[Skybird]

I have taken the offer of the 2018 edition of COTW and embarked on the PC-version of the game as well. There are six (!) reserves now, and 39 (!) species, only 3 of them being waterfowl, which I welcome, I do not like this aspected of The Hunter, bird hunting, I find it boring.

There is good and not so good to report. The good stuff first: the game looks much better on PC than on PS4, and I must say especially the latest new reserves are works of breathtaking beauty. Considering that there is full night-and-day-cycle (the ingame time passes at factor 4) and many different weather and cloud situations, you are in for endless marvel and surprise. The reserves are huge, really huge, they are squares of 128 km2, means 11.3x11.3 km in size. The diversity in biomes and landscape is huge. We now have Africa, Patagonia, Alaska, American North-West, Central Europe/Germany, and Russian Tundra/Polar Circle. Each reserve offers different areas as well, not separated artifically like in many other sandbox games, but naturally blending into each other.

I have learned to really like the gameplay. Some of the species, pack predators as well as huge lone ranger type of animals, can turn aggresisve - and I mean really aggressive - I got chased by a pack of wolves because they were annoyed by the noise from my ATV... Sometimes, this behaviour can turn buggy, then I got chased by three water buffalos across half the map, again on ATV, and when I fled into a lodge, they broke into the house and there finished me off. I assume this is due to the aTV, but the ATV usually does not get used anymore once all watchtowers have been visited and all lodges and POIs have been revealed by doing so, at least i do not use ATVs after that anymore. The lack of the statistics stuff of Classic is no loss for me, I never cared for it, and I do not care for it here, I even have not installed the TrueRack addon, which would be free, because some say it is prone for bugs and technical issues.

And that leads to the not so good side of the game: there are bugs. Some are Steam-related and could be avoided by deactivating Steam Overlay, maybe also avoiding MP (I have not tried MP a single time). The studio does a terribly awful job in communicating with the community, and does not document these things nor issues warnings and help. Also, occasionally there are crashes in mid-game. Rarely, I must say, its not that often that it would stop me from playing, but more often than I am used to in other games these years.

If the interest for the beauty and the concept of the game exists, i nevertheless recommend to try this game, and also to invest into the new reserve DLCs, they are just too beautiful (and very typical for the landscape they got modelled after). The sounds of nature, the wind and leaves and water and all that, are superb. You can get lost in just wandering around in this huge, huge wild laid out before your eyes. Atmosphere, mood, immersion are words written in capital letters here, in bold, in signal-red. While the bug situation is a fact, I would no longer call it game-killing. A famous bug there was that made savegames unusable after some time. Well, not few people have met it, but the developer says it has been tackled in one of the recent patches, and most people seem to not get hit by it. I store away copies of save games to be safe, and have deactivated Steam autosynchronization. Probably nVidia Experience also should not be used, but that software, despite the good intention, proved to be such a problem maker for me on my old rig that on the new one I did not even install it again.

I recommend the 2019 edition, which gives you the African Savanna and Russian Tundra plus some very good equipment. In Germany, it saves you an awesome lot of money, too. When I bought it via Amazon, I must have saved around 50% of the total costs of all incldued items if I would have bought them individually and in a Steam sale.

There are no microtransactions with real money, you only buy reserve DLCs, and eventually equipment+weapon DLCs, most that I have - they are limite din numbers anyway - came with the 2019 edition. Classic now is fully free to play, its now gone microtransaction system was its biggest target drawing criticism. Its not existent in COTW, you use only ingame toy-currency to pay for your equipment and ammo. A very nice design, I must say.

A beautiful, a very beautiful game.


P.S. I forgot to mention the immense rendering distance for animals now. I have spotted animals at distances of up to almost 500 meters and without any height advantages. More range than you could wish for! The maximum is tied to the scenery complexity option that you choose. 500m I read is indeed the maximum.