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Hunter Score 2.0: Technical perspective

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splashcreen_hunterscore2

Last week we released Hunter Score 2.0. From a backend perspective, this was the biggest change we’ve had in quite a while, and it touched quite a few systems. For those that don’t know the details from a game design perspective, please refer to Alena’s post.

In this blog post, I will discuss what has been done from a technical perspective.

Preamble: theHunter’s server architecture pre-Hunter Score 2.0
Before I can explain how the new architecture looks, I would like to go over how the old (and current, mostly, see further) architecture works and is set up. We’ll do this back to front, meaning we’ll discuss the layer the furthest away from the player first.

– _Storage_: The SQL database: We use google Cloud SQL to store all the data related to the game, nothing special here, Google takes care of our database, it’s mostly stable.

– _Caching_: Google App Engine’s managed Memcache, with 10GB of dedicated memory.

– _Servers_: Google App Engine (PHP and Python): This is where it gets more challenging. We use Google App Engine to serve the website, as well as the API for the game. The website is a mix of PHP (inherited from the olden times before Expansive Worlds and Avalanche Studios owned theHunter) and html/css/javascript. The API servers meanwhile are written in Python 2.7, both the PHP and Python code are running on App Engine, and connect to the Cloud SQL database and memcache.

– _Cloudflare_: Cloudflare provides an additional layer of caching, it will cache static files such as images, html, css and javascript files, so our web server does not get swamped.

– _Website/Launcher_: The html/css/js served by the web server will be rendered by either your browser, or the game launcher. It is a single page app built using pretty old versions of marionette/backbone frameworks(the ones released back when the website was built).

Challenges
There are several pieces in this stack that are posing challenges for us in the dev team, the main one being the current server/web stack.

– These old versions of marionette and backbone are incredibly verbose and troublesome to work with, making any web changes slow and hard to test.

– The App Engine servers have no unit tests nor automated integration tests, this makes them prone to breakage, especially with the weakly typed languages that are being used.

– The servers have no sane error checking, making it impossible to tell the difference between a user sending an incorrect request and genuine server errors, this makes logs dramatically less useful than they should be.

– Database consistency was not considered during its development, meaning that errors can sometimes cause data corruption, which burdens both the players and our support team.

– Much of our static game data (such as which achievements are available to players, which animals spawn where, etc.) are stored in JSON files. While this is a practical format for developers, these files are most often changed by the game design team, this leads to occasional breakage whenever a single comma or quotation mark is forgotten.

What we’re moving towards
With the release of HS 2.0, we made the first steps towards improving on all this to move towards a more stable server architecture. The idea is that we will minimize the amount of changes made to the Python/PHP servers and instead start building on a new server stack, written in Go and hosted on Google GKE (Google Container Engine: A Managed Kubernetes cluster).

How does this improve on our problems, and why aren’t we just fixing the current servers instead? Well, I’m glad you asked, there are several reasons:

1) The main and most important reason is that, to fix the current servers, we’d need to rewrite them anyway, a lot of individual pieces are poorly designed (from a technical POV) and exhibit unexpected and undocumented behaviour in many cases. Writing new pieces and making sure they are well documented and don’t exhibit such undocumented behaviour solves this issue.

2) Weak typing and lack of unit tests: Python and PHP are both weakly typed languages, combined with the lack of unit tests, this makes any large refactoring or change extremely prone to breakage and passes the whole burden of ensuring correctness for any change onto the QA team, this is not sustainable. Rewriting piece by piece from scratch and making sure we have good unit tests coverage and use a strongly typed language for the new pieces solves this issue.

3) This allows us to move static game data to an administration panel, much easier to use by the game design team.

Upgrade approach
We are not going to be rewriting the whole server stack in one go, this would take months if not years, and would completely stop development of new features.

Our path forward consists in rewriting piece by piece as we make new features, the first step in this was made with the release of HS 2.0, we’ve moved the achievement system from JSON files to our administration panel, we’ve made an administration panel for ranks, and we’ve written an entirely new server for all of it that is now hosted on kubernetes. The new achievement and ranking system does API calls to our new servers written in Go, which are hosted in a kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud.

Compared the the Python servers, we’ve already noticed a huge increase in stability and performance compared to the old, the logging is also much better and they have full unit test coverage.

Hope this was of some interest to you. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask! I am looking forward to working towards a more stable and faster theHunter experience.

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Status Update

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Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another Thursday at theHunter Classic, where it’s status update time.

Hunter Score 2.0

Earlier today we released a new updated Hunter Score system. It features ranks, Steam achievements, special badges and header images for achievement collectors, as well as a new avatar presentation in your profile. You can find all the details about the new system in these game design notes. This has been a big feature for the whole team, Luna has been working on all the backend magic, Johan has created the great art and our new client programmer Linus has sorted out the code for the Steam achievements. Thank you guys, you’ve done a tremendous job <3

We are going to closely monitor our servers in the next days and jump on any issues that might be likely to occur when a feature of such magnitude is implemented. We’ll be answering any questions you might have, listening to your feedback and keeping you in the loop about the progress in the respective forum thread.

New Animal

2015_02_reserve_release

As you know, we have been working on a new species for quite some time now. It is indeed headed for the outback of Bushrangers Run and it will be a Feral Goat! We chose them because we thought they would fit well in that reserve, and they offer what we believe will be some very interesting trophy hunts. The horns and fur can look in all manner of crazy ways, making hunting Feral Goats a unique experience every time, plus they make really great sounds. We are hoping to be able to share some sneak peeks with you in the upcoming weeks.

Baiting Changes

In response to your feedback, we have taken a stab at our baiting game design. David and Roberto have been digging deep into the code and trying to find ways to tweak the system. We even went as far as consulting our previous game designer Björn, as well as Danny, the client programmer who implemented the system in the very beginning. The conclusion is that bait sites have never worked as designed, so what we are trying to do now is find a way to make baiting gameplay more rewarding without compromising the integrity of the game. All I can say right now with certainty is that we will not go back to they way it used to be before, when you could have 10 bears at one barrel and 20 pigs at the feeder, climbing over each other trying to get to the bait. This was simply not good hunting in our book, so we are aiming to find a reasonable compromise.

Game Design Competition Winners

A while ago we ran a game design competition for missions and competitions for the animals of Timbergold Trails, and now it’s time to announce the winners!

  • Bighorn Sheep competitions – Cityzen
  • Bighorn Sheep missions – freck1es
  • Grey Wolf competitions – tbug
  • Rocky Mountain Elk competitions – Ash1302
  • Rocky Mountain Elk missions – Dillakiller
  • Grizzly Bear missions –  drakle
  • Grizzly Bear competitions – BuiuRei

You might notice that there is no winner for grey wolf missions. This is because we felt the quality of submissions was slightly below that of the other species, and we feel this species deserves a high quality mission pack. Our internal game designer Patrick is going to work his magic on this pack of missions, making the set complete.

We are going to post the winning entries in the competition thread shortly and hope to introduce the mission packs and competitions soon, and take this opportunity to thank you all again for your participation and creativity in this competition. The winners will receive their rewards and coveted “almost Dev” jackets as soon as they contact me via private message to specify whether they want em$ or membership days, as per the original post.

Womanly Woman Event SplashScreen_womanlywomancomp

And finally, please do not miss the last hours of our Womanly Woman competition – those foxes aren’t gonna harvest themselves!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

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Features:

Bug fixes:

  • Fix for wolf score spotting always showing 0
  • Fix for no weapon or HM equipped after exiting the trophy shot mode
  • Fix for the Shooting tripod rest – now you will be facing the same direction as you exit it
  • Contextual help is now disabled in a tutorial

In progress:

  • Looking into long map loading times experienced by some players

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Introducing the new Hunter Score

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splashcreen_hunterscore2After many years of service and having been applied to countless thousands of hours of the most realistic hunting experience, our once brilliant Hunter Score system has lost its appeal for many players. The reasons are numerous, the most brought up being the amount of weapon variations which we’ve added over years, each carrying its own achievements, further influencing the Hunter Score figures. Another one is that it has become somewhat of a never-ending and demotivating task to increase one’s Hunter Score, with the Achievements bars being set so high.

The challenge to redesign a system with such a huge amount of data, affecting every single player we’ve ever had, hasn’t been an easy one, and what we’re releasing today has gone through many iterations. Our main goal with the new system was to find a balance between preserving what you’ve already achieved in the EHR while adding additional levels to the Hunter Score which would eliminate the problem of weapon variations, making the system more compelling for beginner hunters (imagine joining the game and looking at the achievement progress bars of top players) while still attractive for players with many years of EHR hunting under their belt. As much as we would like to introduce even deeper identifiers of one’s hunting skills and the breadth of one’s gameplay (such as, we wanted to add Hunter Score points for completing missions, harvesting rare animals, competition trophies, harvest value etc.) this has proven to be a huge task for us, at least for the time being given our resources and other projects in the pipeline. In the new improved system, we’ve removed “Exploration” from counting towards your Hunter Score, as this is one of the most controversial categories. Instead we replaced it with another category (which some might find as controversial). That new category is “Collectables”, inspired by community feedback relating to mushrooms and other treasures being meaningless.

Long story short, after months of hard work we are proud to present you with the new Hunter Score. In a nutshell:

1.Achievements. Our Achievement system will remain untouched in terms of numbers and thresholds. However, it will represent nothing more than in-game achievements. As usual, you will receive an in-game pop-up and hopefully a sense of gratification after reaching achievement milestones, but this progression will have no direct impact on your Hunter Score. Achievements will become a means of gauging your own progression, competing against yourself to become a better hunter, but not something to compare yourself against others in game.

  • To add an additional edge to the Achievement system, we are introducing two new features: Achievement Collector Badges. They are available in five different categories, named after EHR animals and ranked by their hunting difficulty. Those badges will be awarded to you after you’ve reached a certain percentage of Achievement points available and will be displayed on your profile, under your profile picture. Badges are dynamic, which means that if the amount of Achievement points becomes higher, they get recalculated.

 

Turkey – 90 – 100% existing achievement points
Red Fox – 75 – 89% existing achievement points
Black Bear – 50 – 74% existing achievement points
Roosevelt Elk – 25 – 49% existing achievement points
Moose – 5 – 24% existing achievement points

  • Achievement Master Header images. Those are the available in six different variations for each of the Achievement categories. You unlock them by reaching certain levels in becoming a Species, Weapons or Exploration Master. Unlike Achievement Collector Badges, once unlocked, images remain available to you forever, even if there are more species and weapons introduced later. You can pick the image you want to display on your profile within the Profile Settings menu. If you don’t choose any, the most recently earned head image will be displayed by default.

Species Master
Level 1 – 1 harvest for every species of animals

species_1
Level 2 – 25 harvests for every species of animal.

species_2
Level 3 – 100 harvests for every species of animal.

species_3
Level 4 – 250 harvests for every species of animal.

species_4
Level 5 – 500 harvests for every species of animal.

species_5
Level 6 – 1000 harvests for every species of animal. species_6v2

Weapon Master
Level 1 – 1 harvest using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_1
Level 2 – 25 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_2
Level 3 – 100 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_3
Level 4 – 250 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_4
Level 5 – 500 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_5
Level 6 – 1000 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.

weapons_6

Exploration Master
Level 1 – “10 Traveled” (10 km) + “1 hours” (1 h)

exploration_1
Level 2 – “Evergreen Marathon” Achievement (42 km) + “A Day Well Spent” (24 h)

exploration_2
Level 3 – “Stockholm-Copenhagen” Achievement (522 km) + “Heroic Hunter” (72 h)

exploration_3
Level 4 – “Los Angeles-Austin” Achievement (1987 km) + “Master” (336 h)

exploration_4
Level 5 –  “New York-Paris” Achievement (5851 km) + “Veteran” (720 h)

exploration_5
Level 6 – “Globe Trotter” Achievement (40076 km) + “Legend” (8760 h)

exploration_6

  • Steam achievements. We are finally bringing out these bad boys! Steam achievements will mirror our existing achievements per animal, unique weapon as well exploration and total harvests. To unlock an animal or weapon achievement, you need 250 harvests per animal / weapon (except duck, geese and mallards, those have 1000 harvests). Exploration and total harvests have different levels, please check all the details on our Steam page.

2. Ranks. Ranks are the new sheriffs in town, i.e. they will count towards your Hunter Score. Ranks come in three categories. These categories are Species, Weapons and Collectables. Species and Weapons are grouped in the same way as our Skills system, so all species have their own Ranks and all unique weapons have their own too. Weapon variations, such as the three different Plinkingtons, are grouped together and harvests with any of the three of them will count towards the same Rank.

22_semiauto treasures reindeerExample:

The “.22 Plinkington” comes in three color variations; “The .22 Plinkington Blue Marble”, “The .22 Plinkington Winter Camo” and the “The .22 Plinkington Wood”. All of these count toward the same Rank and no matter which gun a player uses, all kills count towards the one Plinkington Rank which in turn counts toward the Hunter Rank.
What it looks like in the old system:
22 Plinkington “Blue Marble” has 100 kills
.22 Plinkington “Winter Camo” has 50 kills
.22 Plinkington “Wood” has 50 kills
… would look like this in the new system:
.22 Plinkington has 200 kills

Collectables have three Ranks: Common mushrooms, Rare mushrooms and Treasures.

Each kill per Rank adds you one Hunter Score point. All Ranks are currently limited to a maximum of 500 points, aimed to make the system as accessible as possible. Please note that we will monitor the performance of the new system in the first months and will adjust the bar if we deem it necessary to do so.

That’s it! You can now go to your profile, check your new Hunter Score and new place on the Hunter Score Rank Leaderboard (please note the Hunter Score recalculation will take some time), Achievement badge and headers images. Have a look and let us know what you think!

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Status Update

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Howdy hunters,

Hunter Score 2.0

Good to see you! It’s another exciting week at theHunter Classic and everyone is working hard.

Luna is finishing off the overhaul of the Hunter Score system, the sneak peek of which I shared with you last week. We’re hoping to be able to deploy it so you can see it firsthand very soon. In the meantime, if you spy some fishy achievements on Steam, don’t fret. They’re currently locked and sitting waiting for their time to be released properly and unlocked by you.

New Species

Ami and Moe have been busy working on our new species. Things are moving along nicely, albeit with some occasional hiccups as we’re trying out some new things here and there, but overall we’re making good progress. We hope to be able to share a first look with you soon, in the meantime, here’s a guessing game for you! Which reserve do you think our new darling will populate? A hint: the reserve in question was added after I joined theHunter team.

Baiting System Review

The client code team has also been keeping themselves busy getting our species to work in the game, working closely with our backend team on how we can make our baiting system more attractive for bears, pigs and, well, our players. All while poking into some new exciting but yet top secret stuff.

Reverse Draw Crossbow & Crossmania

This week we released a Winter Camo version of our popular Reverse Draw Crossbow and launched a Crossmania competition. Tons of EHR species, high harvest value requirements, all those things that you like 😉 Give it a shot. It’s divided into tiers based on Hunter Score, so no excuses for not trying out your skills and luck.

Trophy Shot Competition Winners

After the release of our Trophy Shot 2.0 and premium character poses we ran a Trophy shot competition and received oodles of entries in both premium and standard categories. You are endlessly creative and the quality of the submissions made it super difficult for us to pick the winners. We shortlisted 10 trophy shots in each category and then ran anonymous voting, but even then the battle was really tight. Anyway, the votes are in and we managed to decide on three winners in each of the categories as well as a bunch of runners-up who were extremely close! All runners-up will receive a 500 em$ prize.

Here are the breathtaking winner line-ups. Amazing job everyone, congratulations and thank you, it’s been a pleasure to judge your work!

Standard category:

1. Granti

2. hunterfisher

3. TheSheWolf

Premium category:

1. HooCairs

2. MewKitty

3. Rammstein59

Runners-up:

  • kahuamp (my personal favourite <3)

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

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Hello hunters,

It’s Thursday in theHunter-verse and it’s time for our weekly update.

Trophy Shots 2.0
Yesterday we released a game patch with changes, fixes and a new feature. We call it Trophy Shots 2.0. For one, we added five versatile camera filters as well as animal freezing functionality to make it easier for you to position your trophies. Secondly, we also introduced a bunch of character stances which will let you further enhance your trophy shots by striking cool poses and showing off your weapons. Character poses are a premium feature and are available for purchase separately or in a bundle. Our animators Morris and Moe and programmers Patrik, Robin and Roberto have done a terrific job on this feature and we are thrilled to see that you are enjoying it.

Here are some of the trophy shots taken while testing the new feature on beta:


You can see more of the “new generation” trophy shots in this thread where we are running a competition in which you can win the whole pack of premium character poses, or, if you already have them, some ever-useful em$.

Manly Man Event


Today is the 23rd of February and as you might know (or remember from the event we ran a couple of years ago), there is a tradition in Russia and Russian speaking countries to celebrate all men on this day. Since a lot of theHunter Classic fans come from those countries, we are once again tapping into this tradition. To pay tribute to this day in a “manly” manner and with style, we’ve prepared a special Manly Man competition for you. Fierce bears, no safety of platforms, shortest range counts, all that sort of fun! You can also find a Manly Man bundle in the store. Our special February 23rd edition Ushanka with a bear paw emblem is also making comeback! It will be available in the store until the end of the week, grab it while you can. And a shameless plug; it’s my most favourite headwear in theHunter, here is me rocking it during the last year’s Movember

 

HunterScore Overhaul
In an attempt to improve the existing systems, we took a stab at our existing HunterScore and tried to make a couple of tweaks here and there to make it a bit more interesting and rewarding. Our backend programmer Luna has been working on it for a couple of months now and we are moving into the testing phase as we speak. There will be some new things for you there, including the long-awaited Steam achievements. Here is the sneak peek a.k.a. first iteration of some of the new features that will come with this update. Please bear in mind that this is just a work-in-progress and the design might change, but we will follow up with more details soon!


Lock&Learn is back


After the short hiatus Lock&Learn is back. Tune in at 16:00 CET today to watch Johanna and Stefan taking it to Redfeather Falls to try out their luck in the Manly man competition against Black bears.

That’s it from us for today, see you in the forums!

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

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Features:

New feature – Trophy Shot 2.0

Includes:

  • Five camera filters – free added functionality for trophy shot mode
  • 10 premium character poses – available for purchase separately on in a bundle
  • “Freezing” animals in the trophy shot mode – prevents an animal ragdoll from falling down after releasing the mouse button

Check out this tutorial video by HooCairs to see all the new features of Trophy Shot 2.0

Changes:

  • Tweaks for .357 Revolvers – Slightly increased penetration
  • Improved sound mix for Geese, Crows and Scent hounds
  • Scent Hound sound is slightly reduced
  • Improved cheat detection functionality. Nothing to see here. As long as you don´t cheat in the game you will be fine!

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix for the Mule Deer and Sitka Deer injured laying ear animation bug
  • Fix for the jerky lateral movement when using a Tripod shooting rest
  • Minor tripod shooting rest fixes
  • Fix for a crash related hitting an animal with an arrow or harvesting an animal hit by an arrow
  • Removed the Inventory pop-up for Dog backpack triggered when the dog is within 1 meter radius

In progress:

  • Looking into long map loading times experienced by some players
  • Bug with wolf scoring showing as 0 in spotting info

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Status Update

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Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another status update!

Exclusive rifle with theHunter: Call of the Wild!

Today is a big day. Our younger brother, theHunter: Call of of the Wild has released into the wild (pun intended). If you’ve diligently followed the pre-release news announcements and streams, I’m sure you’re psyched to try it out. You can buy it on theHunter: Call of the Wild Steam store page.

To celebrate the new creation from the EW furnace, we’re running a promotion in both games. If you buy theHunter: Call of the Wild in the first three months after release you will receive this exclusive .270 Bolt Action Rifle “Call of the Wild” in theHunter: Classic. This rifle will never be released in our store and hence will have no achievements attached to it. theHunter: Call of the Wild is also offering unique rifle and Ghillie Suit for active and loyal theHunter: Classic players. You can find more details on how to participate in this promotion and redeem your rewards in both games on this page.

Valentine’s Event

In the meantime our Valentine’s event is well underway in its usual hearty fashion. We still have 4 days to go and the battle for the teddy bear trophies is wide open. If you are not a competitive soul, you might want to check out the missions for a special teddy bear collectable challenge and its reward (a Deployable Hunting Tower in bare wood).

We hope you’re enjoying heart$ hunting, teddy bear collecting, stocking up on bargains in the store and all the other stuff that makes this week in February special in theHunter.

New Website Features

Today we’re releasing a long-awaited function on our website and launcher. You can now delete images from your photo gallery! Not only that, we’ve also added a sharing function, which makes copying and sharing URLs of your trophy shots on the forum or elsewhere much easier (right in time for the upcoming Trophy Shot poses!). Give it a try and go crazy with all those weirdly shaped mooses and shameful kills that you’ve been longing to get rid of for years. Please bear in mind that deleting images is irreversible, so think twice before hitting that delete button.

Following your feedback to the friends list after the last game update, we’ve also improved its functionality with three small tweaks. You can now delete your friends from the friends tab on your profile (but please keep Doc there as he might feel lonely), we have tweaked the online status when you view someone else’s profile, and we have increased the limit of friends from 1000 (an old restriction from years ago) to 2000. If any of you are so popular that you have, or expect to have more than 2000 friends, please let us know!

One thing to note regarding the online status of friends is that there can be a short delay after a player logs in before you see them as being online. There can also be a long delay in them appearing offline after they log out. This can be attributed to people not logging out but just closing the launcher or website. We might try to tweak this again in the future but for now, try out the new features and let us know your feedback!

Ask Us Anything Replies

And finally, here is something bedtime reading for you all. The replies to Ask Us Anything with the theHunter: Classic team! Read on to learn about how the clothes camo works, our thoughts about the developmet stage of reserves in theHunter, and who is the most fun dev.

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

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Features:

Changes:

  • Friends’ lists are now ordered alphabetically.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix for the Break-Action scope position bug in reload animation
  • Fix for a random crash related to carcasses
  • Trophy Shots from Timbergold Trails are now saved under their correct name

In progress:

  • Deleting trophy shots from the gallery

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Status Update

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Hi there hunters,

Another Thursday, another status update. Some things never change 🙂

Shooting rest in town!

Today we released a game patch with a brand new feature – a Shooting Tripod Rest. A “shooting stick” has been a popular request in our Thoughts and Suggestions forum, probably since the very beginning of the game and understandably so, as weapon wobble is the main culprit behind those questionable shots. In the past we had some doubts about introducing this pretty powerful feature to theHunter, taken into account our skill system as well as already existing world items which offer significant wobble reduction. Nevertheless, we felt that there was a place in our game for a more portable and lightweight, well, stick-thingy that you can carry around and use with the majority of your weapons on the fly, especially on terrain where long grass or bushery doesn’t allow for going prone to take that perfect shot.

We went for the tripod version due to some technical obstacles with the one-legged tool and after many hours of coding, animating, testing and tweaking we are proud to present the result and are curious to hear your field reports. This nifty piece of equipment works as a world item, so you can put it out and dismantle similarly to tents etc. As with any other world items, only hosts can place them in Multiplayer games (but guests can of course use the host’s shooting rests) and we will be investigating the possibility for guests to place their equipment too (no promises yet, but I will keep you in the loop on our progress, if any).

Shooting tripod rests will temporarily add +7 to the skill of the weapon being used. For weapons that are already leveled to skill level 13 and higher, it will add additional wobble reduction beyond what you can expect at skill level 20.

You can check the tripod rest in action in this video that HooCairs kindly made for us in the beta environment during the last stages of our testing:

If you are looking to test the new toy, make sure to activate the special Deer Sniper competition beforehand, to give your tests more fun and purpose!

Valentine’s Event

Next week on Monday we are starting our traditional Valentine’s Event that will last for one week and will be filled with daily competitions, nice prizes and who knows, maybe an astray mission or a sale will also sneak in. Make sure to check back to our communication channels on Monday so as not to miss the most hearty hunting event of the year 🙂

Some of you might have noticed that the Valentine’s competitions were inadvertently released over last weekend. This was of course unintentional, they were untested and sneaked onto live by mistake and we sincerely apologize to those of you who lost time participating. By the time we discovered the mistake it was too late to remove them as it would have caused serious game problems to the people already enrolled, so we decided to let them run their course to the end. We tried to compensate those of you who lost their (incorrect) trophies and who have contacted us, but I hope that your time won’t be wasted any way, since you can see it as getting an extra weekend of practicing 😉 We will of course make sure that this won’t happen in the future.

Concerns about future

With the release of theHunter: Call of the Wild less than a week away, many of you have been holding your breath in anticipation but there are also many who expressed concerns about what it will mean for the future of theHunter Classic. We had a good discussion about this in the forum the other day, and I would like to reiterate my reply, addressing those concerns here again, for those who might have missed it:

This is a really good question [how can you be sure that theHunter Classic will have resources to continue developing and maintaining the game if people would leave for theHunter: Call of the Wild?] and definitely the one I’ve heard a lot in the last couple of months. I am confident that theHunter Classic will continue to stay relevant and attractive to the community for years to come, alongside our bigger (or, in some respects, smaller) brother, theHunter: Call of the Wild. The reason is that we offer different hunting experience with a deeper gameplay and around-gameplay features, significantly more content, established and passionate community that has time and money invested into the game and strong personal bonds with each other. After 9 years (8 years of live operations + development) theHunter Classic is bigger than a game, at least for many of us.

Another thing is that we have an exciting roadmap ahead including some things that we have never done before, and the team is on fire.

Yet another thing is that theHunter: Call of the Wild simply has very much higher system requirements, which are too high for a large percentage of our community. Sure, some people will leave for theHunter: Call of the Wild, some people will play both games, some people will stick to theHunter Classic. But all in all, I don’t see any real danger or serious competition for theHunter Classic in the long run. I’ll say it again, both games are supposed to complement each other, not compete with each other.

… and one for the road

I wanted to share with you another sneak peak of the upcoming feature we’ve been working hard on recently. Premium trophy shot poses! You will soon be able to use these to showcase your trophies and weapons in a more classy way. This is just one of many, the work is ongoing and we’ll keep you posted when they are ready for your EHR adventures!

And on that note, I wish you a nice hunting weekend and hope to see you next week!

Happy hunting!

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