Saga: Hanging with the Yearlings

[loboLoco]

We're making good progress with the Saga!*

Lately we've been working on the yearlings -- the pups who survived their first year of life and now are helping raise the new pups of the year (whenever they're not playing or getting distracted). Even at 13-15 months of age, they're still very puppyish, even though they're physically approaching adult-wolf size.

I know there are a lot of questions about yearlings, so let’s answer a few of them:

1) Once you've got some yearlings in your pack, how do you tell them what to do? The short answer is: you don't. Just as with your mate, you can go up to any of them and whine to invite them to hunt -- but they have minds, preferences, and personalities of their own. Typically, females are more likely to stay at the homesite and males are more likely to go hunting -- though certainly an individual can have a different preference. Packmates are more likely to stick with their best friend (using the new fondness feature between packmates). And you'll see packmates whine at another wolf to invite them to go hunting -- sometimes they may invite you, and sometimes they may not, but either way you can join them if you want.

2) Similarly, when it's time for some wolves to go hunting, yearlings are more likely than older wolves to stay with the pups, since they're not great at hunting yet. They lack an adult's strength and skill. So don't expect to be able to sit back and make all your packmates do all the work. In fact, marking territory is generally the responsibility of the pack leaders. They're the only ones who do raised leg urination. Everybody else can pee and howl, of course, which helps a bit, but territory is the leader's job.

3) So then, you might ask, can we find some dispersal wolves and invite them to join our pack, so we can delegate the work to them? Sorry, no. While that does occasionally happen, it's usually when the pack needs a new breeder (packs are families, not an aggregation of unrelated wolves).

4) The way to expand your pack is by having pups, and playing through the years. A good percentage of pups won't survive to become yearlings. But it only takes a few years to get a multi-generational pack. In Yellowstone, packs tend to have 6-12 wolves. Sometimes they get bigger (though the famous examples like the Druid pack with 37 wolves, was a quirk from wolf reintroduction, before wolf and elk populations stabilized). We'll definitely have a cap on pack size, since it just gets awkward to have so many NPC wolves in your pack (along with performance impacts of so many NPC AIs running at full bore)

Tommi has the yearlings working pretty well, generally, and so we've also been working on gameplay balance. For example, while yearlings do help out with daily work, it's limited. At a carcass, they can eat extra food to regurgitate for the pups, but as much as adults, since they still need most of that food for their own development.

So: good progress, but still lots to do before the Saga is ready to release! We'll share more as we go, so stay tuned!


* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game." Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but 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.

[DinoDogDude209]

This looks really great so far! It will definitely be fun to go hunting with the yearlings and see how they learn how to hunt, and being able to have a yearling or subordinate watch the pups will also be really useful. I'm definitely interested to see more information about the yearlings in the future!

[Windstrider]

This is exciting! It will be really cool to have multigenerational packs and see the pups grow up.

[Skrillning]

This looks super fun. While I'm disappointed that the yearlings won't help out with territory marking much, I'm really excited to see how the AI plays out in the game and interested in the interactions between yearlings and pups! Fantastic work as always, devs.

[Angel15797]

This looks so fun, and I can't wait for it to be released! I was wondering though- wolves will interact with us, but I may not notice or hear them "inviting me to hunt" etc. Would there be some sort of pop-up that lets you know they are interested in doing x, y, or z? Anyways, I can't wait! So glad they are still working on it.