WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

The WolfQuest Saga is now in public beta on Steam! See instructions at bottom of this post for instructions on how to switch to the public beta branch. If you'd rather wait until the full release, that's fine, it won't be too long!



But first, a couple things:

The Saga is in good shape, but there's a chance that it might break an existing save or family tree, so please make a backup of your User Files folder. Just copy and paste the whole folder onto your desktop or wherever you like.

* Windows: Documents/My Games/Wolf Quest Anniversary/User Files
* Mac: [YourUserDirectory]/Wolf Quest Anniversary/User Files

Now most important: Treat the Saga like it's a new game! While much of the game is the same, the Saga brings many changer to existing gameplay and features, along with the new Saga quests and gameplay. Don't assume that everything works exactly how it did before. Please peruse the Game Help (now available in the main menu of the game), especially the new About the Saga section. It's pretty long, but if you're wondering if something you're seeing in the game is a bug or intentional, that's a good place to check. The Game Help is also much improved in general, with better entries about various gameplay features.

Similarly, even if you have logged hundreds of hours logged in the game, be sure to enable Tutorials and Common Notifications in Game Settings, as those will give you important information when you reach something that's new or different.

Now a few tips about Saga gameplay:
* You really want to prioritize your wolf's health. Without good health, everything else becomes much harder, including keeping your pups and packmates alive and healthy.
* Your yearlings and subordinates are not duplicates of your mate. They won't help much with marking territory (that's the job of the pack leaders). They will help hunt, but if they see enough other wolves taking on the risks, they're happy to freeride and get an easy meal without taking damage.
* Your packmates will eat reguritant if they're hungry, but they'll wait until the pups of the year have mostly filled up. They're pretty polite about that, but not totally polite.
* Sickness and low health is extra dangerous for pups now. Sick pups move slowly, as do pups with low health -- they're not speedy if you woof them into the den during a pup raid, and can be picked off by predators more easily.
* Don't expect all of your pups to survive, even on Easy difficulty. That's not the way of the wild.
* If you come across a bug, please do use the in-game Bug Reporter! And pleeease give us a lot of details, don't just say "mate isn't working right" -- tell us what you were doing, what's happening, and what you expected to happen.
* You can load a saved game in Loaf at Rendezvous Site or Endless Summer quests and carry on into the Saga quests -- but it's not a bad idea to start a new game to try out the Saga, and we don't recommend playing on Accurate difficulty this first time either. (And if you do, expect that things can get hairy.)

So there it is! The Saga is in public beta, on Steam. If you're interested, check it out!

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TO GET THE BETA BUILD
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.

(I'll be traveling this weekend, so releasing this devblog a day earlier than usual.)

The WolfQuest Saga* has been in beta-testing for five months now -- plenty of bugs to find and fix, but we're also making hundreds of improvements too. Many of these improvements are suggested by our beta testers, so in today's devblog I'd like to look at a few of those.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

1: Companionship with a sick pup. We added companionship long ago to give players some chance of helping their pups recover from sickness. But it can feel burdensome as gameplay. You feel like you really should spend all your time with that pup, but you also have things to do! So betatesters suggested adding a cooldown, similar to social emotes. This has been a great improvement: you can put in some time with your sick pup, but you don't feel guilty if you then go off and hunt and maintain territory. We limit companionship to two game-hours per day (five realtime minutes) before the cooldown hits.

2: When you have yearlings and older offspring, any packmate can decide to go on a hunting excursion. They invite other wolves, including your wolf, by whining. But it can be a bit hard to know who is planning to go and who's planning to stay. So beta testers suggested indicating this "planning to go on excursion" mindset in Pack Info. We created a small double-pawprint, which appears next to the name of those packmates. And then once on a trip away from the homesite, a larger pawprint icon appears there in Pack Info.
This gives more clarity to each packmate's situation.

3: Fights with rival wolves can get pretty wild, with packs of eight or more wolves involved. In fall and winter, pups of the year are involved in these fights, and their older packmates get upset if you bite one of those pups, so it's important to know who's who. So we implemented a beta tester suggestion and added a small yellow dot on the Fight or Flight meter above those pups. So you can go in knowing that you're risking a more vigorous response if you bite one of them.

4: Pup raids by competitors can theoretically happen at any time -- but from the start, we prevented them from happening while the player-wolf was sleeping. This of course narrows the window for attacks considerably -- not when you're sleeping, and not when you're away from the homesite. That really leaves only a few game-hours each day -- and so raids often appear soon after you wake up. We've gotten complaints about that over time, so decided to finally solve it by allowing raids to wake you up from sleep. We put in some constraints, ensuring that you get at least three hours of sleep, and this change did solve the problem. This new feature didn't bother many beta testers -- you get woken up, fight off the raiders, and go back to sleep -- but some beta testers really, really hated it. So after trying to finesse it more, we finally disabled the feature, and again limit raids to your waking hours at the homesite. That's why we test things in private beta before releasing them!

5: Playing with your pups. As your pack grows, it's fun to watch your pups and older offspring play together. In fact, it's so fun that beta testers felt rather left out of the fun. They really wanted to be able to join in -- at least doing the playful, bouncy trot. So we added that (pressing B key on the keyboard toggles on this gait on and off). And furthermore, we enabled a special playbow that packmates often use when inviting others to chase them. So when you're in this bouncy/playful mode, if you do a playbow, your wolf will do this Invite Chase playbow. So now you really can be part of the fun.

All this is coming soon in the WolfQuest Saga -- later this year!

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
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The WolfQuest Saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

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

We're going full speed with beta-testing the upcoming WolfQuest Saga, finding plenty of bugs along with many, many little things to tweak and tune and polish. Every day, the Saga gets a little better. One thing we're testing are the new achievements for the Saga. We have about 18 of them. Some will be in a new Saga tab on the Achievements panel, but others make more sense in the Core, Above and Beyond, and Life Arc sections. Especially with the Saga achievements, these take a long time to test, since they generally take several game-years, at least, for even a chance at unlocking them. But we're getting there.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Longtime WolfQuest player/beta tester/moderator Loach (Jessie Clarey-Berthiaume) has created all of the achievement icons already in the game, and she created the icons for half of these new achievements. Rolin Serna (who created the beautiful splash image that you see when you launch the game) created the other nine new icons. Each one is exquisite.

Loach recorded a video while making the Guard Dog icon, so along with a sneak preview of several of the new achievements, today's devblog features this video. Enjoy!

All these new achievements are coming with the Saga, which we expect to release later this year.

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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

Territory is an essential part of a wolf's life. The territory system in WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition has worked pretty well over the last five years, but as we have been playtesting the upcoming Saga*, we decided to tweak a few things.

With the addition of Hex Invasions in the Saga, territory quality is even more important than before. You should try to keep your hexes above 50% strength-- that's why we added the special "Strong" hex icon some years ago. But some players feel the need to keep their territory much stronger than that, above 80% strength, and since you can display the strength percentages on all hexes, it's easy to focus on that more than necessary. Which is fine -- if you enjoy maintaining territory (and some players do). But it's not necessary. We needed to make that clearer.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So now, in the Saga, there are four different hex styles: two styles for hexes above 50% -- the same "Strong" icon we've had for a long time, and a newer one, with a double outline inside the hex. This doesn't mean Super Strong. It just means you've marked it recently and gotten the strength above 75%. But rival packs regard all hexes that are above 50% equally enticing. So do what you like with those hexes, but it doesn't matter to rival packs if they're 52% or 99%.

We also have a new crosshatched hex icon for Weak hexes, which indicates they are below 25% strength. You should probably get out there and mark those soon!

Also, to try to discourage players from obsessing about hex percentages, we added a third option to the hex percentage display, so you can choose to show no percentage readouts (except on mouseover), or just the percentage for the hex your wolf is in at the moment, or percentages on all hexes. We don't recommend this last option. It's an awful lot of information, and it can lead you to focus too much on keeping hexes very strong when that doesn't matter. But it's up to you.

On another topic: we do have plans for multiplayer in the Saga, but that will come later, after we get the Saga for single-player in good shape and released.

So anyways, these territorial tweaks are another little improvement to the upcoming WolfQuest Saga, which is coming later this year!

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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

With such a big expansion and revision as the WolfQuest Saga*, it's inevitable that we'll find problems --with the gameplay, with the arc of your wolf's life, with the visuals. So there's always a couple problems that need to be solved. Today we'll look at a few of those.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

First: Once you've played through a year or two in the Saga, you'll have older offspring, who can stay back at the homesite as babysitters. But if they're not out hunting with you, how do they keep from starving? We could make them go off and find food on their own after you return from hunting, but that gets complicated in terms of pack activity, sleep, and such. The simplest solution is just to do the same as with the pups, and have the babysitters eat regurgitant, just as the pups do. Nice and simple -- and happily, I found a paper by Dave Mech (world-renowned wolf biologist and one of our original WolfQuest advisors) saying that packmates do indeed eat regurgitant at times. Problem solved!

Another problem is with dispersals. After a few years, your pack will have wolves of various ages, from pups of the year to yearlings to 2-3-yr old subordinates. We have a lot of behavioral logic about when a pup will decide to disperse -- based on age, personality, size of the pack, and more. But since it takes many hours to paly through year to year, these variables are hard to fine-tune. So Raul, who created the persistent pack system last year, whipped up a nice little simulation. I can load a save with large big pack and run the simulation forward for one year and see who has dispersed. So very rapidly, I can test different variables and see how they play out. Our goal is to usually have 5-9 adults (yearlings or older) in the pack, plus the pups of the year. So this simulation is a tremendous tool to let us tweak things to get close to that goal.

Finally wolf coats and aging. I've talked in past devblogs about this. Like human hair, wolf coats tend to get lighter, and sometimes go white, as the wolf ages. We have a wide variety of coats, and some are quite white since they're based on old wolves. That's always been a bit odd, but it's really odd in the Saga, when your pups get their adult coat in late summer -- and it's white! Someday we hope to implement a real aging-tint effect, but it's quite complicated and not happening anytime soon. So for now, at very least, we have created an alternate coat for the whitest of the coats. Your pups will get this younger version of the coat automatically, and all NPC wolves will get the younger version until they turn five. In the Wolf Customization, you can chose either the younger or the older versions, just click to toggle back and forth. We've also set it up so pups and other NPC wolves who have lighter coats get a darker tint in their younger years, automatically.

So there are always problems to grapple with, but we're making steady progress in solving them. We don't have a release date for the Saga, but it's coming sometime this year!

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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