Being a wolf is dangerous business. You have to stick your face right into the thick of it, biting animals that weigh three or or four times more than you do. Wolves can take a beating and survive -- but sometimes they get hurt. So, to represent that, beyond the damage and health system, we've been thinking about adding an injury system to the game for a long time. But the question has always been how to make injuries into good gameplay. Having just a random change of getting an injury, and a penalty to an attribute, doesn't seem fair (even though that's realistic).
We mulled over this, periodically, for a couple years, and then, last summer George came up with the idea of injury tiers: You can get a minor injury any time, with a small penalty, and then, while you have that minor injury and before it heals, you have a chance of getting a major injury. So once you have a minor injury, you must decide how much risk you want to take on, given your current situation.
This adds a nice element of risk and reward for player tactics. So we refined that into what we've now built in the game. At any time, when taking damage, there's small of getting a minor injury. If you do, that injury stresses your body (and perhaps you're compensating a bit for it), so then you're at risk of getting a major injury, which has a much bigger penalty. Both kinds of injuries heal -- minor heals faster than major, of course, and both heal faster when your health is high. To keep track of your injuries, we've revised the Pack Info layout so you can see exactly what's going on: what kind of injuries you currently have, and what effects they have.
Most injuries don't have a physical manifestation, but major leg injuries do -- which means we're bringing back Limpy! In WolfQuest 2.7/Classic, Limpy was based on a real Yellowstone wolf who had a permanent limp. But wolves also get injuries which cause temporary limps, and that’s what we are representing in this new injury system. And now you can get a leg injury and thus a limp on any leg (not just the rear right leg, like the original Limpy).
This new injury system is coming in the next patch (probably in several weeks) along with a new DLC pack featuring cosmetic injuries (and ten new coats)! Stay tuned for more about that!
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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs. More maps and wolf customizations are also coming in 2022!
Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will turn our attention to other platforms.
We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.