Howdy hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update. Things in the office are going well, Calle has been settling in and has already started to dig into the much missed Personal Bests feature. Hopefully he’ll be able to find a better way to implement this functionality and bring it back to us soon.

Thank you for the feedback

Thank you everyone who have completed our feature survey, there were some interesting insights and we’ll be working on implementing them into our future roadmap. As promised, we randomly picked three respondents from all people who have replied to the survey and added 1000em$ to their accounts. Here is the lucky trio: Cashet, Jeff1963, restor104. Congratulations!

We went through all the feedback on our offerwall (”Earn em$”) you’ve shared both in the survey and dedicated forum thread, and right now we are working together with our offerwall partners on streamlining the offers, to make the ”Earn em$” feature more reliable and user-friendly.

The new reserve has got its name

Thanks for all the name suggestions you’ve shared on 20 forum pages, some of them were really brilliant. We went through all of them and in the end settled on this gem we really liked: Val-des-Bois. It is pronounced /val-de-bwah/ and, loosely translated from French, means ”a wood valley”. We thought that both the melody and the meaning suit the new reserve and other EHR names very nicely. Our special thanks and appreciation goes to the player named Haldur who has suggested this beautiful idea: congratulations, your name has now been recorded in the chronicles of theHunter 😉

The secrets of Val-des-Bois

As you might remember, we’ve mentioned that the new reserve will come with a couple of surprises. For starters, there of course will be a new animal living there, more on this in our next status update, but feel free to place your bets. Another surprise and a totally different game design feature was dictated by the mountain nature of the new reserve, and namely, to access certain particularly steep areas in Val-des-Bois you’ll have to climb! The ability to climb will come with special gear and some hazards, naturally associated with this kind of activity. More details will come later, for now here is the sneak preview of the climbing with Robin testing the new mode and animations (please note that this is still very much work in progress):

Deployable hunting tower

Today we released a new item – a deployable hunting tower which has been a popular community request. The hunting tower is different from the majority of our items in that you can not buy it in the store. These towers can only be obtained (for free) when buying selected types of memberships and membership bundles. The good news is that all existing members holding 6 or 12-month memberships, purchased via our website and Steam, got their first hunting tower automatically for free. For more details please check today’s game update and the item description.

See you next week,

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi there,

My name is Calle and I’ve just joined Expansive World, where I will work on our backend systems.

I’m originally from a tiny village on the eastern border of Sweden, between Småland and Östergötland, called Skeppsgården. I moved to Stockholm when I was 16 to study multimedia with the vision of becoming a game developer. As it turned out, the school was more about motion graphics, 3D design and the web. I tried all of them but got stuck with web development as that was the most “programmy” option.

Since then I worked as a web developer for a couple of years, studied at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, worked with ‘Smart-TV’ systems and only now, after 17 years, I’m finally in the business I aimed for when I was a pimply teenager.

I usually spend my free time with my girlfriend, my friends and my family. I’m into GeoCaching, watching TV-series and brewing beer.

Calle has already had his induction by fire into theHunter team, or to be more precise, induction by yellow paint balls. Yesterday our team went playing paintball to the woods of Stockholm, and here is a little photo report for you of this fun but quite happening.

See you in the woods, happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello Hunters,

In this status update: news about the EW team, information about the upcoming reserve and the new animal revealed, so read on!

On the hunt for an awesome frontend developer

Sadly, our backend developer Adam and frontend developer Herman have left Expansive Worlds for other adventures, which means that we are short on the web staff at the moment and things might require additional time to get fixed and updated. A new backend developer is already on his way, but we’re still on the lookout for a talented frontend developer to fill in Herman’s shoes. If you know someone who might fit the role, send them our way! Here is the detailed job description.

It’s gonna be mountains!

The work on the new reserve continues and we’re happy to tell you that it’s going to be an Alps inspired reserve. It will feature ample meadows, shady mountains, lavish spruce and a sparkling creek. Once we’re ready, we’ll share more details and some screenshots with you, for now just rest assured that the new reserve will come with a couple of surprises.

You know Dasher and Dancer…

Here comes the most exciting piece – the mysterious new species. Well, not that mysterious, since hundreds of people hit the nail on the head with their guesses. Yes, it’s a reindeer and it’ll come to Hemmeldal. Here are some screenshots of this gorgeous boy for you to savour, please bear in mind that it’s still being tweaked and some minor changes might be added before the actual release.

Sneak peek competition – Winners

We’ve received 280 correct answers to our the competition to guess the animal and reserve. Much more people guessed right, but they didn’t qualify for one or another reason (their guesses were either not submitted in the specified forum thread, or after the deadline, or mentioned only the animal, or made several guesses). We accepted both ”caribou” and ”reindeer” as correct replies, because those are two names for the same species used in different areas of the world. Since Hemmeldal is set on our European inspired continent, we decided to use the local name ”reindeer”. Here are the names of the 10 winners, chosen randomly from 280 people, who will receive a new reindeer rattler caller, a large bottle of scent eliminator and, if applicable, a one-week license to hunt the very same.

• The Herring
• Rabbitfriend
• EclipseStar
• extremebowhunter12
• Villkatta
• ItzCriscco
• Renier Cronje
• Lateralus
• Charlie2299
• SeeDoe

If your name in game is different from your forum name please contact Alena.

That’s it from us for today, let us know what you think about the looks of the reindeer in the discussion thread linked to below.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello good hunters,

Here comes our weekly status update. A lot of you have been eagerly waiting for some news about the new species, so I’ll start with that one.

The cat is (almost) out of the bag

Today we’re ready to reveal the first sneak peek of the new animal, so here it is, as seen though the eyes of a short sighted hunter:

By showing you this blurry picture we wanted to prolong the suspense a tiny bit more as well as throw in a small competition. Based on the screenshot above, try to guess what the new animal is and in which reserve it’s going to reside and leave a reply with your guess in the discussion thread to this status update. Only guesses submitted before Sunday, 17th August midnight CEST will be considered. 10 people who have correctly guessed both the animal and the reserve (winners will be chosen randomly) will receive a special prize: a lure for the new animal (not released yet), a large bottle of scent eliminator to better hide from its curiosity, and, in case a winner is a guest, a one-week-license to hunt the very same Mr X.

You can only guess once, people who have submitted several different guesses will be disqualified. The winners, alongside the identity of the new animal, will be announced in the next status update.

Summer Fiesta – Bonus challenge

As promised in our previous status update, today we’re adding an additional ultra-challenging challenge for those of you who have completed all the Fiesta missions (and have been complaining that they were not difficult enough 😉 ). The 6th bonus mission consists of three objectives and can only be activated after you’ve completed 5 ”normal” Fiesta missions. Those who manages to accomplish all three objectives will receive this stunning diamond stag trophy. Worth a try if you ask me.

What you didn’t know about NAOutdoors…

Our support manager David NAOutdoors has replied to your questions in his Ask Me Anything thread. Read his answers to find out which theHunter weapon has been modelled from his own, the impressive variety of animals he has hunted in real life and much more.

That’s all from us for today, please note that from now on our weekly status updates will mostly be published on Thursdays.

Happy hunting!

Discussion