Status update

Another week has passed and we’re hoping that you hunters are still enjoying playing the game as much as we are developing it.

We had a small sale on em$ over the weekend, and we were happy to see that some of you took advantage of that offer. The countdown to Thanksgiving is up and running and we can see that a lot of you are in on the new competitions. We will end the week with a pretty pleasant surprise.

We’re spending a lot of time on preparing for the Christmas campaign that will be launched December 1st. We’re very excited about that and we hope you are too.

The next Game Update is scheduled for Wednesday next week and will include the Blacktail TruRACS update, and along with it also a new mission-pack for Blacktail!

And we just want to remind you all that the best Christmas gift to a loved one is a theHunter membership, so use the gifting option in the Hunter store to share the joy of hunting online 😉

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Status update

So it’s finally Wednesday again and time for an update.

As some of you might already have seen on Twitter and Facebook we were celebrating yesterday and the reason for this was the fact that we reached an important milestone earlier this week. TheHunter now has over one million registered players. This is truly an amazing achievement and we’re happy that our beloved game has attracted such a vast number of people. This doesn’t mean we’ll lean back and start taking it easy, but quite the opposite. Next milestone is 2 million registered hunters and we hope you, our dedicated community, will keep helping us reach that goal.

From what we can see a lot of you seems to be enjoying the new Tripod. We hope you are as satisfied using it as we were creating it for you.

We would also take the opportunity to thank all of you who have helped us out by completing the user survey. Your answers will help us in further development of the game.

The team is working hard on new content and features. We will have a TruRACS update fairly soon and we’re working on some new bow arrows to be released sometime in December. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US, so we will have an event starting next week based on that theme.

That’s all for this week, happy hunting!

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Game Update

Features

* Tripod Stand – A new medium height tower that can be placed almost anywhere is now available for purchase at Doc’s Outfitters. Check out this wiki entry for a comparison with other stands: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Hunting_Stands
* New tracking abilities – A number of new abilities have been added to the tracking skill. Check out this wiki entry for more information: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Tracking_Skill
* New spotting abilities – A number of new abilities have been added to the spotting skill. Check out this wiki entry for more information: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Spotting_Skill
* Weight vs. Score decoupling – The correlation between weight and score is now weaker among species where weight is not part of the score. The strength of the correlation vary with species. Unchanged correlation: Coyote, Turkey, Feral Hog, Wild Boar. Medium correlation: Black Bear, Pheasant. Weak correlation – All Deer.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed a bug where the Muzzleloader cap was visible after weapon change, if you were aiming the weapon at the time of the change.
* Bushes and flowers are now removed from a wider area around animals when in trophy shot mode (grass is not affected).
* Weapon reloading is now cancelled when entering ground blinds, tree stands, towers and when accessing the menu, inventory and full screen map.

Server updates

* Competition join fix – You can no longer join a competition in the middle of a hunt, instead you must join a competition before you start a hunt in order for the kills in that hunt to register for the competition.
* Added Hunterscore leaderboard

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Status Update

It’s Wednesday and time for the weekly update.

The past week has been a lot about on-boarding Pim, Herman and Christoffer, Expansive Worlds newest additions. All three of them are getting up to speed quickly.

We have, of course, also been busy preparing for this weeks update that will take place tomorrow. The update will not be big news to you since we’ve described both the Tripod and new skills system for tracking and spotting in previous status updates. But we are excited about getting your reactions and feedback on both of these new features.

For those that are interested in the details of the new spotting and tracking system more information can be found here:

A comparison between the Treestand, Groundblind and Tripod Stand has also been created here:

We´ve also started working on a holiday campaign that will be on during the whole of December, featuring events, sales and more. This campaign will be our biggest one to date and we hope you will like it.

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s wednesday again and time for this week’s status update.

We are quite busy right now with finalizing the Tripod as well as the development of the new skills system for tracking and spotting that was announced, fairly detailed, in the last status update. Both will be included in the next Game Update scheduled for release in next week!

New faces
We got some new faces on the team! Herman Nilsson joined us last week as Web Developer along with Christoffer Nyberg, Animator from our parent company Avalanche Studios, who will help us out for a period ahead. You will get to know both of them better later on in the Forums and in our Blog.
Also tomorrow a 3rd new person will join the team, but more info about that will be posted later this week.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s that time again!

Well, it was yesterday but we had to postpone because of personal related issues (the whole team went go-karting). Unfortunately no one thought to take a picture so you’ll have to take our word for it.

New Tracking & Spotting Abilities
Something that has been on the (in)famous TODO-list for a very long time now is to improve the skill system and therefore we are very pleased to announce that we are finally in a position where we can begin to tackle this.

There are many flaws with the current system including transparency (it’s unclear to the player how xp is earned and what the benefit of it is), xp being rewarded for the wrong things (shooting an animal multiple times gives more xp than a clean kill) and a general lack of a sense of progression.

What we are currently working on is the progression problem. By introducing a new set of unlockable abilities for tracking and spotting we hope that players will begin to feel that gaining levels actually do something.

For spotting this includes:

  • Random weight information that gets more accurate at higher levels
  • Random score information that gets more accurate at higher levels

And for tracking:

  • Random weight information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random track age information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random animal health information for blood tracks

In contrast to most of our current skill benefits these abilities will not increase incrementally with each level, but instead make larger jumps at specific levels. For instance you may unlock weight information with an accuracy of 20% at level 5 and then jump straight to 40% at level 10. The idea behind this is to make progression more noticeable, it also allows for more variation at each level since we can have, for instance, gender at level 6, weight at level 8 and weight at level 10.

Another cool thing specific to the tracking abilities is that we can now specify the track-types for which an ability works with at a specific level. For instance we can have weight information at level 5 from footprints only and then make it available for all track-types at level 10.

Once we getting ready to release this update we will post more specific information on what each ability does and at which level it is unlocked in the wiki. This will also include frequently requested information about current abilities and incremental improvements already available in the game.

This, however, is only a temporary solution to the transparency problem since we also plan to revamp the skill page attached to your player profile. The idea is to display both your current progression and information about what each level do in the same place. Imagine something similar to the achievement page.

That’s it for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s Wednesday again and time for this week’s status update. Among other things we´re doing some “under the hood” work in places which unfourtunately make the status updates somewhat shorter.

New patch will be released later this week with some bugfixes – fix for animals not dropping clues after some time and shotgun sound fix.

Blacktail TruRacs improvements
Just like with the Mule Deer improvements that came with the last game update, we will soon start to work on a new larger antler model for the Blacktail to push it’s visuals closer to the actual scores too.

New reserve
Preliminary work has also been started on the next hunting reserve. At the moment things are in the evaluation stage where we are trying to ensure that we can actually reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves. This involves trying out some new types of vegetation and other work that we haven´t really done before. We hope that this one should offer something quite new once released, and also correspond to community wishes. We can also say that it is not an African environment we´re making, and for reasons we will get into later on (although an African reserve is not as far away into the future anymore as we have previously stated). This is also a very early announcement and work will be done in several steps with some other things in between until the release which is at the moment roughly scheduled for March next year.

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Game Update

Features

* Animals drop clues more often when changing direction. This should make it a bit easier to track animals.

* Mule Deer antlers tweaked – The visual appearance of the antlers now corresponds better with what they score. This includes a new XL World Record model for 200+ antlers.

Bug fixes

* The Muzzleloader iron sights are now better aligned. This should fix the problem where players experienced the zero setting as ~30 m when it should be 50 m.

* Fix for the broken bolt action animation of the .243, .270 and .300 rifle.

* Fix for the incorrect finger placement used to hold the Recurve Bow arrow.

* Roe Deer Caller sound volume tweaked – All variations should now have roughly the same volume. This resolves the issue where some players experienced the caller as sometimes sounding broken.

* Several random crash fixes.

* Fix for achievements being wrongfully awarded when using unpermitted ammunition.

* Improved cheat detection.

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Status Update

It’s time for this week’s status update!

It’s a rather short update this week, we have been busy with previously announced tasks including the next Game Update that will be released tomorrow.

The update includes:
* Crash fixes
* Mule Deer TruRacs improvements – XXL antler added to give a better visual to score match
* Improvements to how animals leave clues
* Fix for bolt action rifle reload
* Fix for which fingers are used to hold the recurve bow arrow
* Muzzleloader iron sight better aligned

More info will be posted tomorrow with the update.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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