Similarly, hunters watch animals way more than they shoot them. “Instead of sitting in a tree waiting for three days maybe you wait 10 minutes, which is still a very long time in a videogame, but it gets across a similar feeling without it being too annoying,” says Öjlert. Even hunters don’t want to play the exact hunting experience on their PCs. And he needs to be, since about 60% of Classic’s players are actual hunters, and they have high expectations of realism.īut Expansive Worlds also wanted to make a game that’s good to play. I’m kind of surprised that neither Peake nor Öjlert hunt themselves, but Peake says all the research Öjlert has put into hunting over his time working on both Classic and Call of the Wild means that he’s become an expert, at least on a theoretical level. But creating the behaviour of its animals is still down to a vast amount of work. Call of the Wild could lean on the years of development that went into theHunter Classic, which was originally launched back in 2009 and is still being supported with new content. “I know there are some who want to walk around and look at things, and they don’t want to shoot the animals, they just want to experience nature.”Īctually making something this detailed and credible, well, that’s been a journey. “We’re interested in making a living and believable world, and that’s really one thing that’s important for players,” says fellow designer Björn Öjlert. Many players won’t have any idea that there’s a world of animals outside their ken as they stumble across the tracks they leave behind, but hunters, who have an understanding of how animals move and what they do at varying times of day, expect this kind of detail, and they can understand it when they see it. “And the player doesn’t know about them and probably never even sees them because they’re five kilometres away and it’ll take three hours to get there,” says Peake. In herds or alone, they sleep, eat and trek to new locations as days pass, following schedules that take them through their home ranges. “That’s something I had to understand and work through.“Ĭall of the Wild simulates the movement of 1500 animals across the world. “Anything in the world that the player is not experiencing is kind of wasted.” But it’s not in a good hunting game.

“I had this rule that if something happens and the player doesn’t see it, it doesn’t happen,” he tells me. Designer Dan Peake, who worked on games like Mad Max before he joined Expansive Worlds to help make Call of the Wild, had think about design in very different ways. Hunting games don’t work like most games. They’re the result of countless hours of AI design and animation that closely model the behaviour of wild beasts, but they’re also part of a game, a fact that lends Call of the Wild a fascinating relationship with the natural world. Here, you’re alone in large expanses of wilderness, following wild animals which live out lives and react to your presence in many complex ways. TheHunter: Call of the Wild is a hunting simulation that goes far beyond anything in a Far Cry or Tomb Raider. You crouch but the deer barks, alerting the rest of the herd, and moves on again, disappearing into the undergrowth. The deer stops and turns its head to look back in your direction. The deer’s ear twitches and it turns and trots away. You raise your binoculars and edge closer, but a branch scrapes your jacket. You’ve been tracking the herd for fifteen minutes, and now, finally, you’re close enough to see your first deer. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.

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