Greetings, hunters!
A lot has happened since the last Hunter log so let’s address that! This time, we will cover the 1.23 update, your thoughts on some of its changes, an upcoming patch, lingering issues, and what the dev team has been up to in recent weeks. Without further ado…
What’s new
After a bit of a wait and a brief stint on Steam’s development branch, we finally released update 1.23 on Steam, EGS, GOG, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S! Since the release two weeks ago, we have been following your feedback very closely and it was a joy to see you find your first albino bison and populate a bunch of brand-new taxidermy stands.
1.23 was jam-packed with gameplay tweaks, quality-of-life changes, and additions that were either inspired by, or directly pulled from community feedback - such as an ambient audio volume slider, rare fur identifier in the claim screen, new sound effects for traversing water, and many more. In case you missed them in the deluge that were the 1.23 patch notes, here are a few of our favorite sleeper hits:
Herds will no longer spook if one of its animals is called far enough and shot with a crossbow,
Daily animal cycles were tweaked per species to make them overlap less, and no longer crowd popular drinking spots,
Lowered the rotation speed of crossbow arrows in the Bullet camera,
Improved camera while traversing steep terrain in prone,
Animal calls can be heard (and seen in Hunter sense) from further away.
How you’ve been
Let’s stay with that last bullet point for a while longer – we have seen that the change to animal call distance has been a little contentious. Although we are confident that this change significantly improves the gameplay experience for the majority of players, we also recognize that this change is not popular with those of you who were used to the way things were.
We are quite convinced that a change like this was essential to alleviate the frustration of many players who were spooking animals unintentionally while traveling, and to enhance the liveliness of the maps. We were very heartened by a lot of your feedback saying that the change has accomplished exactly that.
We also recognize that the more populated areas of the map can get too busy with animal calls to the liking of those of you who enjoy more tranquil hunts. Because of that, we are exploring options for further tweaks on higher difficulties to bring animal calls closer to what you were used to. Please stay tuned for more information in the not-too-distant future.
And before we hand it over to a few very dedicated content creators – yes, female bison taxidermy stands are on the way!
Community creations
For this Hunting log, we’ve picked two videos that may be mighty helpful to those of you in need of some tips and tricks. Give it up for HUNTgaming and Bumblewoot:
By PiRadiusz (Steam)
By Geges Obecny (Facebook)
By Adzima Martin (Facebook)
By Tomas Vaclavik (Facebook)
What’s next
These days, we are hard at work on a patch for a few issues brought about by the 1.23 update that we wish to remedy as soon as possible. Though we are not able to give you an exact ETA, it won’t be too long before we deliver fixes to some of the most burning issues, namely:
Occasional sudden and loud static noise on console versions of the game,
Volume of animal calls at longer distances,
Excessive reverb in certain animal calls,
Camera jerking on console versions of the game,
Wrong descriptions of objectives in various languages.
Lastly, some of you who are playing Way of the Hunter on PC have been reporting visual glitches and crashes due to compatibility issues with DirectX12. If you have been experiencing problems and we have not yet reached out to you with troubleshooting steps, please try launching the game with DirectX11 via these steps until we bring a permanent solution:
Steam: Go to your Library > Way of the Hunter > Properties > General, and find "Launch Options" at the bottom of the window. Enter "-dx11" without parentheses and launch the game.
Epic Games Store: Go to Settings in your Epic Games client, scroll all the way down and expand Way of the Hunter in the “Manage Games” category. Check “Additional Command Line Arguments”, enter “-dx11” without parentheses and launch the game.
GOG: In GOG Galaxy, right click Way of the Hunter > Manage Installation > Configure > Features, check “Custom executables / arguments” > Duplicate, enter “-dx11” without parentheses into “Arguments” line, check this one as “Default executable”, click OK, and launch the game.
What we have been up to
It’s still too early to talk about DLC2 but it’s been a busy few weeks at Nine Rocks Games in other ways as well.
We have won awards! Four of them, no less! Golden BiT Awards is a bi-annual celebration of Slovak video games and seeing the vibrant local scene and a great turnout at the event was nothing short of inspiring. We had the awesome privilege of accepting the following awards:
Best PC/Console Game,
Best Technology,
Player's Choice Award by Sector.sk,
Developers Choice: Best PC/Console Game.
One more thanks to everyone who attended, to the readers of Sector.sk, and to the Slovak Game Developers Association and Arcade Watch for making the award show happen. We also want to give a hearty shout-out and congratulations to other winners and runners-up.
Last but not least – another spring, another Game Access developer conference in Brno, Czech Republic! We would not miss it for the world, and we would want no one but our good friends from Ashborne Games to share a booth with. While they showed off an early build of their as-of-yet-unannounced project (keep your eyes peeled!), we had a lot of fun at our own demo stations, watching some hunters in action. And it wouldn’t be a developer conference without a few technical artists admiring the foliage and QA engineers brushing up on Unreal Engine 4 quirks!
We also thoroughly enjoyed lovingly dispensing several barrels worth of beer and Kofola in exchange for donations to the People in Need charity supporting the people of Ukraine. Here’s hoping we will not need to do too many more of these.
Thank you for caring about Way of the Hunter and if you have any thoughts to share, you know where to find us (and if you are not a fan of social platforms, drop us a line at info[at]ninerocksgames.com)
Good hunting!
On behalf of Nine Rocks Games,
Michal, Community Manager
By Tomas Vaclavik (Facebook)
