Launch Day & Free Week

Greetings, Folks!

We’re excited to announce that Fear The Wolves officially leaves early access today. We’ve also released the sixth major patch that introduces massive new additions to the game, such as the artifact system, a new mutant, anomalous lockdown areas, and more.

The free week should start around 6PM CET / 5PM GMT / 12PM EST / 9AM PST / 8PM MSK.

We’d like to extend a huge thanks to everyone who played Fear The Wolves in Alpha, Beta, and Early Access. Your continuous feedback and support have been the grass roots of our work on six massive patches to improve the game.

As part of celebrations, Fear The Wolves introduces the “First Hunter Week”: From tonight until February 12th, the game can be played for free, and can be purchased at a 50% discount to keep for good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MayOY000a4A
Over the past months, we’ve read a lot of feedback from the community. We’ve also added many features to the game, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes. Below is a short recap of what has been changed throughout early access.

Fear The Wolves Early Access Improvements

Game flow

• Added the possibility to start a match with fewer players using a smaller map
• Spectator matchmaking
• Improved shooting
• Improved wolf behavior
• Rooftop extractions
• Unified mode (Duos as default, with friends or strangers / Solo available)
• New pre-match system (enter the map immediately & vote to force starting a match while waiting for the minimum number of players)
• Anomalous lockdown areas
• Wolves can break doors

Game content

• Three new customization sets
• Lot of new or improved points of interest and environments on the map
• New weapon, the SOK-94
• Hidden stashes around the map with high tier loot (treasure map system)
• Axe item allowing access to boarded up rooms with high tier loot
• Vaulting
• Voice chat available for squad
• New deployment system
• On boarding elements: Dynamic tooltips and tutorial loading screens added
• Artifact system
• A new mutant: the Wolf Matriarch
• Wolf Matriarch Heart
• Spore Artifact
• New point of interest: Stadium

Graphics

• Updated anomaly effects, weather effects, and a variety of new shooting VFX
• Improvement of heat VFX weather
• Improved textures on specific elements
• Reduced texture quality difference between level of settings

Performances improvements

• Client performance improvements
• Auto settings
• Various client crash fixes
• Performance optimization: huge work on LODs
• Sounds improvements
• Improved server capacity and reworked server re-partitioning

Quality of life improvements

• Added Ultrawide support for 21:9 monitors.
• Rebalanced the mouse sensitivities, allowing players to better manipulate their settings.
• A lot of new settings
• Compass added
• More sounds
• Nvidia Highlight feature
• Auto attachment

Localization

• 13 new languages (Russian, Simplified Chinese, Ukrainian, French, Italian, German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Spanish)

Most of the new content and game improvements listed above are based on your feedback! That’s why we’d like to thank you for playing the game and posting feedback as well as reports on our community hub and official forum. Without this small but dedicated player base who supported us over the past months, we couldn’t have done it.

Therefore, those who have played Fear the Wolves during Alpha, Beta, or Early Access will be receiving 5000 in-game currency as a gift. If you haven’t played the game recently, there’s never been a better time to come back and give it a new shot!

Below is the full change log of this sixth major update.

Change log

New Features

• Anomalous Lockdown areas:
  • When you don’t collect all Spore artifacts in Anomalous Lockdown areas, you will be hit by the permanent radiation ( 3-5 DPS, depending on the radius to an artifact)
  • Fungal Anomaly:
    • Will attack players trying to find a Spore artifact:
      • Largest radius will attack players who are sprinting
      • Medium radius will attack players who are walking
      • Smallest radius will attack players who are crouching

    • Anomaly needs some time to recharge after attacking a player
      
    • The damage and range will be affected by player’s radiation protection
      
    
    
  • Spore Artifact:
    • You can collect up to 3 Spore Artifacts in a stack.
    • It allows you to see hidden players through walls and landscape for 7 seconds. (Note that you can’t use any weapons during these 7 seconds.)

  
  
• Wolf Matriarch:
  • Wolf Matriarch is the leader of several wolves and will spawn near the end of the match
  • Can summon new wolves
  • The Wolf Matriarch will keep her distance from players. If you manage to get close, she won’t hesitate to defend herself and will begin attacking you
  • The Wolf Heart Artifact can be collected once the player defeated a Wolf Matriarch. The Wolf Heart Artifact has three functions:
    • Protect its owner in a passive mode (You won’t be detected by wolves, except for Wolf Matriarch.)
    • Apply passive mode to teammates in a limited radius
    • Can summon a pack of wolves (2 charges)

  
  
• Wolves knocking down doors:
  • If a player hides behind a closed door, a wolf will knock it down.
  • After being knocked down, the door will be broken and can no longer be used.

• New customization set: Airborne Forces, including 11 items
  
• Revamped UI
  • New Inventory
  • New in-game Map

• Added 22 Steam Achievements
  

• New dynamic tooltip (Spore Artifact, Heart Artifact, Fungal Anomaly, Anomalous Lockdown, Pre-match, etc…)
• “Hide/Show items highlight” option is available in settings for more advanced players who would like to lighten the UI of the game
• New Loading screens (Wolf Matriarch, Anomalous Lockdown)
• New background for Loading screen with Wolves
• Credits are now available in the Lobby

Optimization

• Optimized the Evacuation stage

Balancing

• Following new standard of map size, the number of vehicles has been reduced by two

Artwork on the map

• Added a new point of interest: Stadium
• General polishing of all new points of interest

Bug fixes and polishing

• Fixed an issue where if the door has been opened during the pre-match, it would stay open, and players would be able to pass through at the beginning of the match
• Fixed an issue where the game would be blocked if the player presses the button "Open one more for 500$" without enough money
• Fixed an issue where Alive Counter didn’t work properly
• Fixed an issue with grenades not landing in the targeted place
• Fixed an issue where even if the “Force Start Accepted” message has been displayed, the countdown would restart
• Fixed an issue where the weapon would shoot automatically if the player presses the shoot button while opening the map
• Fixed an issue where loot boxes would fall through objects on which players were standing
• Fixed an issue where the UI would still remain on the screen if the item tooltip has been displayed in pre-match, and then the match started
• Fixed the “twitching” effect of rivers
• Fixed an issue where players wouldn’t receive any “kill” credits when a player in knockdown state used the “EXIT TO LOBBY” button
• Fixed an issue where the head position while vaulting was unnatural
• Fixed an issue where some rocks all around the map didn't have any collision
• Fixed an issue where the DOWNED debuff icon would stay on the screen after a player has been revived
• Fixed an issue with equipment not displaying properly when a player exchanged a piece of armor for another one
• Drinking Vodka now adds a layer of fun to the player's screen
• All menus should be functional now
• Fixed an issue where squad members that loaded slower would spawn far away from their teammates
• Fixed an issue where squads were made with existing players in a game and not new players connecting to the game
• Fixed an issue that the keybind didn’t display properly for "You have low health, press "J" to use your medkit"
• Improved the in-game map
• Fixed an issue where if the character fell from a higher place while reloading, the reloading animation would continue
• Fixed an issue where the deployment map didn’t adapt to resolution changes that prevented players at lower resolutions from picking villages on the right side of the map
• Fixed various localization and UI formatting issues
• Fixed an issue that players staying in a vehicle were not able to click on the deployment map during pre-match
• Fixed an issue that caused the background to flicker
• Fixed an issue with backpack dropping into any loot container, extended slots would duplicate contained items
• Fixed some issues related to dynamic hints
• Fixed an issue where some blocked buildings didn't have a board in the entrance door
• Fixed many invisible collisions

As always, don’t hesitate to bring to our attention any feedback you may have in regards to the changes!

Fear The Wolves is FREE until February 12th! Spread the words, bring your friends, and drop into the radioactive wasteland!

See you in the game,

The Fear The Wolves Team