https://youtu.be/wLAY8q2c-yw
WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition will offer three difficulty levels, which we hope will make the game fun and engaging for a wide range of players. Today we look at how we’re crafting the hardest difficulty level. Most of this work has been done by our summer intern George, who is a college student (majoring in computer science), competitive Counterstrike player, and coincidentally, my son. So he’s how he tackled it:
When I first started designing the Accurate difficulty, I had two primary goals. The first was to create a difficulty that increased the challenge of the game, without turning hunts into lengthy, boring slugging matches where player skill is secondary to simple time spent on the hunt. The second was to try and replicate the success rates of real wolves in the wild. The core changes that make Accurate different from other difficulties reside in the multipliers Player Damage Dealt and Player Damage Taken. As a reference point, for the Challenging difficulty, the default difficulty of the game, these numbers are both set at 1. On Accurate, Player Damage Dealt is set to 1.5, meaning the player deals one and a half times as much damage to prey, and Player Damage Taken is set to 2.7, meaning the player takes more than two and a half times as much damage from prey on Accurate than on Challenging. Those are some big changes, and they make Accurate feel like a very different game. Hunts tend to be shorter but require more caution and active thought. Even the most skilled players won’t succeed on every hunt. Knowing when to give up the chase is crucial, otherwise your wolf might not survive the harsh wilderness of Yellowstone. Accurate is not for the faint of heart and is by no means necessary to enjoy WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition to the fullest. The game is designed to be engaging and well-rounded on Challenging, which offers a test of skill without being overly punishing, and there will also be an Easy difficulty, for those who want a more relaxed experience. But for the bravest souls, Accurate offers our most realistic, most difficult representation of the life of a wild wolf.
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We are releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access on July 25. That will be followed by multiplayer and Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.
WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7.