Magic hour as the sun rises

I check the Huntermate in my hands—it’s 6:45AM. I shouldered my rifle and left the hunting lodge nearly two hours ago.  I’ve heard the deer around me, moving softly, but I haven’t seen a single one—yet.

I admit it; I’m a rookie at hunting. I had shot at the outline of a deer hidden in fog before I’d walked two dozen paces from the lodge.  It didn’t move an inch, and when I examined it closer I took comfort that the metal sign was riddled and dented from all the bullets it had survived.  I guess I wasn’t the first to make that mistake.

Despite the quick shower of morning rain the fog had burned off nicely, visibility was good and the sun was beautiful as it rose glowing through the trees.  As I walked I lost myself in the forest, almost forgetting I was here hunting for prey until my Huntermate beeped, letting me know it hadn’t forgotten we were there to hunt.  The Huntermate had heard the sound of a deer and it marked the general location on the GPS where the sound had come from.

I began heading the direction indicated until I saw a soft red glow on the ground and I abruptly realized that I had been completely immersed in a video game for the last two hours.

This red glow indicates areas where you can find tracking clues like scat or hoof prints and it’s an effective but subtle mechanic for making these vital clues possible to find in the dense 3D forests of this huge open world.

The dedication to realism is one of the things that really makes game unique and special from nearly anything else I’ve ever played.  Where it still makes some compromises in terms of accessibility it ultimately stays true to the core experience and nature of hunting in the wild.

The first thing you realize when you begin playing The Hunter is that it has nothing in common with the other hunting games you’ve seen as you pass through the game aisles at stores like Walmart.  What makes this game so interesting is that it has no hesitation breaking the gaming conventions we take for granted and consequently confining itself to a gaming niche that definitely isn’t for everyone.

Those who are looking for a game with fast action, AWP sniper rifles and animal head shots should look elsewhere because The Hunter has none of those things.  You can spend hours walking through the forest looking for signs of deer before your Huntermate—a GPS deer tracking tool on steroids—picks up a single sign of the deer traveling around the island hunting reserve you’re walking.

Good luck finding this kind of opportunity

As gamers we expect instant gratification, especially in first-person-shooters (which The Hunter might technically be described as).  If I’m playing a LAN game of F.E.A.R or Team Fortress 2 with friends, something’s very wrong if I haven’t killed or been killed for more then 15-30 seconds.  Yet here I am hours into a hike across some of the most beautiful forest game environments I’ve ever seen and not once have I had a deer lined up in my crosshairs.  For many gamers this may be infuriatingly slow, tedious and boring yet I find it beautiful, peaceful and extraordinarily immersive.

The process of successfully killing a deer is as follows:  As you leave the hunting lodge you pull out your Huntermate which picks up the sounds of deer in the forest around you.  As you wander through the environment you try to find the area where the noises are louder until you get close enough that the Huntermate chirps at you and places a large circle on your GPS around the rough area where the deer currently is.  Now you’ve begun tracking your prey and you move forward looking for clues left by the deer to examine so that your Huntermate can mark down information such as how fast the deer is moving or which direction it’s going.  You may find the deer quickly or the deer might veer off to the left or the right and you’ll have to continue searching for tracks of where the deer is now headed.

Once you’ve seen the deer, pull out your rifle and sneak up as close as you can without scaring it.  Take aim and wait for your crosshairs to float over the animal—then fire.  Even if you hit the deer your work isn’t necessarily done, since your shot probably only wounded it. By the time you’ve reloaded your prey has disappeared into fog and bushes around you.  Now there’s more tracking to be done, but if you did hit your target it will be leaving blood which will help you follow its trail more easily.  On my last kill it took me a little under thirty minutes and a mile hike to find the deer on the beach; dead from the bullet in its thigh.

Now for my next surprise—as I approached the dead animal I started to feel a little sad.  It’s only a fake animal and I’m cynical and extremely desensitized but I was so immersed in the game that it felt a little bit real.  I think this is the point that I finally confirmed that I’ll never be a big game hunter. I’ve always wanted to hunt but I’ve also always wondered if I could do it—pull the trigger and kill one of these majestic animals in the peace of their own home.  I don’t think so and that’s precisely why The Hunter is so engaging.

However, not all of the game conventions The Hunter breaks are good ones.  The barrier to entry for the game is a bit high, starting with their confusing site, extending to their circa 1999 RPG character customization and lack of any in-game tutorial, not to mention poor documentation.

Installation and game launching is particularly frustrating.  To install the game you’ll need to find the ‘Go Hunting’ page and click the ‘Install the Game’ link.  This will begin downloading and installing the Emote Launcher which will then download the game in a similar way to Steam or Stardock’s Impulse does.  The launcher default to is to use a torrent downloader but you can change it to a direct download if you’d prefer.  All done?  Great, let’s launch the game.  Hmmm, no Emote Launcher in the Start Menu, no ‘The Hunter’ desktop shortcut either.  You can find the executable in your Program Files but launching it that way just tells you that you need to launch the game from The Hunter website.

If you’re offline you’re out of luck here but the site is an okay way to launch the game and you can choose from different starting places and time of day you’d like it to be when you begin the game.  The cool thing about this is that it adds a strong social component with stats, characters, quests and direct messaging to what is otherwise an exclusively single-player game.

The downside is that if, say, the Emote Launcher crashes when you start it because the port it wants to use is stealthed by a firewall or your ISP and you can’t open it, you’re DOA.  While their support is prompt and helpful they may not be able to fix your problem and there’s no way to launch the game manually—a problem I ran into when I tried to run it from one of my fast 3D workstations I manage at work.

Another odd thing is that you have to adjust your settings before the game is launched. You can choose your resolution and some graphics options while any other settings; volume, brightness, mouse sensitivity simple don’t exist.  This is a problem too because the mouse is slow and floaty for me.  I compensated by turning up my Logitech G7’s sensitivity in-game but nothing helped the how floaty the mouse was.  Once you play a bit, it stops bothering you. You don’t need lighting fast moves and needlepoint precision in this game anyway.

The other annoyance is that if you do want to change your resolution or graphics settings you’ll need to quit the game, go back to your browser, refresh the Go Hunting page, launch the game from the site and then change your settings.  Not exactly fast or friendly.

A peaceful end.

Right now the game is free to play and the development for it is still pretty early. I expect it’s going to become much more polished with more time.  With the bar set so high by the quality of the environments (which rival any other modern game by a big publisher) I have high hopes that the rest of the game just needs a little more time.  In the meantime though, you can upgrade to 3-12 month memberships starting at $14.99 for the three month option that will allow you to hunt more types of animals and give you more guns and unlimited ammo for as long as you’re a member.   Otherwise you’ll be embracing the micro-transaction model when you need to fill up on ammo or buy new gear.

While the game still has some clear flaws to overcome I’m very impressed by The Hunter and I think it’s a really interesting game to play right now as well as one to keep on the radar as it improves.  Since the basic game is free to play there’s no reason not to jump in—assuming you don’t have any technical problems—and give it a try.  If nothing else, walking through such a beautiful forest with its wonderful sunlight, blowing trees, gentle rain showers and sublime forest sounds is a a wonderful way to escape your desk when you need a break and can’t go explore a real forest yourself.

Interested?  Go Hunting.