Hi there hunters,

Another Thursday, another status update. Some things never change 🙂

Shooting rest in town!

Today we released a game patch with a brand new feature – a Shooting Tripod Rest. A “shooting stick” has been a popular request in our Thoughts and Suggestions forum, probably since the very beginning of the game and understandably so, as weapon wobble is the main culprit behind those questionable shots. In the past we had some doubts about introducing this pretty powerful feature to theHunter, taken into account our skill system as well as already existing world items which offer significant wobble reduction. Nevertheless, we felt that there was a place in our game for a more portable and lightweight, well, stick-thingy that you can carry around and use with the majority of your weapons on the fly, especially on terrain where long grass or bushery doesn’t allow for going prone to take that perfect shot.

We went for the tripod version due to some technical obstacles with the one-legged tool and after many hours of coding, animating, testing and tweaking we are proud to present the result and are curious to hear your field reports. This nifty piece of equipment works as a world item, so you can put it out and dismantle similarly to tents etc. As with any other world items, only hosts can place them in Multiplayer games (but guests can of course use the host’s shooting rests) and we will be investigating the possibility for guests to place their equipment too (no promises yet, but I will keep you in the loop on our progress, if any).

Shooting tripod rests will temporarily add +7 to the skill of the weapon being used. For weapons that are already leveled to skill level 13 and higher, it will add additional wobble reduction beyond what you can expect at skill level 20.

You can check the tripod rest in action in this video that HooCairs kindly made for us in the beta environment during the last stages of our testing:

If you are looking to test the new toy, make sure to activate the special Deer Sniper competition beforehand, to give your tests more fun and purpose!

Valentine’s Event

Next week on Monday we are starting our traditional Valentine’s Event that will last for one week and will be filled with daily competitions, nice prizes and who knows, maybe an astray mission or a sale will also sneak in. Make sure to check back to our communication channels on Monday so as not to miss the most hearty hunting event of the year 🙂

Some of you might have noticed that the Valentine’s competitions were inadvertently released over last weekend. This was of course unintentional, they were untested and sneaked onto live by mistake and we sincerely apologize to those of you who lost time participating. By the time we discovered the mistake it was too late to remove them as it would have caused serious game problems to the people already enrolled, so we decided to let them run their course to the end. We tried to compensate those of you who lost their (incorrect) trophies and who have contacted us, but I hope that your time won’t be wasted any way, since you can see it as getting an extra weekend of practicing 😉 We will of course make sure that this won’t happen in the future.

Concerns about future

With the release of theHunter: Call of the Wild less than a week away, many of you have been holding your breath in anticipation but there are also many who expressed concerns about what it will mean for the future of theHunter Classic. We had a good discussion about this in the forum the other day, and I would like to reiterate my reply, addressing those concerns here again, for those who might have missed it:

This is a really good question [how can you be sure that theHunter Classic will have resources to continue developing and maintaining the game if people would leave for theHunter: Call of the Wild?] and definitely the one I’ve heard a lot in the last couple of months. I am confident that theHunter Classic will continue to stay relevant and attractive to the community for years to come, alongside our bigger (or, in some respects, smaller) brother, theHunter: Call of the Wild. The reason is that we offer different hunting experience with a deeper gameplay and around-gameplay features, significantly more content, established and passionate community that has time and money invested into the game and strong personal bonds with each other. After 9 years (8 years of live operations + development) theHunter Classic is bigger than a game, at least for many of us.

Another thing is that we have an exciting roadmap ahead including some things that we have never done before, and the team is on fire.

Yet another thing is that theHunter: Call of the Wild simply has very much higher system requirements, which are too high for a large percentage of our community. Sure, some people will leave for theHunter: Call of the Wild, some people will play both games, some people will stick to theHunter Classic. But all in all, I don’t see any real danger or serious competition for theHunter Classic in the long run. I’ll say it again, both games are supposed to complement each other, not compete with each other.

… and one for the road

I wanted to share with you another sneak peak of the upcoming feature we’ve been working hard on recently. Premium trophy shot poses! You will soon be able to use these to showcase your trophies and weapons in a more classy way. This is just one of many, the work is ongoing and we’ll keep you posted when they are ready for your EHR adventures!

And on that note, I wish you a nice hunting weekend and hope to see you next week!

Happy hunting!

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