Howdy Hunters,

We are back from our winter break and are now catching up on everything and anything that happened with and about theHunter during our absence. Here is a round-up for you:

• Many players have been reporting multiplayer issues when people were not able to join MP games. We implemented a fix yesterday and will continue monitoring this. If you’ve been experiencing the problem, please make sure to let us know, either in the forums or on our social media channels, whether the issue has been resolved for you.

• On December 19th, right after the team signed off for the vacations, a major bug occurred, which broke the functionality of scope reticles and HUD GUI elements (blinds, tents etc.) Our programmers fixed the issue on the next day, but the game was pretty much unplayable for about 24 hours. To reimburse you for this interruption, we’ll add 1 extra day to all memberships. We’re bummed about this unfortunate incident and especially its bad timing and we’ll try to prevent this from happening in the future.

• As per the special Primal deal, all the shotguns and extra memberships have now been added. If you still haven’t received your membership and have fulfilled all requirements, please contact our support and they’ll sort it out for you.

• We recently have become aware of a malicious phishing web-site: “playthehunter [dot] net”, which looked exactly like our official thehunter.com‘s first page. (Huge thanks to our community members who alerted us!) We’ve investigated this and it looks like the purpose was to lure our players into entering their theHunter usernames and passwords in order to steal/abuse them, so called phishing. There was also a link to a file hosted on a Google drive account, which most likely was ridden with malware and viruses.We’ve contacted both the hosting provider of the site and the domain registering company (the domain was registered with false information), and the site has now been taken offline.

  If you visited this site, or fear that you may have without realizing it, we suggest that you run a virus scan on your computer and update your account information with a new password.

  If you’ve become a victim of the culprits behind the website, please contact our support from the email address you used when registering at theHunter and we’ll help you to get your account back.

  only thehunter.com and Steampowered.com are official publishing platforms of theHunter. It is of course very important for us to protect our players and our own brand from evil doers, but we do not have control over and, thus, can not help about anything happening outside our official publishing platforms, even if it’s somehow related to theHunter.

• And last but not least… Meet Sandra – our latest addition to the art team who joined us yesterday. Read her intro below and say hi in the forums.

Hello!

My name is Sandra and I’m super happy to be joining the team at Expansive Worlds where I’ll be working as an environment artist. Previously I’ve worked at Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam but being back in my hometown Stockholm is a real treat!

I have a background in fine arts and graphical design but a few years ago I started to dabble in 3D and of course I got hooked. It’s just so much fun! I did my studies at Futuregames here in Stockholm from where I graduated in September last year.

When I’m not working I like to cook, and especially eat, food. Playing games, watching a movie or just having a cold one with my friends are also things you might find me doing on my spare time.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Welcome to the last status update in 2014! Tomorrow our team is leaving for Christmas vacations to spend quality time with their families which means there will be no updates or newsletters for the next two and a half weeks. We’ll be back at the office on January 7th, ready to start another chapter in the theHunter history. Please note that our support hours will also be reduced during the holiday season.Thank you for your understanding!

Peter on the art in theHunter

Our art director Peter Johansson has recently made a long in-depth interview for a 3D art magazine 3D Art Direct. In it he is sharing how an artist designs 43 square miles of real-time 3D wilderness (to us known as EHR), and make it convincing enough for experienced real-life hunters to enjoy. If you want to get fundamental behind-the-scenes information on theHunter art, this is definitely a must for you to check out. You can read the interview by registering on the magazine’s website. You’ll receive an online version in your email inbox.

Looking back at 2014

It’s been a truly amazing, mind-blowing, flabbergasting year for all of us at theHunter and we want to thank you, our community, for spending it with us, playing the game, sharing your thoughts and stories in the forums and guiding us in the development. We hope that you’ll stay with us in the next year as well, we’ve already planned a bunch of stuff and we can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

We’ve looked back at 2014, at everything that has happened in theHunter and crunched some numbers to make an end-of-the-year wrap-up.

Here is what has been achieved in 2014:

• New reserve – 1
• New species – 4
• New weapons – 15
• New pieces of equipment – 26
• New items of clothing – 39
• New special event items – 38
• New game features – 3
• New missions – 130
• New competitions – 114
• Bugs fixed – 150+
• Special events – 13
• Tutorials – 1
• Community created competitions and prize draws – 46
• New people joined the EW team – 10
• New people joined the community forums – 3 405
• Supports tickets resolved – 14 351
• Release on Steam nailed – 1
• Player surveys created and replied to – 2
• Questions answered by Devs in Ask Me Anything – 264
• Store Discounts / Sales – 57
• Free species hunts – 8

I’ve also asked the team and community members to share their personal highlights of 2014, and here are some of them. For more of team and community highlights of 2014 check your inbox for the theHunter newsletter, holiday edition.

Daniel Jansson, EW Game Designer: My favorite was the Summer Fiesta because it was really fun to make difficult missions and then seeing people on the forum helping each other out by posting tips and strategies.

JackRbbt, community member and Romanian translator: The new additions: Val-de-Bois, Alpine Ibex and, of course, new rifle for it: Stambecco. Also, but this is something quite personal, Romanian localization.

Andrés Hansson, EW Lead Client Programmer: The highlight of 2014 was when we released theHunter on Steam and got a lot of new players.

TundraPuppy, Community member and Forum moderator:

My favorite theHunter related thing was the release of the air rifle and rabbits in May. It was an excellent belated birthday present because it represented an interesting change for theHunter – not only did we see a move towards smaller prey (as opposed to deer) which also required more careful and precise aiming (as opposed to the more twitchy sky-filled-with-lead shooting of birds), but we also got a new weapon which isn’t a traditional gunpowder based weapon – it has excellent range, is very precise, and was tailor made for small prey which means we could see more small prey added with an existing valid weapon to use on them. It was an interesting shift for the game which helped add variety and options for people who were tired of the same-old same-old hunting options we previously had.

Jose Diaz, EW Animator:

Interaction animations between the Ibex made by Hampus. More of that!

Blind Mole, Community member

Official: new map Val-de-Bois
Non-official: caledonianblues’s competition “Gotta hunt them all”

Magnus Eckers, Frontend Developer

Pratze, Community member and Video creator:

That’s it from us for today and this year, happy holidays and see you in 2015!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Here comes our weekly status update.

theHunter’s little brother revealed

Most of you have probably read our Monday announcement in which we introduced the new project of Expansive Worlds, called theHunter: Primal. The announcement has attracted a lot of attention across the globe, which makes us happy and humbled. We won’t reiterate on this further in this update, if you missed the post on Monday, make sure to read it. For more news on this project, please follow Primal on Facebook and Twitter.

Smells like reindeer…

December with all its festivities and special vibes is crawling closer and closer. Last year’s Holiday countdown event was a huge success, so we decided to keep the same format this year, with a bit of adjustments and unexpected treats (of course ;)). The main theme of this year’s event is going to be (surprise, surprise!) a reindeer, and we are kicking it off on Monday, December 1st, and will keep you busy every single day up until the Christmas day, December 25th. Expect more details on this on Monday.

Until then you still have a couple of days to join our Thanksgiving fest and shoot yourself some sneaky Turkey, fortunately, it’s free to hunt until the end of the week.

Here’s to Robin!

On a final note, we wanted to share with you something more serious and personal. Back in August a very sad incident occurred involving our client programmer Robin (you might remember him by his racoon avatar on the forum and his cheerful posts). In late August he suffered a stroke which came as a huge shock to all of us since Robin was only 23 and very fit and healthy at the time. The months since then have been extremely tough for him and his girlfriend, his family and the whole EW team. Robin is an amazing individual who is very much loved by everyone around him. Today, we are happy to tell you that  the worst is over, Robin has been making great success in what we expect to be a full recovery! He has been a true trooper and we’re incredibly proud of him. We visited Robin yesterday and he asked us to send his regards to the community. Robin can’t wait to get back to working on theHunter.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Here is a short status update from us.

The beginning of a new era

Today starts the new, 17th, season in theHunter, yay! The 16th season has been a long and luscious one, with 4 new species and one reserve added. We’ll be celebrating the beginning of a new era with a free species hunt. Two of the four animals released during the 16th season, Canada Goose and Alpine Ibex, will be free to hunt from the official start of the 17th season and throughout the whole weekend. We’re also running a weekend sale on all goose-related items in the store, including extra discounts on goose decoy bundles and the popular Canada Goose Starter bundle. It’s a good day for those of you who have been dreaming to set up a second (or a third) goose spread on Hirschfelden.

Turkey fest is coming

On Monday we’re kicking off yet another holiday event – Thanksgiving in theHunter. There will be lots of turkey challenges in all forms with varying difficulty levels. Stay tuned for more!

TheHunter quiz – results

We received 1110 responses to the quiz announced in the last status update, out of which 788 people answered all 30 questions and 74 got all of them correctly. With this project we mostly wanted to get hunters to use the wiki more actively by showing how much valuable information about the game one can find there. On the other hand, I hope that the quiz was enjoyable and useful also for those of you who wanted to test their ”raw” knowledge of the game, without digging into any extra sources.

Here are the names of the 5 winners of the em$ draw, randomly chosen out of 74 people who answered all questions correctly.

• StriderBurp
• kestuxx
• foresterjoe
• Krystal
• Cogsy666

The detailed results of the quiz can be found in this thread.

Break Action vs. Bullpup

And last but not least, on Wednesday we released a shiny new 7mm Break Action Rifle. The earlier released Bullpup of the same caliber divided the community into two camps, with a lot of people asking for a 7mm rifle with a more traditional hunting design, so we decided to do something about it, plus such a rifle has been a long time community request. So here it is. And in order to solve the community dispute, we’ve thrown in a small challenge – two identical competitions, one featuring the Bullpup, the other the Break action. Let’s see which one wins 😉

That’s it for today, more news next week!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey you hunters,

It’s status update time and here’s what’s been cooking up here in our corner of the world:

Events, events, more events

The Nordic Father’s Day last weekend turned out to be a ball and a hell lot of reindeer got shot. Although there’s been a fair deal of frustration here and there, mostly attributed to the elusive trio of 450’s, overall, the event was a success, with as many as 1266 hunters having completed the first mission, 402 the second, and 504 the third.

Now, the ongoing Mid-November Madness is a different kind of hoopla. We know that a lot of you have love-hate relationships with the 100% harvest value requirement, but we thought it’d be rewarding to add in an extra challenge, calling for some additional thinking over the choice of weapons. Fame and glory as well as this unique trophy set will be a reward for top 10 hunters in each of the 9 divisions – well worth a hassle.

There’ll be more events in the weeks to come, don’t get lost in the wild and be sure to follow our news and updates.

How well do you know theHunter?

During some 6 years of theHunter’s existence (in fact, the first forum member registered almost exactly 6 years ago), the game has spawned a truly colossal wealth of knowledge, stories and personal anecdotes.

So, here is a small quiz for you to check just how well you know the game and all its nooks and crannies. No worries, no theHunter myths and anecdotes this time, only hard facts and publicly accessible knowledge. The quiz was prepared by our awesome Wiki team who are doing an excellent job collecting and storing all theHunter know-how for the generations of hunters to come. Thank you guys, your work is invaluable!

The quiz consists of 30 multiple-choice questions (only one correct answer per quesion). If you answer 100% of the questions correctly, you’ll be automatically entered into our final em$ draw, during which we’ll randomly pick 5 people and award them each with 1000em$ (don’t forget to enter your theHunter name at the end of the quiz form if you want to be a part of the draw). You can submit your answers up until Sunday, November 16th, midnight CET, the correct answers and lucky draw winners will be announced on Monday.

Take the quiz

Interview with Björn

Our game designer Björn has recently been interviewed by the website GameStakers. He has shared some behind-the-scenes information about the development process and tips on how to succeed in the game. You can read the whole piece here.

New interns in town

This week we’ve welcomed two new interns to the theHunter squad: Pär joined our game design team and Carl-Oscar the programming team. Read their intros below and give them a good welcome in the forum.

Pär

Hello Guys and Gals,

My name is Pär and this Monday I started my game design internship here, at Expansive Worlds.

The first game I’ve ever played was probably Alley Cat, an old DOS game. My interest for games grew quickly and I started playing pretty much any game that my parents allowed me to. My favourite genre is and has been RPG ever since I played that first Diablo game. It did not take long until I dreamed of making my own games.

Gaming is still a pretty big part of my life, whenever I find the time for it. My free time I mostly spend on either side projects or with my girlfriend whom I have been together with for 9 years.

It took quite a while before I actually started following my dream and began to work my way up to become a game developer. When I was about 21 my girlfriend found a game development educational programme in Stockholm, which I did not even know existed at that time. I am originally from the northern part of Sweden but as I got into that programme, I relocated to the Stockholm area. Now I have been through 2 different educational programmes which finally led me to Expansive Worlds where I hope and believe I will fit right in.

Carl-Oscar

Hello out there!

My name is Carl-Oscar Lönn and I’ve just joined Expansive Worlds as an intern. I will be a part of the Client Programming team to bring you new content.

I am originally from the Swedish city called Trollhättan, this is where my beloved family lives. There I studied game development and found my calling, programming. After I was done with studies I went to Falun to further develop my skills at Playground Squad.

When I am not working, I like being at home, playing games and having a cup of tea. I also like to get out and do some geocaching. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing it on my own, but my father often keeps me company.

It feels great to get this opportunity to be a part of the team, so I will give it all and I hope you’ll have a good time hunting.

Happy hunting from the rest of the EW team!

Discussion

Hey you hunters,

It’s been only a couple of days since our Movember campaign took off, and we’ve already sold 888 moustaches, worth  $1776 in donations. (Can you guess which moustache has been the most popular one?) Thanks for your support everyone and don’t forget that you can also donate directly via our official Movember page.

On Friday we’re kicking off a new event, this time it’ll be a small tribute to the Nordic Father’s Day. Now we know that honouring fathers happens on different dates around the globe, but we had to choose one, so we picked the second Sunday of November, using our privilege as a Scandinavian company 😉 Father’s Day in theHunter will feature good ol’ muzzleloaders and Reindeer, to add a Nordic feel. The best thing, Reindeer will be free to hunt throughout the whole weekend. Check back tomorrow to make sure you don’t miss any details!

On Monday we’ll be announcing yet another hunting spree to help keep you occupied and fend off the November blues. It’s going to mad, but more on this later.

This week we finally got a new front end developer. Magnus, joining the EW team. Read his intro below and say hi in the forums!

Hello everybody. My name is Magnus Eckers, and it is a great pleasure to be able to introduce myself as a new member of the fantastic theHunter team. Starting this week I will be taking on the role as a front-end developer.

I am a father of two children, who is doing their job well – keeping me happy and ensuring that I have a total of zero time for other activities. Despite this fact, I try to find time for some of my interests which, besides gaming, includes music, movies and beer.

I have always been passionate about computer games, ever since I got my hands on my first computer; the wonderful Commodore 64. Having worked as a web developer in other fields for 14 years, I finally felt that it was time I took the chance to work as a computer games developer.

I’m excited to start doing my best to bring great contributions to the magic that is created here at Expansive Worlds.

If you like, hit me up on twitter (@beingeckers).
I hope to be seeing you in-game!

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

Discussion