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.