Hey hunters,

First and foremost, a short update on the Labradors. They feel good and healthy and are starting to look and, most importantly, behave as we want them to. We’re adding some final touches and tweaks with the intention of releasing them next week!

If you want to see the Labrador retrievers in action, make sure you pop by our pre-release livestream tonight at 19:00 CEST, on this Twitch channel. Our popular and much-loved YouTubers Pratze and ronMctube will be joined by our game designer Pär, who will be able to answer your questions. We hope you’ll be able to make it.

While you’re waiting for dogs, we thought we would revisit a rather old chestnut.

One of the most debated topics in our community is the “realism” aspect of theHunter – whether we should focus on being as realistic as possible, or whether realism should take a back seat so the gameplay can remain fun. Followers of both sides are rather vocal and have been known to fight tirelessly about it. So, we think the only reasonable way to publicly settle this once and for all is to stage a debate. We asked two community members, representing both camps, to be debate the subject and they gladly accepted. The debatable motion will be “theHunter should be developed with the main focus on realism, with fun as a by-product”. Knut will represent the assenting side, speaking on behalf of realism, with TundraPuppy representing fun gameplay. You can follow the debate in this thread, which will last for 2 weeks. Everyone is welcome, and in fact encouraged, to pitch in! At the end the winner of the debate will be determined by public voting.

That’s it from us for today, until next week – happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

This status update is going to be a wee bit shorter than usual, as the whole team is busy working on the feature we’ve hinted and teased you about. Yes, it’s dogs! Almost all of you deciphered the carefully hidden canine sounds in last week’s video. We’re glad you picked up on it!

Dogs being added to theHunter has been one of the most sought after features within the community since the game’s release, which makes sense given the fact dogs are logical companions for hunters in real life. In our last community survey as many as 63.13% of all respondents prioritized dogs in first or second place as a new feature, and we saw similar numbers in our previous surveys as well. The dog was the winner, hands down. They’ve been asked about in an AMA and in the forum and we’ve always stated that the implementation of dogs is a huge project since the feature has so much potential, so we really wanted to do it properly. So, we finally decided to take a stab at it. As we’ve mentioned, there has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears poured into it and we are now in the final stages of development. The release date has not yet been decided but let us say soon. Here is a sneak peek render for you.

As you can see, our first dog will be a Labrador Retriever and his function will be to help to retrieve your birds (Canada Geese, Mallards and Pheasant). We’ve decided to introduce the retrieving dog first, since it was the most common suggestion when the discussion about dogs came up, but we are open to developing different breeds with various hunting functions if the feature proves successful and we can see that you like it and want more. When working on the retriever, we wanted to create a loyal companion who would follow you wherever you go and do all the fetching work while you’re shooting. Apart from the new bird retrieval gameplay, your dog will also have its own name will feature his own XP and stamina systems, skills, interaction with the hunter, etc.

We’ll leave all the details for later, but so far we’re excited about this new addition to theHunter. We hope you enjoy these screenshots (remember, this is still a work in progress) and let us know what you think!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Long time no hear! There was no status update last week, so this one will be a bit longer than usual. But make sure to read till the end, you won’t regret it 😉

Recent releases and other stuff

In case you’ve missed it, on Monday we released non-typical antlers for a Blacktail Deer and last week a Ground Blind in Arid camo. Speaking about the latter, the wrong price slipped into the store at the release (450 em$ instead of 420 em$). It was corrected on May 15th at 9:37 CEST, so if you bought this blind before that (you can check that in your em$ purchase history), please contact our support and we’ll refund you 30 em$.

There is one thing we forgot to mention in our last game update – the old time bug that made it impossible to fast-travel or heal oneself is now fixed! Falling in Val-des-Bois should be more enjoyable now.

Reserve set-ups are in the store

Today we’re starting to release the winning set-up bundles from our recent competition. We’re kicking it off with JackRbbt’s “Turkey Slaughter” set-up for Whitehart Island and will add the remaining 4 over the next weeks. With these bundles you have a great chance to get all equipment featured in the winning set-ups (except for deployable hunting towers) at a lovely 40%-50% discount.

A small update on our reserve load-out competition – we received over 80 entries and are still going through them and preparing for the voting phase.

Password sharing warning

Recently we’ve been receiving quite a few reports about players asking for passwords and login details. Please be wary of such activity. Once you give someone your login, they can easily change your password and lock you out of your account forever. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do in situations like this as often it’s impossible to prove who the account initially belonged to. That’s why we are reminding you to never give away your password but instead to report players asking for this to support.thehunter.com.

“Plinkington” spook radius update

There has been a lot of talk in the forum about the .22 “Plinkington” spook radius  pre and post its tweak on Monday. We’ve discussed all your feedback and decided to tweak it further. Here are some notes from our game designer Daniel which shed some light on this decision and the reasoning behind it:

When the .22 Plinkington was released it had the same spook radius as the .22 Air Rifle. This was a mistake on our side (not some evil marketing trick, like some suggested) and the need to increase the spook radius was obvious. With such a low spook radius it made not only the Air Rifle obsolete but also every bow in the game. Taking into account that the .22 Plinkington is a semi-action rifle it effectively turned the game into sort of a carnivalesque shooting range: Game balance was thrown out the window. So some tweaks were made; the .22 Plinkington spook radius was increased to a little less than half of that of other rifles in the game. The bows and Air Rifle may be slower and have a shorter range, but they have a huge advantage in being more silent. It was apparent from your reactions that the tweaks made were too harsh in comparison to what you players had experienced when the rifle was first released: A completely reasonable reaction. You had fun with the gun and we basically took that fun away. With the new spook radius we’ll hopefully bring you some of that fun back without making the Bows and the Air Rifle redundant. The spook radius will be larger than at the initial release but not as large as after the first tweak. Bows are still superior when it comes to noise, but the .22 Plinkington has an advantage when it comes to speed and range.

There are also a couple of other factors that might be good to remind you guys of:

• Turkeys are among the top three animals when it comes to spookiness. Hunting Turkeys is always going to be a challenge and judging a weapon’s spook radius based on how Turkeys react can be very misguiding. The bows are the optimum choice for gobblers.
• Animals spook other animals. If there is a high scoring animal in a group of animals, chances are that it will react to the noise and spook the other animals even though the shooter is seemingly outside of the spook radius. So, as stated before: Spook radius alone is only one part of what determines animal flight behaviour.
• It is also worth pointing out that albeit we’re striving for realism in everything, theHunter is a system in itself: A system we must try to keep in balance. Even though someone has real life experiences with a gun affecting animals in a certain way, these exact conditions and reactions do not exist in the game as the game has its own reality. In the game, conditions can only be measured and compared within the game itself. Who in real life has done the kind of crazy long range shooting we see in theHunter? Who has seen Pheasants as large as those in theHunter? The game is a world in itself. A world we hope you can judge as reasonable even though, in the end, it is just a game.

Finally…

Despite the outrageously cold weather in Stockholm, the summer is in the air; at least here, in the EW headquarters it starts to feel like it. Hoggy has been shedding his winter fur, our artist Tomas changed his avatar to a pup in a T-Shirt, and Hannes, Daniel and Pär went to the refreshing Rougarou Bayou and made a short video for you guys to put you in a summery mood too. Enjoy!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi there hunters,

Here comes our weekly status update with a bunch of small and a bit bigger news.

The Mule Deer scoring glitch that was introduced together with the release of non-typical antlers has now been fixed and will be deployed in our next game patch (probably next week).

Right now we are in the process of testing non-typical antlers for another species, many of you have already figured out what it will be. If you haven’t yet, check the store description for any weapon for its permitted species 😉 If the testing goes well and no bugs jump in we’ll be able to release them soonish.

The newly introduced .22 “Plinkington” Semi-Automatic Rifle has been quite a hit. After its release a lot of people commented on the spook radius which was unrealistically low for this kind of rifle. This was an oversight on our part which we missed during the testing, our apologies! The community divided into two camps, one wanted us to leave it as it is while the other suggested some tweaking to make it more realistic. We’ve decided to go for a compromise and stay true to the theHunter’s realism, so the spook radius of “Plinkington” will be increased but it won’t be as high as for large calibre rifles in theHunter. The change will go live in the next game patch as well.

Yesterday we released a much missed and long overdue addition to our spray scent portfolio – the “Fatal Desire” for Red Deer. Like other scents, it is available for both em$ and gm$ and will be included into our Mega Mix Scent pack in the near future.

Now to the last tidbit for today, which is a bit sad but still heart-warming. With a heavy heart our 3D artist Oskar has said goodbye to EW and theHunter to move on to his new adventure, which is closer to his hometown than Stockholm. Some of you may know Oskar by occasional posts in the forum but all of you know the fine dashes of his art in theHunter – Reindeer and Ibex models, the beautiful K98k Bolt-Action Rifle, the trophies for Valentine’s event 2014, an odd tree in Bushrangers’ Run and Val-des-Bois and much. much more. Oskar has left you the last piece of his craft which will reveal itself a bit further down the line.

Here’s Oskar’s goodbye picture for the theHunter community whom he really appreciated:

We of course are very sad to see Oskar leave and wish him all the best in his adventures. On the bright side, we have a bunch of talented artists here in house who are continuing to work their magic to make sure that theHunter continues as an absolutely stunning game.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another weekly status update from theHunter headquarters.

Please welcome a new member of the non-typical family

We’ve been teasing you with non-typical antlers for yet another theHunter species for a while now, and the word is already out there as to who is coming next. So, here you go – we’ve just released non-typical Mule Deer into the Logger’s Point hunting reserve. They will be as rare as their “special” Whitetail brothers, but still not as rare as in real life, since we want to give every player a chance to bag one.

Some of you were a bit critical regarding non-typical Whitetails, which we might as well address here while we’re on the subject. Some people commented that non-typicals in the game look “farmed” or, as some of you call them, “freaks”, and also pointed out that there is far less likelihood of meeting one in real life than there is in the EHR. Peter already touched on this in his release notes for non-typicals: “The antler system is one of the most complicated features in theHunter. In order to improve the production value (how much time and money something costs to implement) we’ve made an effort to slightly simplify the system that we use for handling non-typical antlers and have come up with a solution that made all this possible.“ So, to reiterate, we had to make a simpler type of antler for the non-typical variation, to make non-typicals a reality in theHunter. If we were to make a completely randomized (and TruRacs-based) system for them, it would have taken us a year or so to implement and most likely, it would never have become a reality for that particular reason. This is pretty extensive work for a feature that few players will ever see. So, the non-typical racks are a compromise but we think it’s better this than nothing.

We’ve also consulted Larry Weishuhn, a.k.a. “Mr. Whitetail”, who is a friend of our support manager David Lucas (NAOutdoors), regarding the non-typicals for Whitetails and he approved them, which is a good sign 😉

Now coming back to our Mule Deer, today we’re also releasing a special pack of missions, two focused on typical and one for non-typical Mulies. Since the latter is more difficult to come across, you’ll get a longer time to complete the set. And yes, those missions will be rewarded with special trophies, typical and non-typical – classy!

Help us pick the best reserve set-up

Before you head off to Logger’s Point in search of a non-typical Mule Deer, please swing by the forum and cast your vote in our best reserve set-up voting to make sure that the best of the best win.

On the photo – the notorious “hopping bear set-up” (outside of competition).

Looking for more translators

We’re once again throwing a call out there for volunteer translators to come aboard our 28-people strong localization team. Right now we are specifically seeking people with native levels of Danish, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, but if you would like to help us bring theHunter in any other language – get in touch! Our translators receive a specially designed T-Shirt (the one our Finnish translator Lapehunter and Polish translator Makaan are rocking in their trophy shots below) along with other perks.

And the last but not least, our backend guy Emil has made some speed improvements for the skills and achievement pages, so they should load faster now, and the skills are now arranged in alphabetical order (which you may have probably noticed).

See you in the woods of the EHR!

Happy hunting!

Discussion