Hello Hunters,

Welcome to our status update and the biggest news of this week is that, finally…

We’re rolling out on Steam!

Some of you will probably not notice any difference, whereas die-hard Steam fans will rejoice, but we are very happy to be able to bring theHunter to more people and excited to see what this milestone means for us. On Monday we started a ”soft launch”, it means that we’ve been gradually adding new countries while monitoring our servers to make sure they’re coping with the sudden player increase.

If you’re located in one of the countries where we’ve already launched (most European countries at this very moment, but the list grows as we speak, so we’d recommend you to check now and then), you can now find theHunter in the Steam store, add it to your Library and start playing. The first time you start the game in Steam, you will get an option to create a new theHunter account or connect using a pre-exisiting one. Once your Steam and theHunter accounts have been connected, you won’t need to enter your login details again (when starting from Steam).

There have been some concerns expressed about what this change would bring to the game and how the ”Steam” version of theHunter would integrate with the ”old school” one. To put everyone at ease, there won’t be two different versions, all your account information will be automatically available on Steam and vice versa. When you start the game via Steam, you’ll be able to play exactly like you’re used to via the new launcher.

We’ll really appreciate if you find some time to support us and leave a review on Steam. To be able to do it, you need to have theHunter in your library and have played it for at least 5 minutes.

Outage this morning

Today, from approximately 5:00 CEST till 10:00 CEST, all our web-services were down. The downtime was caused by a hardware problem experienced by our service provider and thus was not related to the Steam launch. We apologize for this inconvenience and will add 1 extra day to all active memberships.

Bug fixing

Andrés, Danny and Robin devoted this week solely to bugs fixing, so for the last three days they have been trying to locate, reproduce and resolve bugs in game. The plan is to run such bug fixing weeks on a regular basis. However, please keep in mind that it can take the programmers up to a couple of days to find and reproduce one single bug, as it is for example the case with the “spinning” issue, which has been discussed a lot recently.

That’s all from us for today, make sure to check our update next week, as we’re going to announce a new event.

Happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

This week’s status update will be short, since we’ve been posting bits and pieces of news in-between: if you haven’t done it yet, make sure to check our product update about the release of the new launcher and the post regarding the incident with T-Rex banner images.

New policy regarding third party applications

Following the aforementioned incident, we’ve been taking additional steps to ensure our systems are completely secure. Security has become a top priority concern for Expansive Worlds. For this reason, we’re reinforcing our policy regarding third party applications that integrate in any way with, or pull data from our servers. From now on, all such apps, scripts and software (including forum signature widgets) must be pre-approved by Expansive Worlds. You can get in touch with us via support [at] thehunter [dot] com or send me a PM in the forum. If we discover an unauthorized app scraping our server data, we reserve the right to shut it down without prior warning.

Receiving official support

The developers have been receiving an increasing amount of support questions via private messages. Please understand that taking time to reply to them means the devs will spend less time on their immediate job responsibilities, which can be anything from designing a new reserve to troubleshooting a bug. For such issues we have an official support channel. If you need help or want to get in touch with us, please submit a ticket at support.thehunter.com or send an email to support [at] thehunter [dot] com. We do not provide support via forum private messages or social media channels, and we are kindly asking you to refrain from contacting developers or forum moderators with support queries.

Trophy competition

We’ve decided to extend the trophy competition for another week, since the amount of submissions was rather low this time. If for some reason you haven’t had a chance to get creative yet, you have time until June 5th, 23:58 CEST.

Until next week, happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

Today’s status update is longer than usual, but brimming with news, enjoy!

Trailer competition – Winners

All team members watched and evaluated the trailers submitted to the community competition and picked their favourites. The race for the first place was neck-to-neck, and the point difference was really tiny.  And the winners are:

1st place and 5000 em$ or a Pathfinder membership bundle go to Aruvyel for this luminous trailer:

2nd place and 3000 em$ or a Wayfarer membership bundle go to this epic creation by Nuubialainen:

3rd place and 1000 em$ go to ColoradoKid, he is also the winner in the nomination “The coolest ending”:

We want to thank everyone who had taken time to create their trailers but didn’t make it to the victory stand, you’ve done a very impressive job: Rantanrave, jummpy, shotty420, fape19888, Chanelyn, Faran, The-Lakota

Another community competition for the best trophy concept is still ongoing, it might be your chance to win bushels of fame and glory alongside some em$.

New member of the art team

This week we welcomed a new intern on board. His name is Marcus and he will be working with Peter, Tomas and Oskar on the graphical side of theHunter. Read his intro below and give him a nice welcome.

In 2011 I was accepted to a super fun gamedev school in Falun, Sweden, as a graphic artist. Two years later I moved to Stockholm to work for DICE as a 3D intern at Battlefield 4. Shooters have always been a big part of my gaming life and, since I am also fond of nature, I think I will enjoy my time here at Expansive Worlds, helping the team to develop already fantastic hunting experience!

Björn’s answers

Our game designer Björn has posted replies to the questions in his AMA, in which he revealed some hints about the future of theHunter, the most frustrating aspect of his work, which language the theHunter code is commented in, and lots of other curious things. If you want to get a better insight at the very bottom of the theHunter iceberg, give Björn’s post a read – it’s totally worth it.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits!”

… you’ll be able to say very soon. As most of you correctly deduced from our “sneak peek” picture in the last week’s status update, the18th and by far the cutest species in theHunter yet will be the rabbit, and namely the Cottontail Rabbit. Probably the biggest cottontail novelty is that it is going to be the second species you can hunt for free, alongside the Mule Deer. The release will be announced soon, until then here are some screenshots to bring you into the “wabbit” frame of mind:

Happy hunting!

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