Ahoy all you good hunters, time for our weekly status update!
Polar Bear post mortem
We’ll start with the Polar Bear which we released earlier this week in a huntable mode. A common sentiment which we’ve gathered from many recent forum posts has been disappointment, since you got the impression that we didn’t listen to your feedback during the open beta by releasing it with hunting restrictions. To address this, we did listen very closely to your feedback and a lot of changes and tweaks were made solely based on your feedback (such as the bear fur colour). However, the final decision on the game design itself was taken long before open beta. We didn’t have room for any major changes in this respect and we should have been more clear about this, our bad! The event-based game design for Polar Bears has been the result of many a discussion and we of course have taken into consideration arguments that we see being brought up on the forum, theHunter being a hunting game and all. Community feedback and input has always been one of the main driving forces behind every single decision we take, but, naturally, it’s not the only important criterion we have to take into account as a company, there are a number of different factors that we need to weigh against each other.
Regarding the achievements and leaderboards many of you were asking about, we’ve decided to remove them in line with the underlying concept of the Polar Bear game design. It’s the first species in theHunter with which we are taking a step away from the sport, or trophy, style of hunting. The way the Polar Bear is intended to be hunted in the game is rather a population control style, and we don’t see achievements and leaderboards fitting into this. We understand and respect the fact that this way of hunting will not be for everyone, but our game is as diverse as our community, there are various ways to play it and we hope that everyone can find something to their liking.
If you haven’t had a chance to go on your first Polar Bear adventure yet, check out this new video by HooCairs to know what it’s like:
Update on game crashes
If you read our game update from the 1st of March, you saw the mysterious crash reporter note. Now, what it means is that we developed a more advanced and sophisticated software that allows us to collect better data quicker and therefore take a deeper look into game crashes. Since the crash reporter introduction, we’ve already found and fixed two game crashes (these will be included in the next patch). However, the most common one, that usually happens after quite some time playing the game, is still being looked into. It’s deeply rooted into our code and it’s going to take a while to get to the bottom of it. Alt+tab’ing the game significantly increases the chances of a crash, so if you want to stay on the safe side, try to minimize your alt-tab’ing when playing (or make sure to harvest all your downed animals before doing it). Hopefully this temporary solution will reduce the amount of crashes you experience while we continue working on the fix.
New forum and wiki
As we’ve mentioned a couple of times before, we’re in the process of moving the rest of our infrastructure to Google App Engine (the main game server move happened over one and half year ago, you can refresh your memories here). We’ve already moved our launcher and patching process (which will result in much faster and more pain-free downloads of the game and patches). Right now our hard working Wiki team is moving our precious well of theHunter knowledge onto its new place (more on this next week) and Calle is working his magic on the forum. As a part of this move, our good ol’ forum has received some much needed love, in form of a face-lift and improved user experience. We’ll be migrating onto the new forum within the coming weeks, and we’ll of course keep you in the loop. Here is the sneak peek screen of the new forum theme (still work in progress), stylized by our community member caledonianblues, together with our artist Marcus and backend dev Calle. Click to enlarge.
Desktop view
Mobile view
Winners of the game design contest
The community game design event has been a huge success with a whopping amount of entries (you can find all the numbers here). Daniel and myself have spent long hours going through your submission and we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of many designs, having said that we’ve also received a fair share of amusing ones (my favourite has been a mission objective to harvest a mutant Snowshoe Hare killed with a .22 Pistol with tranquilizer adapter). But the votes are in and winners are:
- Bison missions – Villkatta, for the unique historical touch
- Bison competitions – Ash1302, for the variety and staying true to existing competitions
- Snowshoe Hare missions – Bengalis17, for all the science
- Snowshoe Hare competitions – Bosloe, for keeping it short and sweet
- Arctic Fox missions – Waiora, for the meticulously pedagogical approach
- Arctic Fox competitions – Waiora again, *this guy is just too good*
- Sitka Deer missions – Mills, for a good story in the style of existing missions
- Sitka Deer competitions – Zack775, for good variety and sane approach
Bonus winner:
- Whiterime Ridge travel missions – Hardtree
Congratulations guys, you can be really proud of yourselves! You can find the winning designs here and we are starting to work on incorporating the first packs into theHunter.
All in all, the engagement in this contest has been amazing, and so was the quality! We are really impressed and are planning to do similar events in the future.
End of support for Windows XP and Vista
A reminder, as of yesterday, we no longer support outdated operating systems Windows XP and Vista. If you run those systems and can’t play theHunter any more, we are offering you a refund or membership transfer. You can find all the details in this announcement.
That’s it from us for today.
Happy hunting!
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