WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

We're delighted to announce this game update, v1.1.2, released 11 April 2024, for WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition!

[h2]NEW: HELLROARING MOUNTAIN DLC MAP[/h2]
Hellroaring Mountain rises above the Yellowstone River in north-central Yellowstone, several kilometers west of Slough Creek. The largest granite mountain in the park, Hellroaring overlooks the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone and, further south, the rolling hills leading up to the Blacktail Deer Plateau. This DLC is available for purchase for USS10. In the game, start a new game, select Hellroaring Mountain Preview, and click the Purchase button (or the Preview button to load the map for a 10 minute test session).

Features:
* 8x8 kilometer map (almost 30% larger than the other WQ:AE Yellowstone maps).
* Most of the map is within Yellowstone National Park, where wolves are protected, but the map extends about a kilometer north of the park boundary into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.
* The full arc of quests, from learning to hunt through raising pups. (That currently brings you to Endless Summer, but once the Saga is completed, it will be available here as well as in other maps.)
* Wolverines. These feisty competitors are mainly found in the high country north of the Yellowstone River. They will put up a fierce fight over carcasses.
* All the animals found in other Yellowstone maps, except beavers. (They don't live in this area, not enough slow creeks.)
* Fifteen new achievements.
* Over 30 new dreams featuring Hellroaring animals and landmarks,

[h2] IMPROVEMENTS:[/h2]
* Elk Hunt: Adjusted elk speed logic so it's easier to catch up to the herd and stay with the herd without excessive sprinting.
* Elk Hunt: Adjusted damage dealt by elk to wolves -- it's now higher when elk have high stamina and gradually drops as those drop. (This was already occuring, but now the min and max effects are much greater. The goal is to reward patience, chasing the herd to tire them out, and to identify the weaker elk -- the latter has been too quick and easy to do.)
* Elk Hunt: Reduced odds of stumbling on most elk (but greatly increased them for bull and spike elks, the odds were extremely low for them.)
* Multiplayer: Reduced rival wolf multiplier during den raids a bit, when there are only two players in the game.
* Modest reduction in size of rival wolf raiding partly in multiplayer, based on number of players in the game.
* On all maps, moved rival pack homesites so hexes can be claimed, and NPC wolves should usually not be beyond world borders. (Only applies to new games).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal groups on each map.
* Reduced maximum health penalty a bit for elk in April and May.
* Revised some code for toggling den scent glow in different seasons (should not have any visible effect).
* Cougar: Increased movement speed during charge attack.

[h2]BUGS FIXED:[/h2]
* Fix some packs missing homesite on upgrade save to pp
* Persistent packs: Disbanding packs sometimes are not instantly removed when jumping ahead to next year.
* Dispersal wolves move back and forth between hexes to much.
* Summer pup can carry grizzly bear skull, though it's awfully big for them.
* Lost River: Dispersals still getting into ranch area.
* Pups will circle predators at too long of a distance.
* Cougar charge attack has an indefinite duration.
* Idle music plays for a second when doing emotes while moving.
* Some cougar vocalizations are too quiet.
* HUD becomes visible after screenshot when HUD is hidden by dreams.
* File sync misses info when game starts with sync disabled.
* World Map locator maps don't update when moving to another map.
* Chat panel disappears when HUD is hidden.


See all patch notes at our Knowledge Base.

In this beta, game saves are not backward compatible with the last released patch, v1.1.1g. Multiplayer games are also NOT backward-compatible, so you can only play with those who have this beta.

See bottom of this page for instructions on opting into the beta.


[h2] IMPROVEMENTS:[/h2]
* Elk Hunt: Adjusted elk speed logic so it's easier to catch up to the herd and stay with the herd without excessive sprinting.
* Elk Hunt: Adjusted damage dealt by elk to wolves -- it's now higher when elk have high stamina and gradually drops as those drop. (This was already occurring, but now the min and max effects are much greater. The goal is to reward patience, chasing the herd to tire them out, and to identify the weaker elk -- the latter has been too quick and easy to do.)
* Elk Hunt: Reduced odds of stumbling on most elk (but greatly increased them for bull and spike elks, the odds were extremely low for them.)
* Multiplayer: Reduced rival wolf multiplier during den raids a bit, when there are only two players in the game.
* Multiplayer: Modest reduction in size of rival wolf raiding partly in multiplayer, based on number of players in the game.
* On all maps, moved rival pack homesites so hexes can be claimed, and NPC wolves should usually not be beyond world borders. (Only applies to new games).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal groups on each map.
* Reduced maximum health penalty a bit for elk in April and May.
* Revised some code for toggling den scent glow in different seasons (should not have any visible effect).

[h2]BUGS FIXED:[/h2]
* Fix some packs missing homesite on upgrade save to pp
* Persistent packs: Disbanding packs sometimes are not instantly removed when jumping ahead to next year.
* Dispersal wolves move back and forth between hexes to much.
* Summer pup can carry grizzly bear skull, though it's awfully big for them.
* Lost River: Dispersals still getting into ranch area.
* Pups will circle predators at too long of a distance.
* Cougar charge attack has an indefinite duration.
* Idle music plays for a second when doing emotes while moving.
* Some cougar vocalizations are too quiet.


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[h3]TO GET THE BETA BUILD[/h3]
1) In the Steam app, go to your Library, then right-click on the WolfQuest: AE name in the left column and choose Properties.
2) Then go to the Betas tab and select the WQ current Beta option in the pulldown. No password is necessary. Steam should then start downloading it. Later you can switch back to the public version in that Betas tab, by selecting NONE in that pulldown.

The upcoming Hellroaring Mountain DLC map is really shaping up -- but as with so many things, the closer you get to completion, the more little things you notice that need further attention.

So it is with this map, which has ten rivers (about three times more than any other map), each of which need some tender loving care. I'd thought they were finished last week, but taking a closer look, I decided that I wasn't satisfied with their appearance, so I spent a few days tweaking the water shader effects. Today's video looks at that process and offers a sneak preview of the new achievement icons by Loach and special Hellroaring dream images that Susan has been working on. We don't do specific release dates but it shouldn't be too much longer!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

Today we're looking at a very important part of the upcoming WolfQuest Saga* -- when your pups of the year learn to hunt! There's no evidence that wolves teach their pups to hunt. Instead, the pack goes hunting, the pups join them and learn at the school of hard knocks -- literally. We are modeling the pups' learning curve with XP, experience points. So in September, when your pups are five months old, they've gained about 1500 XP, and are now ready to live the nomadic lifestyle. The pack abandons the rendezvous site and spends the fall and winter following the elk herds. Initially, pups follow the adults on hunts, but hang back, observing the action. Over time, they gain XP from observation, and soon they start coming in closer and closer, and finally daring to bite an elk.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As the pack leader, the player's job is to give the pups enough experience to learn how to hunt while preventing them from getting killed in the process. But this is trickier than we'd initially imagined. The hunt is so hectic, just keeping an eye on your pups is difficult, much less tracking their health and XP. So first, we needed to make it clearer which wolves were your pups of the year, since they're about 90% the size of an adult wolf. To aid the player, we're giving pup nametags special icons (currently simply a bullet point before and after the name) to make them easier to recognize during the chaos of the hunt.

But we also realized that, with your wolf, your mate, a couple subordinates and yearlings all involved in the hunt, it simply gets too crowded around an elk. Often there's no space available for a pup to get in there to bite. We needed to limit the number of wolves actively participating in the hunt. But how? Fortunately, science came to the rescue!

I recalled this research paper** by Dan MacNulty (one of our WolfQuest science advisors since 2007) and Doug Smith, Dave Mech, John Vucetich and Craig Packer, which found that the optimal number of wolves in an elk hunt is only three or four. So that's very helpful -- but I'd forgotten the best part. MacNulty et al. looked at various possible reasons for this number, and ruled out most of them, concluding that some wolves in the pack are free riders. They're here for the food, not the injuries. They'll participate in the hunt, but they'll try to avoid putting themselves in harms way -- as long as they can be there when there's fresh meat to eat.

So that helps us enormously. With that limit in place, there is always some space on the elk for a pup to get in there and bite. But even so, the hunt is still fast and chaotic, and it can be quite hard to know when a pup is biting an elk -- especially since they only bite for a second or so when they're still gaining skill and confidence. So we're experimenting with some feedback, trying to decide on the bare minimum of feedback without too much information overload.

So this is very much a work in progress -- we've got the young hunter mechanics working well and are now playtesting to figure out the actual gameplay -- what the player is thinking and doing. So this will likely evolve before the Saga is ready for release. Stay tuned for more in upcoming devblogs!
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* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game." Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but we do not have a release date for it.

** Research paper: Nonlinear effects of group size on the success of wolves hunting elk
Daniel R. MacNulty,a Douglas W. Smith,b L. David Mech,c John A. Vucetich,d and Craig Packera
aDepartment of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN, 55108, USA, bYellowstone Center for Resources, PO Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY, 82190, USA, cU.S. Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, 8711 37th Street SE, Jamestown, ND, 58401, USA, and dSchool of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI, 49931, USA


___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

That's right -- we're talking about wolverines today! Of all the animals we've wanted to add to the game, wolverines have been one of our favorites. Wolverines are notoriously fierce and feisty -- with their formidable claws and jaws, they can and do take on larger and more powerful animals. The problem has been that they don't really live in Yellowstone National Park. A survey in 2009 found a few wolverines in only two areas of the park: the southeast and one area of the northern border -- which, as it turns out, is where our upcoming Hellroaring Mountain DLC map is located! So we took this opportunity to add wolverines to the game, only on this new map.

Wolverines will put up a heck of a fight if you challenge them over a carcass. And they've got some new moves you haven't seen before (thanks to animator Zoltán Záhorszki, who created all of the wolverine's animations). Get a sneak peek at our wolverines in today's devblog!

Get a sneak peek at our wolverines in today's devblog!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.