Diary of a Hunter – Opening
The Hunter is a free-to-play (f2p) online hunting simulator that is more than just a game. It’s the most realistic hunting game to date with mind-blowing graphics and sound. With a strong user base of 500,000 players, The Hunter should be your first choice in hunting games.
Diary of a Hunter is one hunter’s experience in the wild. It will be an on-going diary that will have weekly/monthly updates with personal in-game journal entries, patch notes, updates, and other material dedicated to TheHunter.com.
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| Welcome to this week’s Status Update!
Yesterday we released the game update featuring the revised Whitehart Island and we also made the switch between Logger’s Point and Whitehart Island as the hunting ground for Guest players. Unfortunately the deployment of the server update required for this was not so smooth and we had to take disable logins while we restored data from a backup. The source of this was no bug or error, just a simple mistake that appeared to be too easy to miss. Our takeaway of this is that we to have a look at our deployment process to avoid something like this happening again, but also to make sure we can recover more quickly in case something bad happens (something bad will always happen, sooner or later). The upside is that the recovery was a lot smoother than what would have been possible half a year ago due to improvements we’ve done in this area. Any purchases made that was lost are now back. So any memberships or bought em$ is added to accounts. theHunter in Retail Something we’ve always believed in is that a key channel to market the game and attract new users are through retail stores. I’m very pleased to announce that this is exactly what we are working on right now! We are working with local partners per territory to ensure local presence in terms of marketing, the best distribution and an offer suitable for the particular market considering everything from content to price. Starting early September theHunter will be available to purchase in stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We are also finalizing the terms of the partnership to do the same in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. We are exploring other territories as well and have discussions with several potential partners, but nothing we can announce just yet. For the Germany speaking territory we will also localize the game and offer it translated to German, as well as partner with a German weapon manufacturer. Overall, this is truly very exciting and will result in a huge boost in of new members, which in turn mean we can do even more in terms of development. I would also like to emphasize (I can see this question coming ;)) that what will be sold in retail boxes is essentially a special membership package, with number of months and a range of in-game items. The full installer download will be on a DVD and a manual included, but beside that it is exactly the same game with players playing of thehunter.com. We really want to have a stable and polished version for the retail push so we will put an extra effort into making the install, launcher and patching process as failsafe and easy as possible. The other thing is that we are working on enabling localization of the game client, game server, web and launcher. Moose, Antlers and Crossbow We also have the moose, TruRACS antler system (only used by the moose at this time) and the crossbow in development. The final release of this is planned to 27th of June. Yet again we want to get this out well ahead of the retail release to be able to have it run live for quite some time, to allow us to polish and fix any potential issues. Moose is by far the hardest species to do the random antler system on, due to it’s palm/disc shaped antlers, but stuff is starting to look good and we plan to later release a couple of videos to illustrate the way the antler system works in terms of flexibility and possible variations. Till next week, happy hunting! |
