JimJim
Hi Lorfolk,
Most of you haven't met me before. I'm JimJim — the developer for Lorwolf. I've been implementing Alaunis's amazing art since we began building Lorwolf about 7 years ago. I've been the coder in the background while Alaunis handled the dev updates and the conversations with all of you.
We have not put out a real update in a long time, and I want to acknowledge that directly. People have been left guessing about whether Lorwolf is still being worked on, and that isn't a fair position to put anyone in. I'm not going to try dressing it up — it was too long a stretch, and the goal of this post is to mark a change in that. Lorwolf is still being actively developed, the work hasn't stopped.
With this post, I also want to share that Alaunis has permanently stepped away from Lorwolf. The past stretch has been a difficult one for her, and stepping back was the right call. I want to thank her here for the years of art, writing, and care she poured into this site — Lorwolf is what it is because of her, and that won't change. Going forward, I'm picking up her responsibilities including dev updates/patch notes, and organizing contracted artwork.
When we first talked about Chapter 2: Dark Horizons, the plan was to release everything as a single expansion. The reality is that a lot of that work has been code-complete for some time, while other parts are waiting on art. Rather than continue to hold finished features back until everything is ready at once, I'm changing how we ship.
The plan is to release new features every other month, starting today. The pieces of the expansion that are already code-complete will roll out across these bi-monthly releases as their art lands, instead of all arriving in one drop. This post is the first of those releases, the updates revolve around enhancements to campaign and combat systems in prep for the next chapter.
Here's what is going live today:
Campaign keyboard controls. You can now explore the campaign using the keyboard.
Campaign skip combat. A new site setting allows you to skip combat while exploring in the campaign, if you'd rather focus on exploration. Skipping combat does not affect combat outcome or rewards.
Combat Performance Enhancements. Combat no longer triggers a full page refresh between encounters. For a long time there was an opt-in setting called "SPA combat" that improved this, but it had enough quirks that we never turned it on for everyone. That fix has been holding steady through a lot of testing on my end, so it's now on by default for all players, and the toggle has been removed from the Settings page. The result should be noticeably snappier site navigation after combat.
New map styles. Several map zones have refreshed visual styles. You'll notice these as you move between regions.
Map star system. Campaign map locations now earn a star rating as you explore them — 1 star at 100 explores, 2 stars at 250, and 3 stars at 500. Having a higher star rating will increase rewards from that location.
New Game+. Once you finish the campaign, New Game+ unlocks. This allows you to replay the storyline at increased difficulty, for increased rewards. You may swap between any unlocked NG+ level and normal campaign at any time without losing progress. NG+ progress will be wiped when new storyline chapters are released. I wanted to include this feature early in our releases to give players something to do while waiting for the next chapter.
Saved Parties. You can save your campaign parties and swap between them instantly. No more re-picking the same wolves every time you want to switch between, say, your campaign team and a gauntlet team. This feature is meant help players reuse team combinations as they work through NG+, but saved parties are available across the rest of the site too.
Damage Meter. A real-time damage meter is now available during combat to help players fine tune their team combinations. As damage lands, you'll see it tallied live for both your party and the enemies you're fighting. There's a "Hide DMG" toggle if you'd rather collapse it out of the way for a cleaner view of the fight.
Campaign charges. These have been introduced to address bot spamming in campaign. You have 50 charges, exploring consumes 1 charge, you must have at least 1 charge to continue exploring. These charges regenerate quickly — the goal is to prevent spam while minimizing the effect on normal gameplay. To help alleviate negative impacts from these charges, we added the auto-explore feature.
Auto-explore. Map spots that have earned at least a 1-star rating can now be set to auto-explore. You'll automatically begin auto-exploring your selected location when your campaign charges are full, allowing you to receive rewards from that location while you're away. Rewards scale up with the location's star rating.
Quest Icons. Updated/added quest icons and fixed existing bugs so that the quest log UI shows when new quests are accepted and when quests are updated/completed.
Quest History. A proper quest history log is now in the game, allowing you to review dialog from in-progress and completed quests. You may access this via the history icon in your quest log.
"Too Tired" rework. Running out of stamina while exploring now results in the "Tired Wolves" message the your campaign den page, making it easier to feed and continue exploring.
There are also backend changes going out to improve performance across various areas of the site. It's not something you'll see directly, but worth a mention in case anything looks out of whack.
The next release will land in roughly two months, with smaller bug-fix patches in between as needed. As more of the work clears its remaining art needs, you'll see it appear in these releases. I'm not going to pre-announce a specific feature list for future releases — the point of moving to this cadence is to release things when they're actually ready, not to commit to a roadmap and then explain later why a piece slipped. That being said, I want to leave you with something to look forward too. The next release revolves around Guilds & Live Chat.
Lorwolf is still very much a project I care about, and the recent stretch of quiet was never because I'd given up on it. Thank you to everyone who's stuck around through it. The plan from here is straightforward: ship steadily, communicate when there's something to communicate, and get more of what we've been building into your hands.
— JimJim
