How does it compare to Deer Hunter 2005? Is this fun without hunter vision?

[Waggy]

I think that was the last hunting game I played, back when I was a kid. Great fun.

In Deer Hunter 2005 the gameplay loop was very patient stealth and stalk, or set up bait and stand.

You could get really close to animals if you were patient enough, I mean, almost touching distance, then you stood up and shot them with a crossbow or pistol... I'd love to do that in real life, must be very exciting but impossibly difficult, but it felt so rewarding.

Deer had different behavior depending on time of year and time. You could find footprints, scratch marks on trees, droppings.

However, if your shot wasn't clean and ethical enough to drop them fast, then you'd spend the next 30 minutes or more chasing blood and footprint trails through the maps, trying to find that corpse among the bushes... it was very annoying to chase the blood trail.

In this game I see we have hunter vision to make tracking shot deer easier, but is it fun without it? Is it even possible to play without it or is it impossibly frustrating, since there's even more vegetation here?

[QLIQ]

This game tries to be rather realistic. So depending on the species you can get really close by sneaking up to them, or if you use a caller they will come really close to you. Some species are really alert, I guess with some correlation how they behave in real life, so it can get tricky.

You can choose how difficult blood tracking/ alertness is (3 different difficulty settings), the blood will have different colors and amounts depending on how well you hit the animal. This can be rather tricky as the game takes full account for bullet drop, wind drift and gravitational forces so getting that perfect shot when you start out is a challenge. The damage model for large species is awesome, e.g. you can kill animals from behind if you hit there artery (very detailed kill screen)

IMO hunter sense is a toggle with Q. So you can always just leave it completely off.

Your goal in this game is to identify bad genetic animals kill them off to raise the herds genetics. Feels a bit like being a ranger, so it is less about mindless grinding. You will need to spend quite some time looking at herds and not killing anything because the males are still young and it takes a few ingame days to see there potential.
But you can also mow down whatever you see.

The only negative thing I have to say about this game is that it suffers from a lot of artifacts in the rendering, which does drags down the experience a bit. There is DLSS which improves it a bit, but then DLSS introduces ghosting.

[Kak2R🍸🧀]

Originally posted by Waggy:

In this game I see we have hunter vision to make tracking shot deer easier, but is it fun without it? Is it even possible to play without it or is it impossibly frustrating, since there's even more vegetation here?

I & others play on ranger mode, where you can't use Hunter Sense. I find it satisfying and more immersive. Tracking blood isn't a problem, and even fun, making the harvest more satisfying.

The only real con is the inability to judge the fitness of predators/non-antlered species. Of course you can play a lower difficulty and just turn on HS for that, leaving it off otherwise.