmigan competitions – Hifisch

We couldn’t pick the winner for ptarmigan missions as, same with the Grey Wolf missions in the last competition, we felt that the quality of submissions was slightly below the standards we want to meet at theHunter, so we will be designing those in house.

Red dot handgun scope

Last week we released a new and highly requested red-dot handgun scope, an excellent accessory for four of our side firearms, including the latest addition, the 10mm Semi-Automatic handgun. It’s been appreciated, judging by your feedback, which is sweet! Some of you have asked why it’s not possible to adjust the brightness of the red dot, as you can with the Aimpoint sights. The reason is that it is mounted in a slightly different way and provides a much more dynamic experience (Aimpoint sights open onto the whole screen when yielding a weapon and the handgun scope does not), and due to some technical limitations we have in our weapon and sight set-up, we had to make this compromise to make it work without jeopardizing the handgun functionality, allowing you to shoot fast.

Grizzly competitions

Today we added a new pack of community designed competitions. Grizzly bear ones created by our community member BuiuRei. They are now a part of our regular competitions schedule, enjoy!

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

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Here is a short status update from us.

Bobcat sneak peek #2

Work continues on the bobcat, including tweaks to the animations, sounds, model, AI and gameplay dynamics. We’re getting closer to being able to show you this magnificent feline in all its glory, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a couple more screenshots to help whet your collective appetites.

For those who missed previous updates, our aim is to make the bobcat a fairly unique species in terms of gameplay (how the animal will be hunted and lured) and also make it highly elusive with heightened senses. Hopefully this will make for a unique hunting experience. After all, these are pretty tough to hunt in real life.

Bear roaming bug update

Roberto and Martin have now pinpointed the source of the roaming bug. As many of you have already speculated, the bug not only affects bears, but other species too, with bears having a higher chance “catching” it due to their gameplay specifics. Without going into too much detail, the problem was caused by an error triggered by animal state changes. The fix is already being tested and once we’ve satisfied that it is successful, it will be rolled out in a game patch. In the meantime, we apologize for the continued inconvenience this bug is causing so many of you. It was extremely tough to identify the underlying cause, but we got there in the end.

Stutzen the rifle

Last week we released the .30-06 Stutzen bolt action rifle, and judging by your reviews so far, it seems to be a success. We would love to hear more of your feedback. Do you enjoy the new rifle? Can any of you share trophy shots featuring it?

Last days of Fiesta

Our infamous Summer Fiesta event is slowly coming to an end. We hope that you have enjoyed the mission packs, and the ongoing series of competitions. From looking at our data, quite a bit more than the 23 players I reported in my last update, have completed the 3 mission packs. If you haven’t already done so, it’s not too late. The special trophy being issued by Doc for completing all 3 packs is still going to be very unique, so if you want to get your hands on it, be sure to do so before time runs out.

We will report back on the final numbers at the end of this event. Good luck in the remaining days to everyone taking part.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Thanks for stopping by! Today we are happy to announce the release of the new feature. Bait site management from the web or launcher. This has been requested for many years and we know how tiresome and, well, boring it is to start the game just to run to each of your bear barrels, hog feeders and mineral feeders to fill them up then wait for the attractiveness to kick in. Now you will be able to do it with one click of your mouse button on your commute to or from work, when the Black Bears of the EHR start calling to your soul inviting you for a cosy evening in Redfeather Falls 🙂

Introducing Bait site management

How this works?

You can access this feature via Settings > Game management > Bait sites. There you will see the list of your barrels and feeders, the amount of bait in them and the status (active / inactive / penalty). If you are not 100% sure how the baiting system works, here is a detailed description. Each bait site comes with coordinates and the location map, so you can easily tell which one is which.

From there you can fill your bait site, using the bait from your inventory, by paying a small fee of 5 em$ or 200 gm$ (there are discounted packs of 25, 50 and 100 refills that you can find under Services in the store, for those of you that have plenty of bait sites and use them a lot).

Please note that you need to have bait in your inventory to be able to use this feature, think of it as an additional premium service, improving your game experience and saving you time by taking away the hassle of filling bait sites manually. Remember, you can continue to fill your bait sites using the old school method.

What changed?

While working on this feature, Luna and Martin have found and fixed a whole bunch of bugs in the baiting system, here is the full list of fixes:

• Fix for the issue when shooting an animal within the radius of a bait site didn’t trigger the penalty.
• Fix for the issue when moving a bait site to a different place didn’t trigger the “inactive” cooldown.
• Fix for the issue where a bait site being placed in the world didn’t set the “inactive” status correctly.
• Fix for the issue where a bait site that had been emptied didn’t trigger the “inactive” status when refilled.
• Fix for the issue with feeders being placed in a reserve didn’t have the correct reserve ID, thus rendering got broken.
• Fix for the issue where the feeders didn’t remove the bait attractiveness from a feeder with penalty.
• Fix for the issue with bait being consumed after a bait site is picked up and placed into the inventory.
• Fix for the issue with barrels being picked up and placed down again not triggering the inactive status.

That’s it, hope you’ll enjoy this new feature!

UPDATE 18/8/2017: Following community feedback, We just released a function to choose the amount of bait to fill in your bait sites. Attention: you first need to pick the amount of bait you want to fill a specific bait site up to. I.e. if I want my bait site to have 40 baits in it, I would choose 40, regardless how much is left in my bait. After that you go to the bait site you want to refill and click Refill. The system automatically takes from your inventory the amount of bait needed to fill the bait site up to the desired amount and adds it to the chosen site. Eg. I had a bait with 5 bait in and I want to have 40 in it, I choose 40 in the top right corner of the UI, click refill button next tot hat bait site and 35 bait get consumed from my inventory (40-5=35). That’s it. Please note that cost per service is the same, regardless how much bait you put into your bait site. Enjoy!

Antler shed collectables are coming!

Here’s something I’ve hinted about before, and it’s another feature that has been asked for countless times. New collectables! Antler sheds with their very own leaderboards. Roberto and Patrick are working on enabling all our male antlered species shed their crowns in respective reserves and Luna is working on sorting out the scoring and leaderboards. Stay tuned for more news on this!

Lock&Learn – Devs vs Community

Oh, and don’t forget to join us today at 16:00 on our official Twitch channel to celebrate 3000 followers. Johanna, Stefan, Greg and myself will clash against four community members: Nightmare, Dragonhorn, Raw100 and magicISO on the battlefield of Hirschfelden. Who do you think will win? See you there!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Time for a status update! As we at Expansive Worlds are enjoying the last days of the very short and, as always in Sweden, erratic summer, we are hard at work tinkering with all the wonderful stuff that will soon to be added to the game. So, Luna is adding her loving final touches to the web barrel and feeder management and in the near future you can expect to be able to hire a little horde of invisible helpers to run around the EHR filling your bait sites while you are at work looking forward to a successful hunt on Hemmeldal or Bushrangers Run.

Bobcat sneak peek

Our biggest darling right now, Bobcat, is being worked on and polished and getting ready to jump into the testing phase (when the real work begins, some might argue). There were a lot of questions about how you will be able to hunt them and whether there will be some special equipment for them in the store. We are still nailing the last nuances of the hunting gameplay, so you will have to wait a bit for a definite answer. All I can say right now is that there will be some sort of lure for them but they, as I’ve mentioned before, will be very challenging to hunt.

I know that many of you have been dying to see the upcoming Bobcats, and here you go. A sneak peek of some renders from our talented character artist Cecilia, and animator Moe. Why yes, there will be albinos, the coveted gem of any trophy lodge!

A necessary reminder that these images are work in progress and what you see is not final.

Crunching Fiesta Numbers

Our Summer Fiesta has been rocking and rolling for two weeks now and we have crunched some data for you on the missions: 133 hunters have competed Johanna’s Epic Hunter missions pack, 31 have completed my Legendary Journey pack and 22 have completed caledonianblues’s Nightmare Mode pack. Only 13 hunters have completed all three packs! If you compare it to 160 who have completed the infamous Doc steps in mission back in 2014, this is a very special achievement! To honour all hunters who will have completed all three of the mission packs by the end of Summer Fiesta, Doc established a special trophy. Doc’s Hunting Champion! A true hallmark of hunting finesse. You still have over two weeks to get it into your trophy gallery, so you can cherish it for years to come 🙂 Game on!

Special Lock&Learn

Here’s a heads-up that next Thursday, August 18th, our Twitch channel will host a special livestream to celebrate the milestone of 3000 followers. You will be able to see the EW developers clashing with community members in an epic battle. The names of developers and participants from the community, chosen from those who applied last week, will be announced next week.

Premium tripod shooting rest

Finally, a new deluxe tripod shooting rest arrived in the store this week. Some of you might have seen it from before as it was featured in the rustic lodge. As the rest of premium items in theHunter Classic, it features a higher price point but offers no additional gameplay advantage that would make competitions unfair or make the game unbalanced in any other way. The main purpose of those items is to add an extra spice to the game experience while not interfering into the gameplay and give their owners a sense of having something special.

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey you hunters,

Thanks for stopping by on this beautiful August Friday to read up on what we’ve been up to.

Summer Fiesta

Have you already gotten your teeth into our Summer Fiesta? If not, then you should, you absolutely should. This year we’ve prepared a delicious spread for you: a) a grand month-long Scoresaver competition with new animals being added every Tuesday and Friday (Black Bear and Grizzly are already in, and seven more will join them when their turn comes); b) three packs of challenging missions (at least two players, Sycoshowbob and Ravenous_Fox, have already completed all of them, impressive!);  c) four skill based competitions for each of the week of August. The first one, Stealth Challenge is already live and kicking and awaiting all belated hunters to fight for the fame and glory, as well as a unique trophy. You can read all the details and discuss the Fiesta in this dedicated thread.

Are you ready to meow?

Now, onto something that has been the talk of the past week – the new species in the works. As sneaky as I was trying to be in my hints, you’ve sussed me out pretty fast, even my strategic attempt to throw you off with my avatar didn’t work. It is the Bobcat indeed! We are as hyped and as excited as you are, it being the first feline ever to reach theHunter Classic, and we are all committed to doing a great job on this fluffy and mesmerizing fella. The work with the model and animations is in its final stages and the client programmers are hard at work coding their unique behaviours. As work progresses, we will be keeping you updated with some behind the scenes details, screenshots and other assets, so make sure to come to this blog  regularly.

Lock&Learn – 3000 followers celebration!

Our Lock&Learn stream on Twitch started a bit more than one year ago when Johanna joined the EW team and it has grown into a cosy weekly opportunity for the community to hang out in the chat following Johanna and Stefan’s adventures in theHunter Classic and theHunter: Call of the Wild. Yesterday they tried their luck at one of the Summer Fiesta missions, pretty successfully, if you don’t count one very unfortunate Roosevelt Elk (you can catch the replay of it here, starting at ca. 4:23). In the meantime our Twitch channel has grown to 3000 followers – thanks for your support everyone! To celebrate this milestone, we are doing a celebration Lock&Learn stream on August 17th, and anyone from the community can apply to join! If you are interested in taking part, please fill in this form by August 8th.

Say hello to Martin

Finally, today we are happy to introduce you to the latest addition to our team – Martin, our new QA engineer, who will be making sure that the new releases go as slick as a snake in a barrel of butter, and giving the devs a helping hand in our continuous agony and ecstasy of fixing bugs.

Greetings everyone, my name is Martin Sundberg and I’ll be the next addition to the Expansive Worlds team, nice to meet all of you!

When I play games, I want to be completely immersed, remove everything around me and just be there and then. That’s why I believe there’s nothing worse than to be drawn from or out of an experience due to bugs or other abnormalities. If you haven’t guessed it already I’ll be joining the team as a Quality Assurance Engineer.

I grew up close to Stockholm in a little town called Vaxholm. I’ve always loved games, for as long as I can remember and more often than not I played a little too much… So, at a young age I decided I wanted to become a game developer.

My first milestone was to get through university so I applied for a school in southern Sweden called Blekinge Institute of Technology. While studying there I met five other people with the same ambition as myself. We founded Gatling Goat Studios and to date we’ve released two games, they are called Traverser and Chicku (you can find trailers on YouTube ;)!

After a total of five years in Karlshamn I wanted to move on and widen my horizons with new experiences and that’s when I found this opportunity. Now I’m here and I’ll do my best to help the game become even better!

See you around the forums!

That’s it from us for today, have an awesome weekend and get cracking on those Fiesta missions. I am off to find some sneaky Willow Ptarmigans and pray to the gods of EHR that one of them is over 600 in score 😀

Happy hunting!

Discussion