Working on a big project like the Saga* sometimes feels like climbing a mountain. And sometimes when you're climbing a mountain, the path has some switchbacks, where you have to turn and go back and forth rather than progressing directly up to the summit. Switchbacks can seem slower but they're often necessary in order to make steady, sure-footed progress and find a clear path up tricky terrain. With WolfQuest, a switchback is especially frustrating, but it can be unavoidable re-route when we find some element of the original game design that just doesn't work well with the Saga. Today's devblog looks at several such things.
Learn to Hunt Quest: The first quest in the game, Learn to Hunt, makes perfect sense as the initial quest in the game, since hunting is fundamental to wolf survival. But in the Saga, you'll see (and help) your pups learn to hunt...so why does a two-year-old wolf have to learn to hunt all over again? This is pretty easy to solve by renaming this quest "Learn to Hunt Alone" or "Survive Alone" or something like that.
Wolf Names: When designing Anniversary Edition five years ago, we settled on a nice and simple method for naming wolves in rival packs: Use the pack name and start with 1 and go up from there. It works fine if you play the game a few times, but of course we should have known by then that many people will play the game more than a few times. Redesigning this is relatively simple, but it's tied to a much bigger revision of rival wolf packs, making them persistent and dynamic over the years of the Saga. Raul has been working on that and we'll show it in an upcoming devblog.
Aging Up: This is probably the most glaring example of a design element that doesn't work well in the Saga. When we added Age Perks a few years ago, it seemed unfair to force your wolf to advance in age each year, since some players might well want to stay the same age and keep their current perks. But in the Saga, with time passing continuously year-round, it makes no sense whatsoever. Are your pups going to be frozen in time as well? So I really wanted to remove that option entirely...but after consulting with some players and hearing their strong opinions on the matter, we decided to keep it. Tommi came up with a reasonably good solution: If you decide to stay the same age, all adult wolves in the game will also stay their current age, and only pups will keep growing up until they reach adulthood. I'm honestly not thrilled with this solution, but it's hard to take features away from players, so I accept it.
White Coats: We like to use real wolves as the basis for wolf coats in the game. Those wolves range in age, so some have gone white or whitish with age. Offering those coats makes the game more realistic in the big picture, but a bit weird for specific wolves, particularly the player wolf which is always two years old at the start of the game. We have some ideas about how to address this, but it gets more complicated since all wolves get more grizzled with age. Someday we'd love to simulate that over the course of each wolf's life in the Saga....but that presents multiple challenges, technically and aesthetically, with performance impacts. Eventually, we hope to figure out a good solution for that, but we don't know what it will be or when we might tackle it.
Those are just a few things that we're grappling with, or hope to grapple with at some point. Overall, we're making good progress with the Saga, but it's a big job and will take a good while before it's ready to release. Stay tuned for updates!
* What is the WolfQuest Saga? Basically, it's "the rest of the game" -- where time keeps passing, your pups keep growing -- learning to hunt, growing into yearlings, and eventually (usually) dispersing to find or form a pack of their own. The Saga will be a free update. We do not have a release date for it.
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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!
Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.
We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.