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