hunting

After a long break during which the developers have fixed a number of bugs, I have returned to Way of the Hunter. Initially, I did a couple of side missions on the Nez Perce (US) map. They were both small game hunts – American Badger and Fox – so I was mainly using the Steyr Scout .223 rifle. I also carried the Steyr Monobloc, with .308 ammo and added a couple of deer to my hunt tally. It seems that my rifle shooting skills are still intact after the long break. Then I tried hunting Pheasant with a shotgun. That skill has deserted me, so I will need get some practise in😟

After getting my muscle and key-bindings memory sorted, I had to decide where I wanted to hunt. I think the story quest on the Nez Perce map is getting in the way of my hunting so I’m going to put that on hold. Instead, I decided to take a look at the Transylvania map. Both of the maps supplied with the base game have great scenery and the initial view from the balcony of the main hunting lodge doesn’t disappoint…

…The river in the view is the mighty Danube. There are several marshy areas where tributaries join like the one in the view and that speaks of plenty of wildfowl opportunities – Indeed my first animal bagged on this map was a Greylag Goose. I did miss several others🙄

I have only started finding my way around the map, so most of it is currently unknown but here’s what it looks like currently…

…With the Danube forming the southern boundary. The hunting lodge is by the Adanc Expanse label. When you are leaving the lodge, you’ll find garlic and a cross hanging by the door…

…I can’t imagine why…

Initially, the hunting opportunities seem few and far between – probably because of the background spawning of the animals. I started out looking for animal need points – feeding and drinking locations mainly. Drinking locations are easiest to find – just wander up a watercourse. On one of my early forays, I followed a stream up into the Lempes Hills to the north of the Lodge…

…Close to the border of the Aurora Wood private hunting area, I found evidence of Fallow Deer drinking. I secreted myself on a bank overlooking the site and waited patiently. Eventually, a small herd showed up…

…You can see that one of the herd was a young male and most of the others were also young. The game emphasises correct herd management – you are encouraged to only shoot low value adult or mature animals to enhance the gene pool. That’s how you will ultimately get high trophy value animals to spawn – it’s a gaming way of rewarding the player for acting like a responsible gamekeeper. So those youngsters will not be shot. If the whole herd is made up of young animals then I will just leave them be and put the gun away. However, on this occasion, there is a mature 1-star buck at the back. I waited until I had a clear shot from a good angle and then fired with the Steyr Pro Hunter .243. He made some distance downstream with the help of gravity before finally going down…

…The others fled back into the woods.

You can see that I’m carrying a shotgun alongside the rifle. I quickly learnt that there are several smaller species in the area – Golden Jackal, Fox, European Badger and Roe Deer – so I now normally carry the Steyr Scout .223 for those alongside the Pro Hunter .243 for the larger deer. But once I find myself in Red Deer territory, I’ll need to carry something more powerful like the Remington 673 ‘Guide Rifle’. I currently switch out the .243 for the Monobloc .308 if it’s Wild Boar that I’m after.

Here’s a sequence from another hunt – this time Roe Deer beside the river going diagonally up the centre of the map…

…You can’t make out the animals in the scenic view above, but looking with the binoculars I could see them and after moving closer, get a clear view…

…Yes, the guy at the back will be my target…

…Taken down with the Scout .223.

That concludes this brief reintroduction to Simulated hunting in Way of the Hunter on PC😎👍

I have been remiss in not fulfilling my promise to write more about the game Way of the Hunter. In part my delay was due to my personal mental state but it was also because the game was suffering from a lot of bugs, and I felt stepping back until some of those were fixed was a good thing… I guess we took time out together to get fixed!

Since my last post Way of the Hunter has moved forward a lot with many of the major issues being fixed. So now I think I can finally look more closely at how the game plays. I think I should start with a warning for anyone thinking about playing this game. It gives a pretty authentic hunting experience. Finding the animals can be difficult. Getting close to the animals can be damn near impossible. Then there’s the difficulty of getting a clear shot once you are in range. To quote from one reviewer, “You’ve moved while within 150 meters of the game, so they’ve been spooked. Now they’re running away for the day. This happens every time and with every animal.” – Now there is a degree of truth in that, but I have found it possible to get closer and set up good shooting opportunities. The thing to grasp from the start is that hunts in this game require a patient approach and often it’s good to plan ahead based on the knowledge you’ve gained from tracks. In many ways my hunting in the game mirrors my birdwatching forays – calm, slow and methodical is good.

Choosing the right weapon for the task is important but you won’t be penalised in a contrived manner for using a weapon that is not of the correct tier – most deer are tier 5 animals, so you should use a tier 5 firearm. Most of the time if you stick to this, a single shot will be enough to kill the animal but, not always. Here’s an example of a Male White-Tailed Deer. My first shot was close to head on from over 160m and the bullet lost a lot of energy passing through the muscles before hitting the left lung…

…As a result, the wounded animal was able to run away with the herd. That meant I had to track the herd to find this deer again. I was able to get within 100m for my second shot which, this time, was from a more ideal side-on position…

…The Deer went down immediately, obviously weakened by the initial shot and now unable to even try to run away. The key information is in the lower panel on the right, where the highlighted band shows what was hit by the bullet while its energy was in the optimum range to kill the animal. So you can clearly see the effect of the bullet passing through the muscle in the first shot – a lot of its energy was lost. You don’t actually have to be in the optimum energy range though if the bullet has a clear path to the lung – the animal will just take a little longer to go down.

Normally, a clean lung-shot results in the animal running for a short distance before dying. Here’s what an initial blood-spatter looks like…

…Bright pink is a sure sign that a lung has been punctured. The yellow is the highlighting applied by Hunter Sense which will usually help with tracking the animal. Here you can see a series of highlighted blood drops leading through the brush…

…ultimately taking us to our dead deer in the trees up ahead. If you turn off Hunter Sense, you can usually still follow the blood trail quite easily. This is an area where Way of the Hunter seems to perform better than The Hunter: Call of the Wild.

Returning to our White-Tailed Deer and look at another of the screens presented at harvest…

..Here it gives more information about the animal and your hunt – because I had to shoot the deer twice, I only get 4 stars (Most of my hunts are 5-star😊). You can learn a lot about each hunt improve your hunting skills by doing a detailed review. You can also check that you are shooting the right animals to improve the herd – Normally I try to stick with Mature 0 or 1-star animals to improve the gene pool. The game encourages you to adopt this approach and there’s even a task to remove 5 Mule Deer with those attributes which pays quite well😎

Back to the harvest and there are more details in the Hunt and Trophy screens too – Here’s a Hunt screen from a Mule Deer that I downed…

…It tells how far I had to follow the animal after shooting it in the lung from 80m with the Remington 783 rifle. In the meat info section you can see a category ‘Loss by shot’. This is the quantity of spoiled meat that cannot be used. This is where using a suitable gun is important. If I used a tier 6 weapon from the same range there would be more damaged meat and thus, less financial reward. This feels like a realistic approach to the issue of hunting with a limited choice of guns. In the real world a hunter may only have the one rifle with which to hunt – It might be a 30-30 Winchester (Tier 4) like the first gun you use in this game, or it might be an Elephant gun (probably Tier 8)!

This is now a long post and I have much more to tell, so I’ll aim to cover more in a few days’ time 😎👍