Real hunting comparison

[maukings]

I know this is a game but for those of you who have never been hunting, you might find this interesting...
My experience is with whitetail hunting in Illinois. Hunting hours for deer tend to be from sunrise to sunset. The season begins in October and goes into mid January. Deer spend most daytime hours bedded down. They mostly move a few minutes before sunset and remain active most of the night. Then they come back to bed down around sunrise. Deer a generally quiet. You will rarely hear them call like they do in the game. Only during the rut, they may call but even then it's rare. The rut is the period of time in which deer go in heat. While you can find fresh tracks, it's really hard to follow them for an extended period of time. You can size the deer by the width of their tracks. If the track is 4 fingers wide, it's probably a mature deer. The game makes animals much more vocal than they are in real life. Much more active than they really are. You can spend from 4am to 5pm up on a tree and only see a deer or two. Often times none. Wind definitelly plays are role. It is also really difficult to be quiet in the woods when all the leafs have have dropped and they crunch with every step you take. Really brushy areas can be impossible to get through without a machete. I personally would like this game to be a bit harder. When bagging giant bucks and bulls becomes so easy, the game gets boring. On the other hand, you can't spend hours and hours and not shoot anything. It's still a game. I'd like to see a difficulty mode where they animals call less and big racks are harder to come by. I would enjoy the challenge a lot more. Good huntin!

[Niar]

it would be great if they fix the stupid KI, you shoot a rifle, the Animal is Fleeing for 200 Meters, and an minute later it behave like nothing happens, and you can even call it back.

[Columbus]

Yea, I shot a deer yesterday and hit it in the leg, and waited and it walked back to me after about a minute, which I then killed it.

[Roman 45]

It would be fair to implement difficulty levels, easy, medium, hard, which change the ammount of noise or warning calls from the animals, so in hard mode you would get like 1 call out of 10 animals which normally do it. Im not a programmer but i guess it cant be that difficult to make such an option available in the game.

Besides that lots of players would appreciate that i guess.

[Rickenbacker]

I agree about the calls, but I think it had to be this way for gameplay reasons. I spent large chungs of my childhood out in the woods, which I know were packed with roe deer, foxes and the occasional red deer - yet I almost never heard a single peep from them. Just the occasional buck making some noise in the mating season, but other than that, it was quiet.

Imagine that in the game, we'd never see a single animal, they'd all just shut up and move away before we got within a mile of them :).

[Niar]

Difficulty levels are obsolete anyways, the hunter was and is an niche Game , all the new players who want Action now are gone in 2 Weeks back to Battlefield or CoD. People not interested in playing a Hunting Simulation like The Hunter ever was will not play this Game much longer.
It would be better if they stick close to The Hunter Classic in any desicions.

[conan2020]

Hey maukings, I'm a RL hunter to your north in Wisconsin and your assessment of whitetails is spot on.

It's got to be difficult for people who have never been in the woods with a deer to make a game for people who have also mostly never been in the woods with a deer and try to pass it off to us that have spent time in the woods with deer as a realistic simulation and be fun to the masses at the same time.

My experience with CotW sounds much like yours. I really like the game and new environments, but it loses its authenticity quick when I hear whitetail does nonstop making a mating call that no whitetail doe has ever made (It's a buck's mating grunt, does bleat or bawl, like they did in Classic). Or when their warning call is a grunt? Did EW research or consult anyone that's ever been in the woods with a whitetail? Whitetails grunt to each other to locate other deer when they're cruising solo through the woods, but if they sense danger they let out a snort "whoosh whoosh whoosh" like a sneeze that every single hunter that has been in the woods with a whitetail has heard. If CotW can't be truly authentic, I'd at least like it to be accurate.

I've turned off the visual indicators for the warning calls and the particle effects for the tracks and it's an improved experience, but their are still too many calls. It's disappointing you can't change the track color and that tracks are all the same. They don't visually portay whether the deer was walking, trotting or running, like in Classic. It would also be really nice to be able to completely hide the UI.

It's interesting that the current inability to sneak properly with KB+M is probably a much more realistic representation of what stalking a deer is like. You can't constantly sneak at a slow pace towards a deer because deer notice movement first and foremost, it doesn't matter how stealthy you are or whether you're crouched or prone. I've stood completely upright not moving a muscle ten feet from a deer that was upwind that wandered right towards me and spooked others over 100 yards upwind because they saw me moving or heard me. It's why still hunting is such a great strategy for whitetail in RL and what stealth is currently like with KB+M. Upright, crouched it doesn't matter, with the wind in your face, take two or three steps, stop, scan your surroundings, rinse and repeat. Once you've located your quarry, it's the same, one or two steps, avoiding sudden movement, until you've got a shot.

[TryHardNinja]

Originally posted by conan2020:

I really like the game and new environments, but it loses its authenticity quick when I hear whitetail does nonstop making a mating call that no whitetail doe has ever made (It's a buck's mating grunt, does bleat or bawl, like they did in Classic). Or when their warning call is a grunt?

I'm glad you confirmed that for me. I was sure that's what they did in classic. I'm wondering if it could even be a bug, like the way they had the wrong sound attached to the rabbits/squirrels a few weeks ago. Also the red deer alarm call sounds very much like the roe deer one to me.

Originally posted by conan2020:

Whitetails grunt to each other to locate other deer when they're cruising solo through the woods, but if they sense danger they let out a snort "whoosh whoosh whoosh" like a sneeze that every single hunter that has been in the woods with a whitetail has heard. If CotW can't be truly authentic, I'd at least like it to be accurate.

They do actually make a sound like what you said. Maybe you haven't heard it because it is a bit quiet?

Originally posted by conan2020:

They don't visually portay whether the deer was walking, trotting or running, like in Classic.

There IS a difference between walking and running: the toes do splay out. I'm not sure if there's a difference between walking/trotting/running however.

[Roosterfish]

The problem is this is a game. Hardly anyone would play it if you hunted all season and only saw one deer let alone got a shot at it.

Crouching in game is really good especially once you take the skills that allow you to move more silently and reduce your visibility. I can literally get within touching distance in the right circumstances.

The calling in game is over the top for sure, all the deer and elk you can call in repeatedly and wipe a whole herd. The bucks and bulls are harder to call and usually I only get one shot unless it is a need area then they will come back in.

While I do agree with what you are saying it is a game and disbelief has to be suspended for it to be enjoyable. Like the one guy mentioned you can up the difficulty in the settings.

[Silky Rough]

Originally posted by TryHardNinja:

Also the red deer alarm call sounds very much like the roe deer one to me.

Funny you should say this. Somebody raised this the other day and I said "Nah, I can tell them apart easily". Yesterday, had a call, brought up the 7mm, sighted, expecting a red doe and nope, it's a roe.

(Maybe I owe that guy an apology.)

[djinnxy]

I also live in WI and hunt in a fair sized portion of public land. The part I hunt and walk in is only a small part of the whole public forest. Just the part I hunt is about like 1/2 of either in game map.

In previous posts people mention still hunting and I would agree those methods are spot on with what they spoke of. In my case it's always a choice between that and packing in a climber every day.

The nocturnal deer herd wasn't always that way. It wasn't always wait for 9 days to maybe see one deer either. 20+ years ago, before years of bonus tags, cwd zones pushing people north, earn a buck, and local private land hunters coming in to fill doe tags away from their managed herds It was common to see many deer in a day every day. Sure some deer, particularly older bucks, were still largely nocturnal. The private edge was always an easy 150 deer in 2 miles of shining fields back then and right at dusk. Now that same stretch you are lucky to see 15 and it is usually later. During the day deer would move back into the miles of woods and feed and intermittently bed down.

The point is that the large number of animals and sometimes herds of them is exactly how things would be in a well managed area. On that portion and that they have a daytime schedule that isn't all hide and sleep is realistic.

Edit: One last addition. Deer snort in alarm, which is very common and rarely grunt in alarm. Usually the only time one will grunt at a human is to get them to move. More commonly they stomp. They also grunt and mew for various other reasons outside mating. Does and the milking fawns particularly grunt and mew, much like cows but subtler.