Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another status update, second this week. Yes, a lot of stuff is happening here, and we believe that there is no such thing as too much communication 😉

Continuous work on game quality

Yesterday we released another game update, most likely the last this year, with a lot of bug and crash fixes, changes and tweaks to make the game more enjoyable for all of you. Following your feedback, Wolf permitted ammo has seen some tweaks and now corresponds to that of Coyote. You can find the complete list here.

Not everything is fixed, and we continue working on existing issues, including the launcher patching problem. The launcher is certainly a very special beast, and working with its code requires very meticulous work and patience, but it looks like we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and the problem will hopefully soon be fixed for those of you who have been plagued with full download after certain patches. As the holiday and vacation season is approaching, we probably won’t release the fix this year, but we are committed to doing it as soon as possible early next year.

Bits and bobs from the Holiday Season

Speaking about holidays, now is the perfect time to sum up 2016 and look back at what we have (or have not) achieved in the last year. Come join the discussion, we all are super curious to learn about your personal highs and lows!

We are also expanding our holiday clothing collection with three gorgeous theHunter inspired variations of our knitted items. You can get them as free bonus gifts in two time limited campaigns:

• Recruit your friends to theHunter before the end of the year – we are adding these lovely items to our Recruit a Friend rewards, find more details here.
• Renew your membership this weekend, before Monday, December 19th – here is the breakdown of the bonus gifts:

• 3 month membership or Wayfarer – Holiday Beanie
• 6 month membership or Pathfinder – Holiday Beanie and Holiday Mittens
• 12 month membership or Trailrunner – Holiday Beanie, Holiday Mittens and Holiday Sweater

The Ultimate Bear Hunter event

As you know, our Black and Brown bears have recently received a thorough overhaul and now look so much cooler and more realistic, while sounding more dangerous. To give you an additional incentive to check them out and enjoy their new looks and animations, we are launching a small bear event with a special set of missions. The Ultimate Bear Hunter 2016, in which you will get to hunt all four of them in pursuit of a unique trophy. There is also a bundle in the store with some equipment that can come in handy for hunting all the different bears of the EHR. The missions and bundle will be available until the end of the year.

Adjustment of EUR em$ prices on Steam

This update only affects players located in Europe who purchase em$ via Steam. Today we made an adjustment to the em$ prices on Steam (in Euro/EUR) to adapt to the currency exchange development. Please note that prices on our website will not change, nor will localized Steam prices for other regions outside the European Union. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

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

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Last week was super busy and intense, with lots of things happening at Expansive Worlds headquarters. Here is a short wrap-up of the latest and greatest.

Closed Beta of theHunter: Call of the Wild

For one, we released the long awaited gameplay trailer and had a closed beta session for theHunter: Call of the Wild. It’s been tons of fun and your engagement was beyond what we expected, thank you! For all the details around the closed beta please check our official community hub on Steam. Later this week we’ll posting there a selection of best moments from the closed beta, created by participants.

Grey Wolves are here!

Similarly great news, on Wednesday we finally released Grey Wolves onto Timbergold Trails! The release hasn’t been our smoothest one, which we had expected with adding such complex functionality and animal behaviour to a content-filled game of theHunter’s scale. Having said that, we jumped on the issues right away and fixe the majority of crashes in a hotfix patch the day after. The residual issues are being worked on and we are preparing a patch with the fix for the rest (delayed walking sounds, messed up bear sounds, disappearing tracks on Timbergold Trails, “invincible” wolves). We are also working on the launcher patching issue, unfortunately, we have no ETA on when it’s going to resolved, but we will keep you updated.

Old new Black and Brown Bears

And finally, another long, long awaited update! Our ugly ducklings, the Black and Brown Bears, have finally received an overhaul in terms of their coats, animations and sounds! The release ended up being a bit sneaky (unintendedly so), but hopefully a pleasant surprise nonetheless! Later this week we are going to make more noise about them, with some bear related events and sales. In the meantime, make sure to check this awesome forum thread by BucksNBuffalo where he put together a nice showcase of the different textures of the updated Black Bears.

Movember results

November is all over as is our traditional Movember fundraising for awareness for men’s health. This year our community bought 962 moustaches for which we donated $1924 to the Movember Foundation. Thank you for this year, the engagement has been great, let’s do it again next year!

Say hi to Stefan!

And last but not least, we finally have a new community manager! His name is Stefan, some of you have already met him on the theHunter Classic and theHunter: Call of the Wild forums, and here comes his official introduction:

Hello all,

My name is Stefan and I am the new Community Manager for theHunter. I have joined Avalanche last week and will take over the Community Management from Alena who is moving into a new role as Producer for theHunter Classic.

Originally I come from Germany, more precisely a small town in the Eifel Region near Koblenz and I am 32 years old. I’ve previously worked at Electronic Arts in Ireland since 2011 where I have been a FAQ Content Author, Team Manager and Community Coordinator for games like Battlefield, Crysis and Need for Speed.

PC Games have been my great passion since I started out with playing “Stunts” and “Raptor” on the 386 and 486 in my best friend’s room. As soon as I got my first PC I was helplessly lost and dreamed about working in the gaming industry, bringing the same joy and excitement to many people around the world. The gaming Community is a very important part of the overall experience for me which made it especially interesting for me to work in and with communities, eventually joining the theHunter team here in Stockholm.   

In my private time I enjoy outdoor activities like hiking, camping and kayaking as well as Olympic weightlifting and making music. I also have two wild little kittens, Lykke and Lovis, who keep me busy when I’m at home.

I am looking forward to meeting you on the forums, Steam or in game and exchange ideas, game experiences and have a good time together! 🙂  

Cheers,

Stefan

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

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Here comes your weekly dose of updates and general musings from the EW headquarters. Earlier this week we shared huge news about our new upcoming game, theHunter: Call of the Wild. If you somehow missed it, you can catch it all, including the breathtaking reveal trailer, in this post. Please note that the official forum for the new game will be on Steam, so make sure to join the community hub there, as well as  follow the official Facebook group and Twitter channel, to be in the loop of everything exciting happening with theHunter: Call of the Wild. This blog as well as forum.thehunter.com will remain mostly about theHunter Classic.There is an unofficial sub-forum dedicated to theHunter: Call of the Wild here for you to chat among themselves, but dev communication will happen on the official forum on Steam.

In the meantime, at theHunter Classic foundry things are humming too. For one, we are at full speed approaching the finishing line with the wolves, squashing bugs and tweaking behaviour. You can expect to hear more on those bad boys next week.

Secondly, our traditional Holiday Event is starting today and is going to run up until December 25th. We’ve prepared daily missions, competitions, sales, unique shiny trophies, and of course, prizes; with the crown jewel being this wicked .308 Bolt Action Rifle. You can find all the details in this forum thread.

And last but not least, we have two new additions to the dev team. Patrick Enz is our new game designer and David Mitchell, who some of you already know from being active in the community, is temporarily joining us to help out with developing some features. Give them both a warm welcome!

Meet Patrick

Hello everyone! My name is Patrick Enz and I am working here at Avalanche Studios as theHunter Classic’s newly appointed lead game designer intern. Before this I was working as the AI and World Designer for the recently announced theHunter: Call of the Wild. I started my internship here roughly 3 months ago as a part of my education at The Game Assembly in Malmö, Sweden. Over there I went through 2 intense years, learning how to work effectively in teams and gaining the fundamentals of level design as a whole.

My favorite games are The Witcher 3, Mass Effect 2, Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask and almost all of the Final Fantasy games as they made up much of my adolescence. I also jump around different MMO’s from time to time. Apart from my main interest of video games, I enjoy travelling to different countries and learning how different cultures around the world work. I also extremely enjoy warm humid climates and laying down by the beach in tropical countries as they are, in my opinion, the best means of relaxation.

I’m looking forward to working with theHunter team and the community and I’ll do my best to meet up with expectations! Well met!

Meet David

Hi everyone!

My name is David Mitchell, or as some of you may know me from the game and forum, “caledonianblues”. I’ve recently started working at Expansive Worlds on a consultancy basis, where I will be assisting the backend programmers and working on some new features and functionality.

I’m originally from the UK but have lived in Stockholm now for almost three years. I’ve been playing theHunter since 2010. I’m very passionate about the game and community, both of which I’ve grown to love and cherish over the years, and feel privileged to be able to work on such an exciting project. I have a background in artificial intelligence and software development and, whilst new to the gaming industry, very much hope to apply my knowledge and skills to this amazing game.

When not working (and not playing games) I write for a Linux technical magazine, and my passions include entrepreneurialism, martial arts, motorcycling and flying. After Christmas I will hopefully be adding snowboarding to that list, if I manage to survive the snowboarding vacation I managed to get talked into. You can still program with broken legs, right? 🙂

And a final note to those of you who can not retrieve their large equipment placed next to borders – right now, the only way for us to deal with it is to retrieve items manually. Please get in touch with our support and provide coordinates of your unreachable equipment and we will sort it out.

That’s from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Long time no hear! Well, two weeks to be exact which, for some of you (and certainly for me) feels like a long time. Things have been pretty intense here lately. We’ve been planning the roadmap for the upcoming year as well as working hard on the wolves, overhauling our black and brown bears and our seasonal competitions, to name just a few things.

Wolves

Wolves WIP

The client programmers have been head over heels in wolves. As we told you before, we wanted to do them properly, do them justice and portray them as the smart and iconic creatures they are, and this is what we’re committed to. Right now our Canis lupus are howling, interacting with each other and – oh yeah – feeding on dead animal carcasses when they’re feeling hungry. Everything still needs a lot of work and some polish, but we’re getting there. Stay tuned for more grey news in future updates.

Mid-November Madness
Our Mid-November Madness event is over. It was a marathon, I know, but you did it. Here are the final leaderboards from each of the divisions. Congratulations to the tenacious winners and everyone else who have managed to get a score on the leaderboard. This is quite an achievement in itself!

• Hard Core Division
• Elite Division
• Division 1
• Division 2
• Division 3
• Division 4
• Division 5
• Division 6
• Division 7

Thanksgiving

From Mid-November Madness straight into a Turkey fest! Because nothing can make your holidays better than hunting some gobblers in the EHR, right? 😉 We’ve prepared for you some tiered Turkey competitions, a set of lovely missions, and of course Thanksgiving inspired sales and a bundle for those of you new to Turkey hunting. (And do need I need to mention that popping by theHunter tomorrow would be a frugal idea? ;))

Here are the unique trophies you will get for placing top 10 in the competitions; the last one with a slightly disheveled Turkey can be won by completing the Special mission.

Holiday event
If Turkey hunting is not your cup of tea, wait for next week when we’re launching our traditional Holiday Countdown event, during which we will keep you busy throughout the whole month of December, until Christmas. More news next week!

Last but not least
I thought I should mention that no, we haven’t forgotten about your questions in the recent Ask Us Anything thread. We will answer them. I can’t give you an ETA, because I’m cautious about poking some people on the team right now, as they are ultra busy and slightly grumpy, but as soon as the holiday mood (and successful wolf release) makes them all happy and fat with gingerbread cookies, we’ll get the ball rolling on that one.

That’s it from us for today, see you in the woods and happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

I am back in Stockholm to meet what apparently has been the worst snowstorm in over 100 years, with theHunter team fighting it through the snow to the office to create the most (amazing) realistic game ever created. It’s been a fun week.

Mid-November Madness

The holiday season is (almost) upon us, and we will be kicking off next week with our Mid-November Madness event. It will be truly mad and not for the faint-hearted, so you might want to clear your diaries next weekend, just in case 😉 You can expect to hear more on this next week.

Wolf Gameplay
There have been a lot of questions about wolves so far, so I wanted to shed some light in this area. For one, whether they will come to any reserve other than Timbergold Trails. The answer is not in the beginning, but we are not excluding this as a possibility for reserves where it would make sense.

There are a lot of players contemplating whether wolves will be dangerous animals capable of attacking hunters. The answer is no.

As you know, wolves are highly social animals and this is the key to their success in the wild. This will be reflected in theHunter by the new group behaviour and AI, for example as our wolves will feature pack behaviour with different levels of hierarchy within their groups. Also, our wolf packs will communicate with each other via howling which will also work as a special call.

There will be more news to come on their game design which we will slowly share with you. As you can hopefully understand, it’s a totally new feature with tons of code to be written, and our programmers are really hard at work making this happen. We are super hyped about this but we are very much aware that features like this take a lot of fine tuning to be made perfect. And we want this to be perfect, so we are counting on your patience 🙂

.22 “Plinkington” wood

Yesterday we released our favourite small game rifle, .22 Plinkington, in a beautiful wood variation that was asked for from the beginning. We’ve also bundled it together with some great duck equipment and put it in the store at a very attractive discount – check it out.

Patching issues
Finally, we are aware of the patching issues with the web launcher which some of you are experiencing and we can assure you that we are treating this as a high priority and will do our utmost to get it fixed ASAP. We cannot make any promises on timescales, as we haven’t been able to pinpoint the source of the problem yet, but we will get there.

Happy hunting!

Discussion