https://youtu.be/plnOGea7Abk
We’re making good progress with development of the new episode Tower Fall, but as you’ve seen in recent posts on the blog, many of the things we’re working on would apply to the existing game as well as the new episode. These include the new animal spawning and scent system that I wrote about a few weeks ago, plus other improvements like a new wolf-controller and territory system.
Our original plan was to finish and release Tower Fall, then go back and revise the Amethyst and Slough Creek missions to bring them up to par with Tower Fall. But as we work on these new systems, that plan has become increasingly unsatisfactory. It would be quite strange to play through the current game, then go to Tower Fall and find all-new systems that create (we think!) much better gameplay. You all who’ve been playing the game already would probably understand that, but new players would not, and it would not make a great player experience overall.
So we’ve revised that plan by flipping the release schedule around. Now we’re going to release a major game update, WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition, which will be a remake of the existing game using the new codebase. The basic mission arc will be the same, but much of the core gameplay will be reimagined and redesigned to be more realistic, more sophisticated, and more fun.
What’ll be new in the Anniversary Edition?
- New, more robust codebase for all gameplay
- Improved camera and wolf controller
- More naturalistic AI logic
- New animal models
- Improved hunting gameplay
- Bigger and better maps
- More naturalistic animal spawning and scent system
- More naturalistic territory system
- And more!
We will release the Tower Fall expansion several months later.
What’ll be new in Tower Fall?
- All the improvements in WQ 3
- Big new map of the Tower Fall area of Yellowstone
- New missions to raise your pups, introduce them to hunting, and keep them alive.
- Pups grow from 3 months to 7 months
- Pack vs. pack territorial struggles and fights
- And much more!
I know this may be a bit confusing — why doesn’t WolfQuest 3 include a new episode? Well, it could…but then we’d have to delay the rebuilt versions of Amethyst and Slough Creek until Tower Fall was done, and that seems silly. There’ll be a lot of great new stuff in WQ 3 and we want to get it in your hands as soon as we can.
In short, the 2.7 update keeps getting bigger and better -- so we finally realized it was turning into a new version in its own right. Voilá, the Anniversary Edition!
Of course, the big question is When? We keep thinking of cool new things to put into WQ 3, so it's grown substantially in scope over the past months, and now we're aiming to release it later in 2018.
WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition will be a free upgrade for everyone who purchased 2.7, and the price will remain the same. Tower Fall will require an additional purchase; we haven’t decided exactly how much, but probably $6-$8.
One big caveat: Our players are roughly split between PC/Mac and mobile devices. We’ve worked hard to maintain parity between those platforms, but we also don’t want the significant limitations of mobile hardware to hold back the PC/Mac version. This mainly applies to the larger maps and possibly some other improvements — for example, the day/night cycle I wrote about awhile ago. We’ve got a lot of work to do before we know how to ultimately resolve these issues, so this is just a preliminary note that the mobile version of WolfQuest 3 is not guaranteed to be exactly like the PC/Mac version, and we may need to establish minimum hardware specs for mobile — most likely, 1.5GB of RAM memory. If you’ve got a lesser mobile device, you’ll be able to keep playing WQ 2.7. (And we're looking into ways to let you keep 2.7 on PC/Mac as well, for nostalgia purposes.)
It’s remarkable — perhaps nearly unbelievable — that nearly ten years after releasing the original game, we’re busier with WolfQuest than ever before. And it’s entirely because of you, the players, who wouldn’t let it fade away as almost all games do. I can’t think of a better way to mark WolfQuest’s first decade than with the Anniversary Edition and Tower Fall.