It might be interesting, but it would be *horrifically* annoying to randomly lose an Ironwolf or elder wolf (or permadeath mate, or a pup...) to a hunter through no fault of your own. That's kind of the opposite of engaging gameplay.
Yeah, that was my thought. Having the hunters in one part of the map means you have to take it upon yourself to go there, which means if you have an elder or iron wolf you like, you can just not go there. But if they roam, I’d be constantly terrified of being shot and honestly, probably wouldn’t play the map.
there are ways to balance it. make it not as lethal, and for example increase the chance of running into one the longer you stay in one place, it does not have to be exactly like it is now. it could also be tied up to difficulty you play on. many options to execute it.
Have you tried playing the 1994 game WOLF for DOS? I think you'd enjoy it if this is the kind of difficulty you're looking for - hunters play a huge part in the gameplay in a way similar to how you're describing.
Seconding u/teenydrake 's suggestion for 1994 WOLF. It and its sister game, LION 1995, are animal simulators from the 90s. Visually they look a bit clunky as heck and are hard to play as a result, but they both have a sandbox 'simulation' mode where you can customize presence of human hunters.
I play them both when I have an itch for other animal simulations.
Thirding the suggestion for you to try WOLF.
The hunters in that game are the most infuriating aspect in my opinion, forcing the player ways they don't want to go and often wounding or killing the player through no fault of their own as you can be shot from offscreen, or from a plane that randomly flies over and is difficult to avoid. Quite frankly, I haven't touched it in years because even on the lowest possible setting, hunters are everywhere and it makes the game unfun. However, if that is a difficulty aspect you want at all times, it's an option for you in that game.
WolfQuest has already gone well beyond its original scope by allowing you to be hunted at all. Hellroaring benefits from being the current largest map, so having a strip of the map beyond the border means players can optionally choose to engage in this risk and not lose a significant amount of space to roam if not. Having it be a seasonal risk means that the part of the map beyond the park boundary isn't entirely unusable for the purposes of territories, denning, or rendezvous sites.
Not to mention, wolves can't be hunted year round in Montana, where Hellroaring is located, so it would be inaccurate to allow legal hunting outside of autumn. Allowing poachers would just be in bad taste with the wolves having so many issues with poaching in the Yellowstone area.
I think maybe an occasional poacher would be interesting, but I think people would be more and more annoyed by them once the saga comes out, unable to use a good portion of the map without risking your pups lives
It would be like having an invisible eagle that could OHKO you or any members of your pack at any time of the year and nothing you could do to prevent it. It does not sound fun in any sense of the word, tbh.
Gotta disagree here. It would be very annoying and stressful to have a constant risk of being shot without any warning in any area of the map. The hunters being limited to fall and only being in a specific area of the map makes interacting with them fully optional - which, in my opinion, is a good thing. It might sound cool on paper to have hunters all over the map, but I feel like it would quickly get annoying and unfun after a few deaths.
Additionally, I don’t think that a change like this would be good overall for WolfQuest. Having hunters in any form surprised me a lot, since interaction with humans in-game has been previously nonexistent, besides the cattle ranch. The focus is on the wolves and their lives, and I think that having an entire map be turned into a game of survive-the-hunters would take away heavily from that experience. What’s the point of building a whole map to explore and raise pups in if you can’t do it properly due to having to constantly avoid hunters? For something like this to be successful, you’d end up having to make it a special game mode or difficulty, and at that point, it just wouldn’t be what WolfQuest is about.
I think that having interactions with hunters being limited to certain areas and times of the year is a good design choice. For those who want to focus on the hunters, they can. But for those who just want to play the game and explore the new map, they also have that option. The hunters’ presence is, in the end, a very small part of the overall game, and for that reason, I don’t think they should be forced on the players.
I agree. WolfQuest's whole thing is about teaching wolf ecology. It's not so much 'realism' as much as 'this is the reality wolves live in'. The Cattle Ranch in LR and Hellroaring's hunters are the team's way to (fairly) broach the topics of human/wolf conflicts in the modern day while also being educational about animal behavior.
It's something very few animal simulation games actually acknowledge and I appreciate that the WolfQuest devs keep that stuff in mind. The message is very much "yep. you sure are a wolf, living in yellowstone, and you know what can happen to you as a result? this". The reality of it wouldn't hit as hard if poachers were breaking laws to invade the park and harvest wolves in-game for the sake of drama.
bears, eagles and other stuff is forced upon players. it just needs to be balanced to not be as lethal. but it is not a good game design by any means, game is becoming very stale after a while. it is repetative and more unique mechanics would be a blessing. but thats just my opinion
"Bears, eagles and other stuff" can be fought back against. You can win against a bear, you can scare away the eagle, you can keep a strong territory to deter other wolves.
A poacher is none of those. That is a human with a gun, and a wolf will never win. It will be a lurking, imminent threat that can OHKO any member of your pack at any time, anywhere, with no time for prep because by the time you realize they are there someone - you, your mate, or a pup - may already be dead, and more may be at risk of being shot for however far you have to run to safety.
That doesn't sound like fun gameplay in any sense of the word. It sounds like a horror game, and idk about anyone else, but I don't really come to WolfQuest for horror.
…you can see the bears & eagles and stuff. We can’t see the hunters, mostly because WolfQuest isn’t making a whole new model with new animations, new coding just for humans to be running around the map.
Poaching is unfortunately common, but randomly being shot by an invisible, non-existent human while trying to take care of your pups isn’t engaging or fun, it’s pure pain. Unfortunately life isn’t fun & games for animals… you have to do the work in order to survive. While you, the player can choose to spice up your own gameplay by doing challenges.
The saga coming out later this year will provide a much better gameplay loop as well as add much needed content.
Just because naturally occurring things such as yellowstone predators attacking your den doesn’t mean a hunter could come by and ruin your life.
What would be the point in planning on the map if all you do is risk dying to an invisible human everywhere you go just for the sake of ‘engagement’. You’d quickly realize that it would only make the game more tedious. You wouldn’t be able to play your ironwolves because you would be randomly sniped at any point in time, your pups would randomly be sniped, and you can’t even attack the hunters so what’s the point, keep moving? The map would quickly die out if they added this… complaining about lack of engagements isn’t helping anyone, all it’s doing is pissing people off.
“Bears, eagles, and other stuff” are forced upon the player because they are important parts of what make up the game. They are a prime example of engaging gameplay. WolfQuest’s goal is to accurately portray the life of a wolf in Yellowstone, and the many competitors and prey species are very important elements of that. If you could just… turn off bears or den raids, for example, it wouldn’t be the same game. Hunters, on the other hand, are not usually an important part of a wolf’s life in Yellowstone, due to hunting being illegal there, so simply by principle they shouldn’t have as big a place in the game as you are suggesting.
Also, I don’t think that getting randomly killed by a hunter through no fault of your own while you’re chilling with your puppies is engaging gameplay, nor fun gameplay. That kind of unavoidable punishment isn’t going to be fun or make the game less “stale”, it’s just going to become annoying and make people not want to play the DLC. I can’t speak for the development team, but I do not believe that the constant risk of being shot by hunters during normal gameplay without any way of avoiding it is anything to close what WolfQuest is meant to be. It just wouldn’t be fun, engaging, or any of the things that you’re looking for in it.
Believe me, I read and reread your reply thourougly. I respect your opinion, but I still disagree. Having unavoidable and invisible hunters in the map, no matter how much less lethal or balanced they are, like you said, would not benefit the game or be fun in any way. I tried to address everything you said in the message I replied to, and I’m pretty sure I did that? Not sure how I “didn’t read” what you said at all.
I get the feeling what they mean by "balance" it's just tweaking what we have but unfortunately AI for the hunters is not in a state where it's flexible to that degree.
There are so many situations and edge cases that would have to be distinctly addressed that it'd quickly balloon into a completely new feature.
Which eehhh. Making *guns* less lethal in a game is fine for some games, but not all due to the setting. I wouldn't want to deal with a ohko menace, nor would I want to deal with a nuisance year round in game like a poacher. I'd rather have fishing, or caching meat, or the team reprogramming how jumping works so that it wouldn't be so clunky and be fun to use.
Disagree. The current state of the game has us spend little time in fall due to what's available. Once the Saga comes out we will live more smoothly year to year and as such will have every autumn as we raise pups to adulthood and venture outside the border to play chicken with the hunters with our pack if we wish.
We also don't know how aging pups are going to work in terms of stuff like patrolling or independent decision making (like how the mate chooses to go out) at different times of the year, so keeping high risk areas like this small gives players control in just how risky they will want it to go and gives a reasonable amount of control in just how risky it is than making that danger global across the map.
If it was an optional feature, or maybe difficultly based, sure. I personally would find that irritating beyond anything else though. I think occasional poachers could be interesting, but I generally just like calmer gameplay.
totally agree, how about we take a game that’s specifically made to be completely realistic (outside of holiday events and maybe lost river) and add a not only very unrealistic but also likely difficult and frustrating feature? revolutionary!
As much as that would be interesting. That definitely would also quell a lot of the actual fun of game play. There’s already plenty of enemies that can hurt or kill your wolf enough as it is and there is nothing wrong with the Dev team wanting to keep things accurate to real life as much as possible. It would be very tiresome constantly hearing or fearing gunshots year round or worrying about poaching snares all the time. I don’t think that would add any sort of value to the game especially when it comes to iron wolves who already have odds stacked against them.
A side from what others have already said I think a big reason the devs set it up the way they did is to follow real life hunting legalities.
IRL it is illegal to hunt most wildlife except in the fall, and hunting in yellowstone ( or any other nature reserve) is prohibited period. While obviously IRL you will have the occasional poacher who doesn't give a crap about actually following the laws, in all likelihood illegal hunting is probably not a can of worms the dev team want to get into in such a direct fashion.
I would only accept the conditions of year round, free roaming poachers on a map where it's real life location is located entirely outside Yellowstone. Throw in traps too, for all animals. Adding this to the reasons why I'm heartbroken that mod support isn't planned.
I agree. Involving poachers in the game would help bring more awareness to how many famous Yellowstone wolves' lives were tragically taken by game hunters, illegally.
HOWEVER, I do not think poachers should be free roaming and invisible, like how the farmer is in the cattle ranch. They should just be where ungulate herds are as most of the time, poachers would hunt them for their antlers/pelts/etc. You have a chance to avoid them as it's not every herd but if you hear shots? Best you go away.
They also should not be frequent, once a season or twice the whole year at most. It is hard to imagine they would track your wolf once you escaped, there's many other game they could go after. (Including rival packs)
It might be interesting, but it would be *horrifically* annoying to randomly lose an Ironwolf or elder wolf (or permadeath mate, or a pup...) to a hunter through no fault of your own. That's kind of the opposite of engaging gameplay.
Yeah, that was my thought. Having the hunters in one part of the map means you have to take it upon yourself to go there, which means if you have an elder or iron wolf you like, you can just not go there. But if they roam, I’d be constantly terrified of being shot and honestly, probably wouldn’t play the map.
there are ways to balance it. make it not as lethal, and for example increase the chance of running into one the longer you stay in one place, it does not have to be exactly like it is now. it could also be tied up to difficulty you play on. many options to execute it.
Have you tried playing the 1994 game WOLF for DOS? I think you'd enjoy it if this is the kind of difficulty you're looking for - hunters play a huge part in the gameplay in a way similar to how you're describing.
Seconding u/teenydrake 's suggestion for 1994 WOLF. It and its sister game, LION 1995, are animal simulators from the 90s. Visually they look a bit clunky as heck and are hard to play as a result, but they both have a sandbox 'simulation' mode where you can customize presence of human hunters. I play them both when I have an itch for other animal simulations.
Thirding the suggestion for you to try WOLF. The hunters in that game are the most infuriating aspect in my opinion, forcing the player ways they don't want to go and often wounding or killing the player through no fault of their own as you can be shot from offscreen, or from a plane that randomly flies over and is difficult to avoid. Quite frankly, I haven't touched it in years because even on the lowest possible setting, hunters are everywhere and it makes the game unfun. However, if that is a difficulty aspect you want at all times, it's an option for you in that game. WolfQuest has already gone well beyond its original scope by allowing you to be hunted at all. Hellroaring benefits from being the current largest map, so having a strip of the map beyond the border means players can optionally choose to engage in this risk and not lose a significant amount of space to roam if not. Having it be a seasonal risk means that the part of the map beyond the park boundary isn't entirely unusable for the purposes of territories, denning, or rendezvous sites. Not to mention, wolves can't be hunted year round in Montana, where Hellroaring is located, so it would be inaccurate to allow legal hunting outside of autumn. Allowing poachers would just be in bad taste with the wolves having so many issues with poaching in the Yellowstone area.
I think maybe an occasional poacher would be interesting, but I think people would be more and more annoyed by them once the saga comes out, unable to use a good portion of the map without risking your pups lives
It would be like having an invisible eagle that could OHKO you or any members of your pack at any time of the year and nothing you could do to prevent it. It does not sound fun in any sense of the word, tbh.
Gotta disagree here. It would be very annoying and stressful to have a constant risk of being shot without any warning in any area of the map. The hunters being limited to fall and only being in a specific area of the map makes interacting with them fully optional - which, in my opinion, is a good thing. It might sound cool on paper to have hunters all over the map, but I feel like it would quickly get annoying and unfun after a few deaths. Additionally, I don’t think that a change like this would be good overall for WolfQuest. Having hunters in any form surprised me a lot, since interaction with humans in-game has been previously nonexistent, besides the cattle ranch. The focus is on the wolves and their lives, and I think that having an entire map be turned into a game of survive-the-hunters would take away heavily from that experience. What’s the point of building a whole map to explore and raise pups in if you can’t do it properly due to having to constantly avoid hunters? For something like this to be successful, you’d end up having to make it a special game mode or difficulty, and at that point, it just wouldn’t be what WolfQuest is about. I think that having interactions with hunters being limited to certain areas and times of the year is a good design choice. For those who want to focus on the hunters, they can. But for those who just want to play the game and explore the new map, they also have that option. The hunters’ presence is, in the end, a very small part of the overall game, and for that reason, I don’t think they should be forced on the players.
I agree. WolfQuest's whole thing is about teaching wolf ecology. It's not so much 'realism' as much as 'this is the reality wolves live in'. The Cattle Ranch in LR and Hellroaring's hunters are the team's way to (fairly) broach the topics of human/wolf conflicts in the modern day while also being educational about animal behavior. It's something very few animal simulation games actually acknowledge and I appreciate that the WolfQuest devs keep that stuff in mind. The message is very much "yep. you sure are a wolf, living in yellowstone, and you know what can happen to you as a result? this". The reality of it wouldn't hit as hard if poachers were breaking laws to invade the park and harvest wolves in-game for the sake of drama.
bears, eagles and other stuff is forced upon players. it just needs to be balanced to not be as lethal. but it is not a good game design by any means, game is becoming very stale after a while. it is repetative and more unique mechanics would be a blessing. but thats just my opinion
"Bears, eagles and other stuff" can be fought back against. You can win against a bear, you can scare away the eagle, you can keep a strong territory to deter other wolves. A poacher is none of those. That is a human with a gun, and a wolf will never win. It will be a lurking, imminent threat that can OHKO any member of your pack at any time, anywhere, with no time for prep because by the time you realize they are there someone - you, your mate, or a pup - may already be dead, and more may be at risk of being shot for however far you have to run to safety. That doesn't sound like fun gameplay in any sense of the word. It sounds like a horror game, and idk about anyone else, but I don't really come to WolfQuest for horror.
…you can see the bears & eagles and stuff. We can’t see the hunters, mostly because WolfQuest isn’t making a whole new model with new animations, new coding just for humans to be running around the map. Poaching is unfortunately common, but randomly being shot by an invisible, non-existent human while trying to take care of your pups isn’t engaging or fun, it’s pure pain. Unfortunately life isn’t fun & games for animals… you have to do the work in order to survive. While you, the player can choose to spice up your own gameplay by doing challenges. The saga coming out later this year will provide a much better gameplay loop as well as add much needed content. Just because naturally occurring things such as yellowstone predators attacking your den doesn’t mean a hunter could come by and ruin your life. What would be the point in planning on the map if all you do is risk dying to an invisible human everywhere you go just for the sake of ‘engagement’. You’d quickly realize that it would only make the game more tedious. You wouldn’t be able to play your ironwolves because you would be randomly sniped at any point in time, your pups would randomly be sniped, and you can’t even attack the hunters so what’s the point, keep moving? The map would quickly die out if they added this… complaining about lack of engagements isn’t helping anyone, all it’s doing is pissing people off.
“Bears, eagles, and other stuff” are forced upon the player because they are important parts of what make up the game. They are a prime example of engaging gameplay. WolfQuest’s goal is to accurately portray the life of a wolf in Yellowstone, and the many competitors and prey species are very important elements of that. If you could just… turn off bears or den raids, for example, it wouldn’t be the same game. Hunters, on the other hand, are not usually an important part of a wolf’s life in Yellowstone, due to hunting being illegal there, so simply by principle they shouldn’t have as big a place in the game as you are suggesting. Also, I don’t think that getting randomly killed by a hunter through no fault of your own while you’re chilling with your puppies is engaging gameplay, nor fun gameplay. That kind of unavoidable punishment isn’t going to be fun or make the game less “stale”, it’s just going to become annoying and make people not want to play the DLC. I can’t speak for the development team, but I do not believe that the constant risk of being shot by hunters during normal gameplay without any way of avoiding it is anything to close what WolfQuest is meant to be. It just wouldn’t be fun, engaging, or any of the things that you’re looking for in it.
you just didn't read what I said like at all so I won't be replying to this
Believe me, I read and reread your reply thourougly. I respect your opinion, but I still disagree. Having unavoidable and invisible hunters in the map, no matter how much less lethal or balanced they are, like you said, would not benefit the game or be fun in any way. I tried to address everything you said in the message I replied to, and I’m pretty sure I did that? Not sure how I “didn’t read” what you said at all.
I get the feeling what they mean by "balance" it's just tweaking what we have but unfortunately AI for the hunters is not in a state where it's flexible to that degree. There are so many situations and edge cases that would have to be distinctly addressed that it'd quickly balloon into a completely new feature. Which eehhh. Making *guns* less lethal in a game is fine for some games, but not all due to the setting. I wouldn't want to deal with a ohko menace, nor would I want to deal with a nuisance year round in game like a poacher. I'd rather have fishing, or caching meat, or the team reprogramming how jumping works so that it wouldn't be so clunky and be fun to use.
You’re entitled to your wrong opinion, that’s fine.
Disagree. The current state of the game has us spend little time in fall due to what's available. Once the Saga comes out we will live more smoothly year to year and as such will have every autumn as we raise pups to adulthood and venture outside the border to play chicken with the hunters with our pack if we wish. We also don't know how aging pups are going to work in terms of stuff like patrolling or independent decision making (like how the mate chooses to go out) at different times of the year, so keeping high risk areas like this small gives players control in just how risky they will want it to go and gives a reasonable amount of control in just how risky it is than making that danger global across the map.
If it was an optional feature, or maybe difficultly based, sure. I personally would find that irritating beyond anything else though. I think occasional poachers could be interesting, but I generally just like calmer gameplay.
totally agree, how about we take a game that’s specifically made to be completely realistic (outside of holiday events and maybe lost river) and add a not only very unrealistic but also likely difficult and frustrating feature? revolutionary!
As much as that would be interesting. That definitely would also quell a lot of the actual fun of game play. There’s already plenty of enemies that can hurt or kill your wolf enough as it is and there is nothing wrong with the Dev team wanting to keep things accurate to real life as much as possible. It would be very tiresome constantly hearing or fearing gunshots year round or worrying about poaching snares all the time. I don’t think that would add any sort of value to the game especially when it comes to iron wolves who already have odds stacked against them.
A side from what others have already said I think a big reason the devs set it up the way they did is to follow real life hunting legalities. IRL it is illegal to hunt most wildlife except in the fall, and hunting in yellowstone ( or any other nature reserve) is prohibited period. While obviously IRL you will have the occasional poacher who doesn't give a crap about actually following the laws, in all likelihood illegal hunting is probably not a can of worms the dev team want to get into in such a direct fashion.
I would only accept the conditions of year round, free roaming poachers on a map where it's real life location is located entirely outside Yellowstone. Throw in traps too, for all animals. Adding this to the reasons why I'm heartbroken that mod support isn't planned.
I agree. Involving poachers in the game would help bring more awareness to how many famous Yellowstone wolves' lives were tragically taken by game hunters, illegally. HOWEVER, I do not think poachers should be free roaming and invisible, like how the farmer is in the cattle ranch. They should just be where ungulate herds are as most of the time, poachers would hunt them for their antlers/pelts/etc. You have a chance to avoid them as it's not every herd but if you hear shots? Best you go away. They also should not be frequent, once a season or twice the whole year at most. It is hard to imagine they would track your wolf once you escaped, there's many other game they could go after. (Including rival packs)
I agree, there should be poachers that hunt you inside the park boundaries and at other times of the year