Chapter 94 - #94: Global Hunting Leaderboard!

When the official price tag for theHunter: Call of the Wild was finally revealed and the download button went live, Silver couldn’t help but let out a long sigh of relief. “Before they announced the price, I never would have guessed it would be this cheap.”

“Anyone who’s watched DaddyHunt’s stream over the past few weeks knows that this game is way too good to just be selling for ten bucks,” Silver told his audience.

He hadn’t watched every single one of DaddyHunt’s broadcasts, but he tuned in often enough to understand the sheer scale of the game.

“Honestly, you don’t even need to watch the gameplay. Anyone who understands Nova’s attitude towards game development knows that ten bucks is an absolute steal. You aren’t getting scammed here. You might not unlock any crazy cosmetic items, but you are guaranteed to get hundreds of hours of pure joy.”

Just by glimpsing a small corner of DaddyHunt’s gameplay, the viewers could easily feel how incredibly rich the simulation was.

“I’ve been holding back for a long time. DaddyHunt’s gaming skills are genuinely terrible,” Silver said, staring at the Steam download progress bar and aggressively rubbing his hands together. He really couldn’t wait to jump in.

DaddyHunt’s stream wasn’t designed for hardcore gamers. He wasn’t a pro gamer, and he never bothered to explain the underlying item mechanics or weapon ballistics to his viewers. The vast majority of the audience just spent hours watching him sneak through the dense brush, desperately trying to track down red deer and foxes.

But even though DaddyHunt never explained the mechanics, the viewers still watched with absolute fascination. The game was an incredibly immersive, one-to-one simulation of real-world forest hunting.

Watching DaddyHunt play wasn’t like watching a traditional video game broadcast; it felt exactly like watching an actual, inexperienced hunter wander through the woods.

“Anyway, I’ve beaten so many of Nova’s brutally hard games. I refuse to believe that shooting a virtual deer is actually that difficult,” Silver boasted confidently.

Hearing him utter such wild, arrogant words, the stream chat immediately fired back.

[ hater_in_the_chat: I mean, DaddyHunt’s aim is definitely bad, but I don’t think he’s the only problem. Talsen: The simulation is way too realistic. He shoots fine, but those animals are hyper-alert to everything. Runarsson: Silver is actually on massive copium right now. I’ve watched DaddyHunt’s entire stream. The slightest rustle of a bush or shift in the wind will instantly spook the herd. It’s not just about aiming. salty_backseat_gamer: With your zero patience, you’re going to fail the second you load in. ]

The chat immediately spiraled into a heated debate over whether DaddyHunt’s struggles were due to his boomer reflexes or the game’s ruthless realism.

Meanwhile, Ethan Vale was sitting in his office, casually chatting on the phone with his dad. Ever since Thomas started playing the closed alpha, he couldn’t resist calling his son to proudly show off every single time he successfully harvested an animal.

“Thank God this game is finally launched. I was getting driven absolutely crazy every single day,” Thomas sighed heavily into the phone.

Almost every time he booted up his stream over the past week, he was instantly bombarded with thousands of viewers frantically begging him for the release date.

At the very beginning, Thomas didn’t understand why Ethan had asked him to stream the game. The sensation of sitting alone in his office while tens of thousands of strangers scrutinized his every move was deeply uncomfortable.

During the broadcast, his every footstep was heavily analyzed, and his missed shots were painfully magnified by the chat. A retired, middle-aged man like him had thin skin, and he initially struggled to handle the relentless, sarcastic roasting from the gamers. Even though he knew the viewers weren’t being genuinely malicious, it still stung.

But he pushed through it because he knew this was his son’s career. Ethan’s studio had grown at a terrifying pace, and Thomas just wanted to offer whatever small, insignificant help he could.

But as he grew to understand the game’s mechanics and felt the genuine, overwhelming enthusiasm from the stream chat, his discomfort faded.

It was replaced by a profound sense of pride.

Because this masterpiece had been specially crafted by his own son.

Eventually, Thomas learned how to read the teasing chat messages with a calm, relaxed attitude.

He even started casually joking back with his viewers, laughing off his terrible shots.

And whenever he finally landed a perfect vital hit on a massive buck, the chat would explode into an endless wave of hype and Pog emotes.

Only when he was finally able to share that pure happiness with others did he truly understand what his son was trying to achieve.

Thomas had also heard about the massive psychological breakdown the players had suffered during the Bloodborne launch.

He hadn’t played the brutal horror game himself, but he gathered from the internet that the suffocating atmosphere had inflicted a heavy emotional toll on the community.

He also knew exactly how Ethan had solved it: by patching in a simple, asynchronous Notebook item so players could leave messages for each other.

It was an incredibly simple mechanic. But it completely turned the narrative around.

“After today, the internet is going to be flooded with detailed hunting guides, and it’ll be a lot easier for you to play,” Ethan said with a warm smile over the phone. “If you don’t understand an animal’s behavior, you can just look up a strategy video. You’ll be able to share hunting stories with millions of other players.”

“Yeah, I know. But how did you even come up with the idea to add that interactive notebook to the horror game?” Thomas asked curiously. “I heard from my viewers that the update completely saved their mental health.”

Ethan leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Games are only truly fun when you have friends to play with.”

“Even though the players leaving those messages don’t actually know each other, in that brief moment, they realize they aren’t suffering alone. There’s an old saying in the industry, Dad: friends are the best hardware upgrade a game can possibly have.”

“I don’t fully understand the tech jargon, but I do know I feel incredibly happy when I can finally share a successful hunt with the viewers in my chat,” Thomas nodded seriously.

He understood the underlying feeling perfectly. It was exactly like his neighbor, Mr. Miller. The last time Miller went fishing and caught a massive twenty-pound bass, he didn’t just go home. He carried the cooler around the neighborhood, striking up conversations with everyone until the sun went down, just waiting for someone to ask what he caught.

When night fell, someone noticed Mr. Miller still wandering the sidewalks and asked, “Hey Mr. Miller, aren’t you going home for dinner?”

And Mr. Miller instantly replied: “How did you know I caught a twenty-pound bass?”

Thomas had also seen a viral Reddit post recently.

A guy’s girlfriend had managed to snag him a sold-out Xbox Series X for his birthday.

Instead of driving home, the guy took the subway and rode it in a massive circle for ten stops, just sitting there with the bright green box on his lap.

Someone took a picture of his back and posted it online to share the wholesome moment.

But almost immediately, other people from the same city started posting updated pictures of the exact same guy.

Different subway cars.

Different time slots.

He was literally just riding the transit system so strangers could see his new console.

That was the sheer, intoxicating power of showing off a gaming achievement.

“Speaking of showing off your prey, we just dropped a launch-day event,” Ethan said mysteriously. “The announcement should be live on Steam right now.”

After hanging up the phone, Thomas immediately clicked over to the Sprout Studio community page.

Reading the new announcement, he couldn’t help but shudder. Why is my kid getting more and more twisted?

Thomas had been playing the game for weeks, so he knew better than anyone that the absolute most important requirement for hunting was extreme patience.

And Ethan’s brand-new event was specifically designed to completely obliterate that patience.

[The new reserves are officially open!]

[We are launching a synchronized, global hunting leaderboard! As long as you are connected to the online servers while playing, the system will automatically track the exact timestamp of your successful harvests.]

[The very first 100 players globally to successfully track and harvest each specific animal species will receive an exclusive, physical crystal trophy engraved with the animal and their clear number, shipped directly to their door by Sprout Studio!]

At that exact moment, on a live stream, a pro gamer silently stared at a bright red “flesh wound” blood splatter on the forest floor and fell into deep thought.

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Just finished VisionQuest. Knew Wanda was alive, they would never kill off her character, especially now that the Maximoff family is reuniting again! Anyways, if you liked the chapter, then drop a stone, don’t be stingy~ Also, how’s my upload schedule these past few days? Was it good? ;))