Status Update

Posted on May 12, 2017 by admin

Hi there hunters,

It’s time for our weekly status update!

Doc’s Desk Mystery revealed in the pre-release Livestream

As we are approaching the huge milestone of 1,000,000 community harvests and Doc’s desk keeps shedding its clutter, with the last two items being expected to be removed by the end of this week, we thought it might be time to break out the big guns and show you what we have been working on for the last months! Today we are announcing the pre-release livestream showcasing the upcoming feature. What exactly? You will (probably) learn very soon, just keep hunting ethically and contributing to the Doc’s Desk Mystery reveal.

The pre-release livestream will happen on Tuesday, May 16th, at 19:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel. Our own livestreaming aficionados Johanna and Stefan will be leading it and yours truly will join them to tell you about the development of the upcoming feature and reply to any questions you might have. Be there!

New dimension of varmint hunting

Yesterday we released two new items that have been a very popular community request and, consequently, frequent residents of our roadmap brainstorming sessions. Motion Predator Decoys. With this addition we are also introducing a new level of Fox and Coyote hunting. Sure, the good old Jack Rabbit caller gets the job done, but the new decoys brings out a new level of concealment by providing, in addition to strong attraction, a level of distraction as varmints become too preoccupied by the erratically moving furballs to notice the hunter in concealment. To add to that, Coyotes and Foxes tend to come back to the decoys after some time, so after having smartly arranged your set-up you can enjoy a relaxing cup of java while working on your Fox and Yote Ranks and Achievements. Our client programmers Roberto, Linus and Robin have done a great job on gameplay mechanics for the new decoys, the glorious models brought to you by our art intern Johan and those brilliant animations you can watch forever were done by our one and only animator, Moe. Hope you enjoy this new addition!

As I’m writing this, I got a heads-up from our client programmer Roberto that we released a small patch (2017051201) fixing the bug related to foxes, motion predator decoys and the Jack Rabbit caller that sneaked into the game yesterday.

Sneakathon 2017

Together with the motion predator decoys we launched our annual event to celebrate one of the most vital skills of a hunter – being able to stay unnoticed. Sneakathon 2017! Like last year, we are featuring five of our most skittish species in a set of missions that will give you a coveted entry ticket for the competition to get the fame and glory of the sneakiest of the EHR in pursuit of the turkey on one of our most challenging reserves, Settler Creeks. For the duration of the event, we are running a sale on all Sneaky 3D camo clothes, so it’s a good chance to stock up on gear.

Player survey – last week!

Finally, a reminder to those of you who haven’t filled in our player survey yet – please do, we are very curious to hear what you think about the game and what you want to see next. The survey closes in one week, on May 19th midnight CEST – take it now!

Happy sneaky hunting!

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Game Update

Posted on May 11, 2017 by admin

Features:

Motion Predator Decoys. Check out this Bundle for a good deal.

Bug fixes:

Fix for Coyotes not spooking

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Status Update

Posted on May 5, 2017 by admin

Howdy hunters,

Hope y’all are fine and dandy on this marvellous Friday! Stockholm is finally warming up following the seemingly endless winter, and people at the office are also becoming less grumpy and even Doc feels like a rather pleasant human being, for once!

Doc’s Desk Mystery

We believe it’s your fantastic efforts to clear his desk of all the mess that has put him in a chirpy mood. As I write this, the total number of community harvests is approaching 440,000 which means we are almost halfway through, and some things are starting to become visible to tease your imagination. There are some guesses and theories being shared in the forum but, for now, we won’t be commenting on those. Not until the last leaf falls off Doc’s desk. We’re following the thread and reading your conversations eagerly, discussing it intently within the team. Thank you for your fantastic engagement!

10mm Semi-Automatic Pistol

Earlier this week we released a new instalment for our handgun gallery. The sleek 10mm semi-automatic pistol. Semi-automatic firearms have been notoriously popular with our community and this one is no exception. Following your feedback about the performance of the pistol versus large game, yesterday we tweaked its ballistics data a bit to give it slightly better penetration. Right now we are running a special close-up challenge for you to try out the new pistol, and you can also find a matching bundle in the store.

Player Survey

Following our good tradition, every year in spring we run a large player survey. Lots of good things have made their way into the game as a result of those surveys, including Timbergold Trails, feral goats, not to mention more stuff that is currently in the pipeline. Of course, we collect your feedback every day from the forums, support and social media channels, but this kind of global survey helps us reach as many of you as possible and collect a vast amount of community data, to make sure that we are developing the game you enjoy.

The theHunter 2017 survey will be open for 14 days, from today until May 19th midnight CEST.

It should take you no longer than 15 minutes and we would appreciate your honest and detailed feedback. You can only participate once, but please ask your hunter friends to complete it as well. If you answer all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled in our em$ draw, in which we will randomly choose five players and gift them 1,000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Take the survey

Odds and Ends

Finally, we would like to give you a brief overview of what we are working on. Obviously, almost all of us are busy with the mysterious creation hidden on the Doc’s desk, but not only that. Roberto has been doing an excellent job on our web launcher, and we can now say that we are in a very safe spot when it comes to patching the web launcher so that you don’t have to resort to the Steam workaround any more (unless you prefer to use Steam of course). We still have some work to do there before we can confidently say that we fixed the issue once and for all, but we are getting there.

Linus and Moe worked on some Dall Sheep related bugs that were fixed in the patch yesterday. We are aware of the crazy Dall Sheep scoring bug that is still experienced by some players, and we continue investigating it. In the meantime, we will regularly rid the leaderboards of erroneous scores.

As always, we are trying our best to find a good balance between fixing bugs and developing new things and we appreciate your help in filing proper and detailed reports in the bug forums, which we always read and take into account.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

Posted on May 4, 2017 by admin

Bug Fixes

Fix for Dall Sheep getting stuck and not being spooked on the high mountains
Fix for 10mm Semi-Auto handgun being tilted in third person
Slightly tweaked penetration and wounding values for 10mm Semi-Auto Handgun
Fixed bug for Dall Sheep internal organs that prevented it being killed when hit in spine and neck

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Status Update

Posted on April 28, 2017 by admin

Howdy hunters

Time for another status update from us and boy, have we got some sweet news for you today!

Dall Sheep

For one, we released a new species this week – the Dall Sheep! It’s our 39th species, can you believe that? The release went well and many of you reported the smoothest patching in a long run. That’s really heartwarming for us to hear, as we know this has lately been a pain for our players who use the launcher. Although it’s a good progress, we don’t stop and continue investigating the murky waters of our launcher patching code and we hope to fix it once and for good, for all of you.

Coming back to our sheep, from the feedback we’ve gathered so far you have been enjoying our new snowy residents. I for one think they have brought lots of fun to the around-mountainous areas of Whiterime Ridge, with their lovely furs and rather entertaining calls. If you haven’t seen one yet, check out this video HooCairs made on our beta server, showing off their dazzling beauty:

With the amazing animal variety we have in theHunter now, we would like to know where your preferences lie – tell us what your all-time favourite animal is and why? Share it away in this forum thread – looking forward to your replies!

Doc’s Desk Mystery

If you’ve been following our communication closely, you must remember that we’ve mentioned some big feature our team have been working on for months now. I know you are all super curious and we can’t wait to tell you more. But our beloved Doc, being a grumpy fellow he is, is not very keen on revealing anything to anyone before “the time is right”. To all our pleas he would only go like: “Make them wait”, or, ”Good things come to those who wait, Doc says”. And a whole lot of other clichés only he himself finds amusing. But after quite a bit persuading on our part, we came up with a compromise – today we’re launching a campaign, in which you, our community, will influence how fast the mysterious new feature gets unveiled and, at the same time, make our Doc happier. You’ll have to do what you are best at – hunting and harvesting animals in EHR (no unpermitted hits though, otherwise this whole thing might go down in flames). If we do well, Doc will remove clutter from his incredibly messy desk, slowly revealing something hinting to the upcoming feature underneath. You can find more details and discuss all this mysterious stuff in this forum thread.

Lock&Learn with Lead programmer Roberto

Our Lock&Learn will happen today, at 16:00 CEST, and in this episode you will get a chance to follow Johanna and Stefan to Whiterime Ridge, joined by our Lead programmer Roberto. We will be running our traditional Friday Dev competition at the same time – don’t miss, we’ll see you there!

See you in the woods and happy hunting!

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Game Update

Posted on April 26, 2017 by admin

Features

New species – Dall Sheep

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Status Update

Posted on April 21, 2017 by admin

Hello Hunters,

Welcome to this week’s status update from the (still) pretty cold North of Europe. We hope you had a great Easter with your families and friends and possibly even found some time to go for a hunt in your favorite reserve. Due to the long weekend this status update is going to be a rather short one but that doesn’t mean we don’t have some cool things to talk about, so let’s get right to it!

Easter Event

It was a pretty ‘eggciting’ week for everyone participating in the Easter Event, with all the competitions, egg collection mission and daily sales. We hope you enjoyed playing through it as much as we did and got some nice trophies, too. I’m already looking forward to the next events!

Here are the top three winners of the Easter competitions – congratulations!

Easter 2017: Roosevelt Day

1st: FearlessFreddy, score 418.622
2nd IngeMeissel, score 409.764
3rd Essacksumra, score 391.181

Easter 2017: Duck Day

1st yenber, score 5.749
2nd tolo55, score 5.679
3rd SSR_, score 5.671

Easter 2017: Red Deer Day

1st Pupic, score 792.519
2nd Horozcu, score 786.03
3rd esox105, score 783.184

Easter 2017: Turkey Day

1st CATALIN_RO, score 70.529
2nd Fleischhammer, score 68.269
3rd lowby, score 68.044

Easter 2017: Feral Goat Day

1st IRB, score 1581.468
2nd ADRIcazador, score 1566.321
3rd Coolfirell, score 1527.62

Easter 2017: Grey Wolf Day

1st Fisher_Amur, score 2.57
2nd yenber, score 2.99
3rd Pontape, score 3.2

Easter 2017: Easter Bunny Day

1st kolobok12, score 6199
2nd Sycoshowbob, score 6160
3rd yenber, score 6043

The Dall Sheep

Although some of you were disappointed that the Mystery Doodle from last week wasn’t a ‘My little Pony’ or a unicorn, most of your guesses were of course correct: The upcoming animal is indeed the Dall Sheep! It will be the 7th species on Whiterime Ridge and it will bring hunting excitement to its desolate mountains. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s waiting for you:

Welcome to the crew, Cecilia!

Join us in saying ‘Hello and Welcome!’ to our newest team member Cecilia who has just started on theHunter as a Character Artist.

Hello everyone,

My name is Cecilia and I’m the new Character Artist on theHunter Classic

Previously I’ve worked with the Little Big Planet franchise. After six years of LBP, I relocated from a small town called Karlshamn to Stockholm together with my boyfriend Mattias. Here I studied at FutureGames for a year to learn the latest in the gaming industry, until I got the wonderful opportunity to come and work with theHunter!

In my free time I write stories, cook and paint Warhammer figurines together with friends. When I’m not too busy with those things, I play my favourite game Dragon Age Inquisition!

I have always wanted to make characters and animals for games, ever since I was a small child, so I’m overjoyed that my dream is coming true here at Expansive Worlds and theHunter!

Lock & Learn live Stream

Yesterday, it was time for Lock & Learn again. Johanna and I were joined by Sacha, our User Acquisition Manager, and we went for a hunt on Whiterime Ridge. You missed the stream? No worries, you can find the replay here on our Twitch channel.

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Status Update

Posted on April 13, 2017 by admin

Hello Hunters,

Welcome to this week’s Status Update brought to you from the EW Studio in Stockholm. For us in Sweden it’s a short work week as we will be off for an extended Easter weekend soon and back in the office next Tuesday. In Sweden it’s a tradition to go on an Easter egg hunt (chocolate and real ones) during the Easter time and so it’s no surprise that this year’s competitions, Mission and rewards are inspired by it.

‘Eggciting’ Easter Competitions and Mission 2017

Our team around game designer Patrick has worked on a bunch of fun Easter competitions for us to play through during the Easter time. The competitions will run for a total of 7 days, starting today and ending on the 19th of April, with a new competition being released on a daily basis.

Johan, one of our artists, apparently had a secret meeting with the Easter bunny. He scored some nice rewards and beautiful Easter trophies for the winners of all individual daily competitions.

1st Place: Trophy + 150 em$
2nd Place: Trophy + 100 em$
3rd Place: Trophy + 50 em$
4th-10th Place: Trophy + 25 em$

During the Easter Event you can also go on an egg hunt yourself, in your favorite Reserves. Activate the ‘Easter Mission 2017: Gotta collect ’em all!’ in the Mission section and use your HunterMate to collect a total of:

20 Bronze Easter Eggs
10 Silver Easter Eggs
5 Gold Easter Eggs

Here is the unique trophy you will get after completing the mission:

Along with all this you will find a great selection of limited time offers and bundles tailored to the daily competitions in our shop, so make sure to check it out.

For more information follow us on Twitter where we will announce the new competitions and sales on a daily basis.

Best of luck to all hunters!

About feeders

As mentioned in yesterday’s game update we have performed some changes on the feeder system, after having worked a lot with the feedback from our community. If you shoot an animal in baiting state within feeder range the range will be reduced to minimum and then slowly expand again over time until it hits its full range again after 30 minutes, while still attracting animals. After receiving questions about the concrete ranges for the penalty we will look into this further and see if we can share this information.

Adding to this the amount of feeders that can be placed in a hunting reserve has been raised from 3 to 4. We hope you’ll enjoy these changes and find them helpful!

Is it a bush or a dog?

Fresh in from the Doggy fashion week are the latest backpack variations for our furry friends in Summer Swamp, Fall Forest & Arctic Winter camouflage. Get the right camo for every environment!

All bundled up

If you haven’t yet purchased theHunter: Call of the Wild or have a friend or family member you’d like to take with you on a hunt with you here’s the perfect opportunity for you to get the best out of both games. We bundled Call of the Wild together with a 3 months membership and a Scent Hound for theHunter: Classic, with a 20% discount. Make sure to check it out here.

Customer Support during Easter Holidays

Due to the Easter Holidays, theHunter Support Team will be unavailable from cease work on Thursday 13 April 2017 until the start of work on Tuesday 18 April 2017. We will reply to any support requests on our return to work.

Operation ‘Mystery Doodle’

You may have read that Alena hinted something about a new species being worked on in last weeks Status update. I got curious, went to have a look and found this doodle flying around in the design area. Although I tried to bribe them with sweets and coffee the Devs refuse to share the answer with me (apparently they’re afraid I can’t keep a secret…), so I’ll need your help to find out what species exactly we’re dealing with! I think the shape of the horns is the key here!

Let us know what you think about this week’s Status update and of course your theories for the mystery doodle in the Discussion thread in our Forum. We wish you, your families and friends a happy Easter, a good weekend and see you all again on Tuesday. 😀

Happy Hunting!

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Game Update

Posted on April 12, 2017 by admin

The penalty system for feeders has been changed.

How it worked previously: If you shot an animal in baiting state within feeder range the feeder would not attract new animals for 30 minutes.
How it works now: If you shoot an animal in baiting state within feeder range the range will be reduced to minimum and then slowly expand again over time until it hits its full range again after 30 minutes, while still attracting animals.

The amount of feeders that can be placed in a hunting reserve has been raised from 3 to 4.
The Big Horn Sheep animation for hits has been fixed.

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Status Update

Posted on April 7, 2017 by admin

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another, slightly belated, status update from us at theHunter Classic team.

Baiting overhaul – review
Last week we released a baiting overhaul together with brand new mineral feeders for Feral Goats. We’ve been closely watching the conversations and metrics around this big update and are happy to see that the baiting has been reinstated in its realms again. Awesome. You can see a video from HooCairs comparing hog baiting after the update to the old days here.

As always, we filtered all the feedback we received through the internal sieve of game design, technical and resource limitations and what not, and there will be some minor changes to the system: for one, we will be increasing the amount of feeders / barrels per reserve, after the next patch you will be able to place four of those. We think that this will be especially beneficial in Bushrangers Run, but also in Settlers Creek.

Secondly, we are currently testing a slightly different penalty system, which has probably been the most discussed aspect. While we won’t get rid of it completely in order to balance the benefits that baiting offers, we’ve decided to try to find a compromise and make the penalty a tiny bit more forgiving and dynamic. More details about this in the next game update.

We saw that some people complained about the goat mineral feeders not yielding enough goats. The attraction radius of those is smaller than that of bear barrels and pig feeders by game design, which means you have to be very careful about the location of your mineral feeder to find that perfect spot yielding you tons of different-horned trophies.

16 GA Shotgun & Comp 16 Gauge Lockdown

This week we saw the release of our new unique shotgun. The 16 GA side-by-side. It’s a gorgeous piece of weaponry which the team has poured a lot of love into, starting from the design by Patrick, followed by the 3D model by Mattias (who you should have seen in our Lock&Learn yesterday), excellent animations by Moe, sound by Greg and client code by Patrik. Oh, and there are two multispecies competitions running right now, in case you want to level up your new shotgun AND compete for some fame and glory.

New species? Again?
Yes! Our animal team has been on a creative streak lately and we’ve been working on yet another new species. It’s been one of the most requested animals for Whiterime Ridge and we’re now certain that we are bringing this guy (or gal) to your arctic landscapes hopefully very soon. Now, who shall that be? 😉

Hunt-a-thon Winners
Last week we ran a competition Hunta-a-thon to win theHunter Call of the Wild. 646 players have gotten their scores on the leaderboard and, as promised, we raffled 5 copied of theHunter: Call of the Wild and 5 theHunter: Call of the Wild T-Shirts amongst them. And the winners are:
*Free games:*
seagull653
sleepycarp
OldMM1966
Nimrodfuchs
Ande644m

*T-Shirts:*
MaxJorma
abstandshalter
m0nngis
LongBowDano
Velja1234

We will be in touch with the winners to discuss the logistics. Congratulations and thank you everyone who took part!

Goodbye to David and Dick
Finally, we are sad to announce that our support manager and long-term veteran David Lucas aka NAOutdoors, has left the team and will not work with theHunter anymore. David has been with the game since the very beginning, he is an absolute veteran of theHunter and we can truly say that it won’t be the same without him. Thank you David, for everything, and happy hunting wherever life leads you!

Today is the last day of another long-term team veteran, animator Dick Sjöström. He has shared with us his first and last commit on theHunter:

*First Submit (Rangefinder):*
Changelist: 324121
Date Submitted: 2010-06-09 16:38:12

*Last Submit (XXX – something exciting yet secret):*
Changelist: 1189820
Date Submitted: 2017-04-07 09:49:24

Thank you Dick, for your wonderful scent hound animations, among others, and the bottomless well of honesty and one-of-a-kindness.

On a final short note, as yours truly will be away for vacations in the next week and around Easter, our community manager Stefan will take over the status update for next week and let you know what’s cooking.

Happy hunting!

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