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!
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!
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.
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!
Welcome to another status update! I am taking over from Stefan this week to give you a slightly deeper insight into what has been happening behind the curtains in the EW headquarters, well, at least the Classic part of it. For all the exciting news and developer blogs on theHunter: Call of the Wild, make sure to join their official community hub.
What’s cooking
Both December and January have been extremely productive for the team. We released the beautiful wolves and crows onto Timbergold Trails, made a complete overhaul of our Black and Brown bears, gave your dogs and backpacks an upgrade in form of pouch vests, polished some animations, upgraded and added new membership bundles as well as released duck missions and competitions. With the exception of a couple of short server hiccups we have been keeping the game stable, and the amount of crashes has been at an all-time low. There are still bugs and minor crashes in the game, as there always will be, but we are committed to fixing as many things as possible as we continue working on new stuff.
Speaking about which, I wanted to give you a small insight into what has been keeping us busy in the last month. We’ve started this year off by brainstorming and putting together a roadmap of releases for the next half a year and, if we manage to pull off everything we have planned, we will be looking at a truly remarkable period for theHunter Classic. Fingers crossed. A lot of things are already work in progress, for example we’ve started working on a new interesting species as well as a new and even more interesting feature. In the meantime we have been poking at some existing things that we wanted to improve for quite some time, so we took a stab at Whitetail and Blacktail Deer animations as well as deleting images from the trophy gallery and more things that are a bit too early to reveal. Our main goal for the upcoming months is to try to find a balance between adding more depth to the game in the form of new features, as well as improving the general quality of the game by fixing bugs, while at the same time releasing content and running lots of events on a regular basis to keep the ship afloat and players engaged.
Free Extra Equipment
As I’ve mentioned, last week we updated our good old membership bundles and added a couple of new “special” ones. At the same time we also put together a small sweet pack with extra consumables that every hunter needs in the EHR. You can grab it for free on our Steam page here (you would need to connect your theHunter account to Steam to get the bundle, but you can disconnect it any time later on). Naturally, you can buy it only once and we would appreciate if you could leave a comment on the bundle store to let us know what you think about it.
Bits and bobs
In case you missed our new beautiful .308 Bolt Action Rifle “Carbon” that we released this week, make sure to check it out! We also have a special competition running right now to celebrate its release and hopefully encourage you to try the rifle.
We’ve received a great deal of fantastic submissions to the game design competition for Timbergold Trails animals, thank you for your creativity and engagement on this one! We’ll be going through the entries over the next week to pick the best and most fitting for theHunter. We’ll keep you posted about the results!
We haven’t forgotten about the Ask Us Anything (although it might feel like we have) that we did last year. The team has started going through the long list of questions and we are hoping to be able to release the responses soon.
Welcome to this week’s Status Update! Another exciting week is nearly over at Expansive Worlds, time really flies when we are busy and there are many great things to do. Oh, and talking about things that fly…
Duck Missions
We had announced it in one of the previous status updates and they’re finally here – the long awaited Duck Missions, designed by Tanngnjostr, the winner of the game design competition, are now live and playable. You can check them out in more detail under the ‘Missions’, make sure to give them a try.
We’re super excited to hear what you think about them, so let us know!
Brand new Membership Bundles
Our membership bundles Wayfarer, Pathfinder and Trailrunner have been community favourites since their release back in the days but as time went by and more and more things got added to theHunter, we felt that their contents became slightly outdated. So, we gave them a slight overhaul to give you even more value when buying those.
On top of that we also added totally new Special Bundles into the mix, containing a 3 month membership and a selection of items tailored for specific animals and their hunting gameplay. We are starting with Duck, Deer and Stealth Hunter, but if those are proven popular, we are happy to add more of those. Check out the details in the membership store and let us know what kind of membership bundles you would like to see added in the future.
To celebrate the new bundles there will be 20% sale on all memberships and membership bundles in our web shop until Sunday the 29th of January. You can activate the discount by redeeming this code MEMBERSHIPMADNESS in the membership store. So, come and grab them while they’re hot!
Game Trailer Competition Winners
After receiving so many great entries for our Trailer Competition it was a hard choice for us to select a winner, but we’ve made it. theHunter team has voted and here are the results:
1st place goes to Beatsbynono
You win a copy of ‘theHunter: Call of the Wild’ (once it is released) as well as 5000 em$ or a “Trailrunner” Membership Bundle / 12 month-membership
Your price will be 2000 em$ or a “Wayfarer” Membership bundle / 3 month-membership
I will be contacting the three of you individually via PM on the forum so you can claim your prizes.
Congratulations to all the winners, we hope you enjoyed this competition as much as we did here at Expansive Worlds. It was a pleasure for us to see the fantastic dedication and work everyone put into the creation of their trailers.
Farewell, Emil!
Today is also a sad day for us at theHunter and EW, because one of our own is moving on to new adventures. Many of you know our quirky Backend Developer Emil from the forum or in-game, since he joined theHunter in February 2013 he has brought significant positive change to the way we play the game today. The implementation of Multiplayer, release of theHunter on Steam, introduction of a new payment system and moving servers to a cloud based solution are only some of Emil’s many accomplishments. He will be founding his own business and we have no doubt that he will be successful in achieving his goals! The whole team here at EW says ‘Thank you and farewell,Emil!’
New streaming series ‘The Hunting Lodge’
For the next 3 weeks Johanna and I will be pausing theHunter Classic Lock&Learn to introduce our new streaming series The Hunting Lodge. It will be focused on theHunter: Call of the Wild and, joined by Developers from that team, we will be playing a pre-release version of the game. The first episode goes live today at 16:00 CET and we will be hunting with Robert, one of theHunter: Call of the Wild Animators. Make sure to tune in on www.twitch.tv/expansiveworlds!
Welcome to this week’s Status Update, we have a lot to talk about, so let’s jump right into it 🙂
Dog Backpacks
Available in Happy Camper and Blazing orange variations, the Dog backpack allows you to bring a little more equipment with you out in the field by letting your dog carry some of the smaller items (up to 1.5 kg weight). The total capacity of the dog backpack is 5 kg. Try letting your pooch carry their own treats – they love it!
In addition to that we have also released fantastic dog bundles, in case you want to buy a full set of equipment for your furry friend. They come in two variations, one Scent Hound and one Retriever bundle.
Crows
Our team have created beautiful Crows who are now circling above carcasses on Timbergold Trails to make it easier for hunters to find those.Read about this and other changes and fixes in the latest Game Update In case you missed it yesterday.
Trailer Competition winners
For the past 2 weeks we ran a theHunter Classic game Trailer competition. A big ‘thank you’ to everyone who has submitted a trailer and put hours of work into the creation, the team enjoyed them very much. We are still discussing and picking winners internally, hence the announcement of the results will be postponed for a few days. We want to make sure everyone in the team gets the chance to hand in their votes and the right person wins.
Design a mission or competition pack for theHunter
It’s time to do this again! You’re interested in Game Design and want to leave your personal mark in theHunter? Here’s your chance: Design a pack of missions and / or competitions for theHunter to win great prizes and get them featured in our regular schedule. You can find all the details on the official forum in this thread.
New Team Members
We’re very happy to welcome two new additions to theHunter team – Johan, our new 3D art intern, and Adam, our new customer support manager!
Hi there!
My name is Johan Pauli. I’m the new 3d artist Intern here at Expansive Worlds and I am super thrilled to get the opportunity to work together with this awesome team on theHunter.
I was born in Stockholm and I currently live in the outskirts of the city together with my wife and two kids. I’ve always loved being creative, but up until recently never been really sure what I wanted to focus on. I’ve studied both music and arts prior to my current education, which is Game Development at Stockholms University. When I started there I finally knew that working with games was the thing for me. Apart from games, my interests are cooking (and eating) food, travel and binge watching series.
I’m really looking forward to get to know this dedicated community and to create content that you all like and enjoy!
Stay classy and happy hunting!
/Johan
Alright all.
My name is Adam Potts. I joined the team this week as a Customer Support Manager.
I’m from the North of England and I’ve recently completed a sixteen-year contract with the Royal Air Force, where I was an Operations Manager in theaters around the world.
I’ve been involved with the gaming industry since I started playing the CounterStrike Beta to a high level in 1997. I moderated forums, managed clan servers and wrote news and articles for the online gaming communities Wireplay, Barrysworld and MPZ in the UK before I joined the military. More recently I have been a games reviewer and editor, event report editor and cosplay photographer. In 2013 I ran a series of twelve fighting video game events for all the top fighter development companies raising money for the charity SpecialEffect, which assists disabled gamers with playing games.
The games I’ve most recently played are the Banner Saga, Farcry Primal, Batman (The Telltale series), Fire Emblem Awakening and now theHunter.
In my free time I’m a combatives and silat instructor (and practitioner because you are always a student) and I’ve recently taken up tai chi. I’ve a huge interest in the outdoors and survivalist theories about preparing for worst case scenarios.
I look forward to assisting in any way I can, and will no doubt see you all in the forums or in game.
Stay safe.
Live Stream #Lockandlearn
Join us for our weekly Live Stream at 4PM CET on the Expansive Worlds Twitch channel. Johanna and I will be joined by the game’s Producer Alena, who most of you will probably know very well from being the former Community Manager of theHunter.
You can find the discussion thread for this week’s Status Update here.
New feature – Dog backpack. Available in Happy Camper and Blazing orange variations. The Dog backpack allows you to bring a little more equipment with you out in the field by letting your dog carry some of the smaller items (up to 1.5 kg weight). The total capacity of the dog backpack is 5 kg. Try letting your pooch carrying his or her own treats – they love it!
We’ve put some great bundles with dogs and new vests in the store, so make sure to check them out! Bundle 1 | Bundle 2
New feature – Crows are now circling above carcasses on Timbergold Trails, making it easier for you to find those.
Changes:
The .243 Bolt-Action Rifle Wood now has a new sound and improved animations
Binocular animations improvements
Huntermate animations improvements
Bug Fixes:
Shooting ranges on Timbergold Trails are open now.
Increased the volume on the hog caller
Dog stroll around crash fix
Wolf searching for carcass (fixed a timer)
Wolf crash fix
Several Launcher fixes
Fixed an issue with bisons becoming unresponsive and passive after an attack.
