Time for a stroll! theHunter: Call of the Wild released
Could go for a walk
Hey, The Man: I intend to use theHunter: Call of the Wild [official site] for nonviolent video game tourism and you can't stop me. Well, maybe you can; for all I know, players are locked into a tutorial where they need to shot a moose through each individual organ before being allowed to take a single step. Probably not though? I'll soon see, as Call of the Wild is now out. It's a first-person hunting sim, obviously, and a jolly pretty one - built in the Apex engine of Just Cause 3 devs Avalanche.
Call of the Wild packs 50 square miles of reserves, scattered across the world in different biomes. Grab your gun, your honking whistle, and go stalk some wildlife. Or don't. Or do, if you want. It also supports multiplayer for up to eight folks, with both competitive and cooperative play.
Here, check out this recent dev livestream going on an hour-long walk around around Layton Lake District, an area inspired by the Pacific Northwest:
If Ultimate Pâté is a walking simulator, perhaps this can be too.
Oh, and do read Brendan's ridealong with a real hunter in Call of the Wild's free-to-play predecessor. The closest I've come to hunting is fishing on French holidays as a kid, and that was mostly an excuse to sit for hours on a rock in a river with the current pushing past me, so it's an alien culture to me but ah, good ridealong.
theHunter: Call of the Wild is out on Steam for £29.99/29,99€/$29.99 (has the pound fallen that far?). Yup, this one isn't free-to-play and doesn't have built-in microtransactions, though developers Expansive Worlds do say they're planning both free and paid DLC packs. It's published by Avalanche Studios, the folks who make Just Cause and that pretty engine.
Early responses from players do seem to complain a bit about bugginess. Hmm!