Game Update

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Features

* Tripod Stand – A new medium height tower that can be placed almost anywhere is now available for purchase at Doc’s Outfitters. Check out this wiki entry for a comparison with other stands: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Hunting_Stands
* New tracking abilities – A number of new abilities have been added to the tracking skill. Check out this wiki entry for more information: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Tracking_Skill
* New spotting abilities – A number of new abilities have been added to the spotting skill. Check out this wiki entry for more information: https://www.thehunterwiki.com/index.php?title=Spotting_Skill
* Weight vs. Score decoupling – The correlation between weight and score is now weaker among species where weight is not part of the score. The strength of the correlation vary with species. Unchanged correlation: Coyote, Turkey, Feral Hog, Wild Boar. Medium correlation: Black Bear, Pheasant. Weak correlation – All Deer.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed a bug where the Muzzleloader cap was visible after weapon change, if you were aiming the weapon at the time of the change.
* Bushes and flowers are now removed from a wider area around animals when in trophy shot mode (grass is not affected).
* Weapon reloading is now cancelled when entering ground blinds, tree stands, towers and when accessing the menu, inventory and full screen map.

Server updates

* Competition join fix – You can no longer join a competition in the middle of a hunt, instead you must join a competition before you start a hunt in order for the kills in that hunt to register for the competition.
* Added Hunterscore leaderboard

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Help us improve theHunter

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We have created a user survey that we hope you, the community, are interested in helping us complete. The reason for this survey is so we can learn a bit more about you, as a group, and what you want. The information you provide will not be stored with your account details, so we will not be able to track your answers back to you.

The answers you provide will, together with your suggestions in the forums, guide us in the right direction for further development of theHunter.

The survey is now closed!

Thanks to all of you who helped us out by completing the survey!

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Status Update

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It’s Wednesday and time for the weekly update.

The past week has been a lot about on-boarding Pim, Herman and Christoffer, Expansive Worlds newest additions. All three of them are getting up to speed quickly.

We have, of course, also been busy preparing for this weeks update that will take place tomorrow. The update will not be big news to you since we’ve described both the Tripod and new skills system for tracking and spotting in previous status updates. But we are excited about getting your reactions and feedback on both of these new features.

For those that are interested in the details of the new spotting and tracking system more information can be found here:

A comparison between the Treestand, Groundblind and Tripod Stand has also been created here:

We´ve also started working on a holiday campaign that will be on during the whole of December, featuring events, sales and more. This campaign will be our biggest one to date and we hope you will like it.

Happy hunting!

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Changing roles

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As mentioned in the status update earlier this week, we have had some new people joined us lately, one of which is still to be announced officially – this person is Pim Holfve, who as of yesterday joined the team as new CEO, taking over after me. But don’t worry – I’m not leaving – I merely change my role to CTO of Expansive Worlds, to focus solely on, what I do best, the technical development of theHunter. In turn this means that going forward there will be more time and resources available for development of new game features, improvements, web, infrastructure, and other technical goals we want to achieve.

As for the CEO role, I leave it in Pim’s much capable hands. Read more about Pim in his introduction post here.

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Meet Pim

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Sorry for the late introduction, but I wanted to get to know the game a bit better before introducing myself to you, but since the news is out in the forum here comes a proper intro.

My name is Pim Holfve and I’m the new CEO for Expansive Worlds. As I’m sure you can all understand, this is something I’m very excited about, since I feel that It’s a true privilege to be part of the fantastic team that has created such a great experience that TheHunter is today.

What I really like about Expansive Worlds is the development process. The team listening closely to you, the community. You guys guiding us in the right direction. It is quite obvious that this is a great way to work. And I want to make it clear that I have no intentions to change this in any way.

So who am I? I’m a 38 year old married father of two kids who live in the forest outside of Stockholm. I’ve been working withing the games industry for the past 7 years and I’m truly passionate about game development. Prior to joining Expansive Worlds I worked at Easy Studios as Producer for Battlefield Heroes and before that I built up the Game Studio at King.com as Game Studio Director. I learned a lot from both those studios and hopefully I can bring that knowledge to TheHunter to give you a better experience and also grow TheHunter.

So what can I say more about myself? Long time ago my plan was to become a professional hockey player, but when that didn’t happen, due to lack of skills and broken knees, I set out to be an graphic artist instead. While studying art I started programming to be able to create multimedia pieces and this lead me to start creating games, since games always have been a passion of mine. But it wasn’t until much later, after many years within advertising and marketing, I actually ended up in the games industry.
I love outdoor activities such as skiing and cycling, but according to my kids I spend way to much time talking about my bikes instead of riding them. Not sure if that is true, but I try to keep the talk to a minimum at home.
Even though I come from a family of hunters I don’t hunt myself (yet), but I greatly appreciate shooting and I’m pretty good at killing clay pigeons with a shootgun, so I try to spend as much time as possible at the shooting range.

So what is my plan now? Firstly I need to get to know the team, the product and the community better. The first two are easy, but the third will mean that I’ll be lurking in the forums to see what you have to say. I don’t plan to do any big changes, the team has, under Roberts excellent leadership, set up a great road map for TheHunter, and I see no need to change that. Initially I will be quite invisible to you, since I have a lot to learn, but as I get warmed up you’ll see and hear more from me.

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Status Update

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It’s wednesday again and time for this week’s status update.

We are quite busy right now with finalizing the Tripod as well as the development of the new skills system for tracking and spotting that was announced, fairly detailed, in the last status update. Both will be included in the next Game Update scheduled for release in next week!

New faces
We got some new faces on the team! Herman Nilsson joined us last week as Web Developer along with Christoffer Nyberg, Animator from our parent company Avalanche Studios, who will help us out for a period ahead. You will get to know both of them better later on in the Forums and in our Blog.
Also tomorrow a 3rd new person will join the team, but more info about that will be posted later this week.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

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It’s that time again!

Well, it was yesterday but we had to postpone because of personal related issues (the whole team went go-karting). Unfortunately no one thought to take a picture so you’ll have to take our word for it.

New Tracking & Spotting Abilities
Something that has been on the (in)famous TODO-list for a very long time now is to improve the skill system and therefore we are very pleased to announce that we are finally in a position where we can begin to tackle this.

There are many flaws with the current system including transparency (it’s unclear to the player how xp is earned and what the benefit of it is), xp being rewarded for the wrong things (shooting an animal multiple times gives more xp than a clean kill) and a general lack of a sense of progression.

What we are currently working on is the progression problem. By introducing a new set of unlockable abilities for tracking and spotting we hope that players will begin to feel that gaining levels actually do something.

For spotting this includes:

  • Random weight information that gets more accurate at higher levels
  • Random score information that gets more accurate at higher levels

And for tracking:

  • Random weight information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random track age information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random animal health information for blood tracks

In contrast to most of our current skill benefits these abilities will not increase incrementally with each level, but instead make larger jumps at specific levels. For instance you may unlock weight information with an accuracy of 20% at level 5 and then jump straight to 40% at level 10. The idea behind this is to make progression more noticeable, it also allows for more variation at each level since we can have, for instance, gender at level 6, weight at level 8 and weight at level 10.

Another cool thing specific to the tracking abilities is that we can now specify the track-types for which an ability works with at a specific level. For instance we can have weight information at level 5 from footprints only and then make it available for all track-types at level 10.

Once we getting ready to release this update we will post more specific information on what each ability does and at which level it is unlocked in the wiki. This will also include frequently requested information about current abilities and incremental improvements already available in the game.

This, however, is only a temporary solution to the transparency problem since we also plan to revamp the skill page attached to your player profile. The idea is to display both your current progression and information about what each level do in the same place. Imagine something similar to the achievement page.

That’s it for now, happy hunting!

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Say hello to my little friend!

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YES! Finally, yesterday was payday after my recent fishing antics, catching pretty much nothing but plants and algae. Last weekend I lost a really nice hook in a silly attempt at fishing in completly worthless conditions, and the week before that I sprained an ankle as me and Andres made a little trip in the woods. I was out by myself, getting hungry and at the final stop of the day. At the bottom of a big cliff I had climbed down, feeling sort of like a failure. Then this one took a bite on my hook!

Elegant. Swedish fish equivalent to JAS 39 Gripen! The width of the hoop is about 60 cm.

It´s pretty much my first catch ever, and before I had no idea how it actually feel to have one firmly on the hook. Now I do! On my fifth or sixth throw I felt the rod twitching, so I held off a little on the reel, and a second later it was literally screaming. I quickly tightened the let-off a little (or reel-brake of whatever it´s called) and realised it was something p r e t t y big on the other end. I had read up on the lake I was fishing in and suspected it was a pike. And she put put up one hell of a fight, it was probably a female as I’ve read that male pikes don´t get this big. I was more or less sweating after a few minutes when I started seeing huge marks coming up on the surface. I also had my polarizing shades so I could see down into the water a bit. She pulled really hard at times and every time the reel started screaming I only recall thinking something like “nonononononoooo, please, you´re not that big!”. I quickly caught up with what technique to use though, carefully catching up the line after each “round” and simply holding still or letting go a little as she pulled. After a while though there was no question about what it was as I got it up to the surface. I was standing there for a moment, somewhat confused and stressed out, just holding the rod and staring at it before getting the hoop. I was really surprised about how much the fish weighted as I lifted it out of the water. I can´t say how much, but it was heavy. Getting the hook out was a little tricky as two of the three hooks was firmly lodged in the outer edge of the lower jaw, and when I  finally got it out it was all bent. Before getting the hook out I also had to mess around a with getting the jaw-opener firmly in place as I didn’t exactly feel like sticking my hand into the mouth as there was a huge amount of teeth in there. I was also really surprised about how hard it bite down at times.

The hook I used, not a big one but apparently interesting enough.

For a moment I thought about killing and cooking it, but in the end I concluded that it was larger than what I was allowed to bring with me. I really felt I had gotten enough satisfaction out of catching it though, and she proved to be such a respectable opponent (this day) so I let her back into the water. Afterwards I was almost shaking as I just had the biggest adrenaline rush in a long time. I walked back home, wearing a silly smile on my face the rest of the day.
And last but not least, I now have the office fishing record, BAM!
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Status Update

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It’s Wednesday again and time for this week’s status update. Among other things we´re doing some “under the hood” work in places which unfourtunately make the status updates somewhat shorter.

New patch will be released later this week with some bugfixes – fix for animals not dropping clues after some time and shotgun sound fix.

Blacktail TruRacs improvements
Just like with the Mule Deer improvements that came with the last game update, we will soon start to work on a new larger antler model for the Blacktail to push it’s visuals closer to the actual scores too.

New reserve
Preliminary work has also been started on the next hunting reserve. At the moment things are in the evaluation stage where we are trying to ensure that we can actually reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves. This involves trying out some new types of vegetation and other work that we haven´t really done before. We hope that this one should offer something quite new once released, and also correspond to community wishes. We can also say that it is not an African environment we´re making, and for reasons we will get into later on (although an African reserve is not as far away into the future anymore as we have previously stated). This is also a very early announcement and work will be done in several steps with some other things in between until the release which is at the moment roughly scheduled for March next year.

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