I feel as if Hunting has a high barrier to entry. Right now, I can't hunt, because it requires items that I dont even think i have access to. I feel like hunting should have entry level hunts with no entry fees like that, imo.

Exp during the campaign is… not good. Honestly a high difficulty would be ok if we got more than 1 or. 2 xp for a fight.

I dont have much to say on other parts-- though I see mentions of wolves being befriendable and I'm wondering how that works, because I haven't seen any of those yet.

I wasn't here for beta but was here for alpha. While I understand that that was very much just getting our feet wet compared to now I agree that the game feels very punishing so far. I haven't messed around with many features so far but as has already been said the difficulty sees to be set much too high for the beginner levels. The fact that I've had to refill my stamina probably about 7-8 times just to eke out level 2 for both my wolves is VERY steep for the very start of a game.

I have enough food items to just keep feeding them but if I were to try and regain stamina naturally it would easily take days if I wasn't glued to my computer screen from sunup to sundown. That's going to be a very discouraging rate of progress for new players and I wouldn't be surprised if lorwolf suffered from low retention in having many accounts but few who choose to stick around.

Others have said it much better than I and again, only been messing around for maybe an hour now lol, but just adding my voice to agree with what others have said that it feels very punishing and seems to demand you be glued to your screen constantly in order to make any reasonable amount of progress.

While the alpha test was obviously very much a free for all it was much more enjoyable to play. We were able to earn experience at a decent rate and start getting involved in other activities like the gauntlet and be able to make some progress. It was more fun. And while I understand that the campaigns aren't meant to be easy and are meant to take up the core of the game and your time, there needs to be a balance between telling a story with appropriate difficulty and providing a game that's still fun. I was having way more fun an hour into the janky alpha than I am an hour into early access.

And I stuck around! I contributed to the kickstarter because I had fun in the alpha. It was a choice born of experience, I know this game can be really fun! But right now it just seems like it's trying to do 50 things at once and isn't managing to really do any of them well. I know there were a lot of features promised from the kickstarter but I'm thinking maybe they should dial it back and just try to polish up a few at a time.

This game can be fun. Source: I was there. But right now it doesn't seem to really want you have fun.

This is my first time playing, got in last night.

Honestly I am having an absolute blast. I might actually be mildly addicted and need to control myself better, even. :P As someone who plays Flight Rising every day, I am actually somewhat worried I will end up abandoning that game for this. I really enjoy how much more active the playstyle can be, with all the professions and the campaign. I am sure my opinions will change the more I play to have more critique, but really currently my only complains are minor quality of life things that I've already made suggestion threads for. But overall, I am legit in love with this game. Extremely excited to start gathering more wolves and settling in more!

It is interesting seeing a bit that the impression for those who were here for earlier sessions is that it became much harder. This sounds totally valid, and might not be my place to speak, but it seemed like the earlier runs were easier specifically to test whether features worked, programming-wise? And that the game overall needed to be slower as it's intended to be a slow, mostly background, idle game? Mainly I wasn't there so I don't know, probably shouldn't compare to things I don't know. :P

But as a complete first timer, I am in love!

I have to agree with a lot of the downsides made by other users here, I wasn't here before this EA but just in general there's a lot of really grindy-for-no-reason mechanics in nearly every aspect of the game and it just doesn't sit well for a pet site. Many people including myself don't want to be forced to babysit something that should be a stress-free game/site you can pop into on your free time to check on things and still get rewarded, with the option to spend hours doing something more productive like campaign - but the stamina is used up so fast you cant actually play it for long without having to stop and wait for food to cook anyway so you can't really do that either :/

Cons:

• Professions need major work, ESPECIALLY farming. Long wait times aren't the issue, its the need to be constantly checking in else you get zero return for your efforts
• Xp and stamina need balancing (I honestly don't see the point in stamina for exploring, its just a food/cash sink. We're already spending our own time playing which should be ‘currency’ enough. Those who can only play for a certain amount of time a day vs playing in small amounts all day long shouldn't be punished for it.)
• There needs to be lots more information to explain things on every page, as @Rowlet mentioned some things are confusing and not explained at all
• Nothing seems like it blends well together mechanically: full stamina and a bunch of food to hunt but you can fail anyway, 1 single xp to win a fight yet 3 xp to pick up bugs, 5 stamina from all wolves in your party just to move so its better to only use one wolf to explore, you need a specific item to hunt but to mine you can use picks and/or wheels to speed it up if you want to and to farm you can use special food to have your garden tended to but fishing and cooking you need no items - confusing right? Its like a mishmash of mechanics tossed around, don't get me wrong item requirements are fine as long as they're always accessible not just rotated in a shop randomly, but they need to be coherent and consistent; If hunting requires an item to start, then cooking should require a piece of coal, mining should require a pick, farming should require fertilizer, fishing requiring bait and so on, or alternatively only using those items to speed up times. Making everything different confuses people and makes it tedious for no reason.

Pros:

• The site itself is clearly well thought out, there's lots of early work being done now rather than later when it would be a pain like being mobile friendly and having dark mode (which is gorgeous!)
• The art is awesome, I can only imagine how much cooler it'll be in the future with different patterns for wolves/more apparel ect
• Auto battling is *chefs kiss*
• I love that there's quests in campaign and would honestly love to see daily quests added for rewards as a more in depth addition to activities (defeat x number of enemies, collect x many items ect)

I wont stop playing but probably wont be too active during EA, there's HUGE potential though and I hope the devs can get the site to a point most people would be happy with it because I'd love to see this game flourish and stick around for the long run!

Edit: Adding as well I personally have a good amount of free time to spend on sites like this but I usually don't, and I don't wish to be forced to do so either. I've spent hours on here today and feel zero sense of accomplishment even though I've been trying everything out, and that's a downer tbh because I really do want to like this site

I'll use Flight Rising as an example as I play that daily: it has a good mechanic of getting a little done in a small amount of time (gathering takes less than a minute) or getting a lot done in a longer amount of time (bond familiars, fairgrounds, level fodder ect) depending on how much time you can dedicate to it that day. Both of those time frames reward you, only you get more the longer you play, as it should be, but here I really don't feel that the rewards are all that…well, good? Not to mention you're both penalized by playing a little (crops dying) and playing a lot (stamina depletion) Deorwine below me has some great points I 100% agree with and explained things much better than I could ^^;

Haven't been there for any earlier testing, but from a new player standpoint, the start is terrible. If there is something that Lorwolf suffers from the most, it's lack of any gameplay information. I am not a fan of the fact that there are so many little icons ( on your corner profile, under your wolves' energy bar, on your wolves' battle stat bar ) and none of them have a hover-over text popup, explaining what it means.

After you make your wolves, you land on your Den page (not profile, which is a curious design choice but whatever). If you are a veteran from other pet sims- or even if you are not- you know the point is to breed the pets. I don't know if there was supposed to be some kind of pop-up or info page, but it took me ridiculous few minutes of poking around to find out that to breed my wolves I have to go to the profile of the female, which was supposedly ‘in heat’, and there click a button.
The choice to have your wolves be pregnant before going to a nest/burrow to finish the process before giving birth is… odd. According to a friend (who told me to give this site a shot), they can stay pregnant indefinitelly until a nest spot is cleared.
Much more freeing than other sims, but ultimatelly will cause issues down't the line, where the there will be sudden massive influx of pups. But anyway, breeding, fairly standard if somewhat convoluted.

Crafting and Cooking is bit of a disappointment. As a new player, you arrive at essentially a blank page with no information whatsover, and only a coloured animal mascot for a company. I know crafting recipes can be purchased from the mole market, but what about cooking recipes? Are you trully expected to just discover them by random?

Fishing is fine; perhaps the only minigame that trully feels like minigame. Tho tad exploitable by those trully dedicated, if your only limit is wait, what, 20, 30min to recharge a trip? Perhaps the 25 stamina cost is supposed to be the control for that, but with fish immediatelly grilling in the cooking, each filling up 20 stamina, you are still getting ahead of that curve. One can assume there would be those crazy enough to return to fishing every 30 min, stacking up on ‘easy’ food source. Some will hardly have so much time to do the same. In my opinion fishing should be a daily, with limited number of trips, without any stamina payment.

Mining is terrible. I was not lucky to get a recipe in the market for either pickaxe or a wheel; my wolf was like a slug, moving through the mine; spending 50 stamina just to get a cart with 15 ores, probably only making 2 ingots with are worth pocket lint is not my idea of rewarding time. Worst is the fact that your wolf doesnt even automatically return when your cart is full. Even worse that if you dont have enough of one ore to smelt it into ingot, it stays in your cart, taking up space.
Lower the stamina cost, do away with the cart limitations. Have the ‘mining camp’ area have limited inventory slots (one slot capable of stacking 10 ore), make the smelting a different sort of brewing. Let there be slider of sort for the time spent- longer time in mine meaning greater depths, greater depths meaning more ore and more rare ore, give us the ability to sell unwanted ore for some pennies.

There was enough said about farming today, but I will add few points from me. I dont know how many different seed there are, but I dislike the inconsistency of seed requirement per plot. And more than that, but to deliberately choke the farming experience- as terrible as it is- by limiting the amount one can purchase off MM so that you can only hope to plant 1 plot with one crop and no more? Or in case of the rare/blue walnut, not able to plant it at all? (even if one was level 27; for curiosity, you need 5 walnut seed to plan one crop, and MM only sells them in amount of 2) Water shouldnt be even a resource in my opinion; there shouldnt be any necessary babysitting recquired to keep the crops alive. Heck, tile the ground, keep the infuriating seed amount needed for a plot, but do away with water; make compost a buff you can use but dont necessarily need to. Make it possible to choose to compost only food items, so the exchange has some balance. Have the farming duo be another buff- or perhaps by feeding them, you can stock them up with seeds and compost and have them automatically grow crops for you for a time limit when you know you wont be able to do it yourself.

Hunting is terrible.
I could accept an item recquirement, I could accept different time recquirement; I will never accept that it wants 100 stamina to do, and in some cases 100 food points as well, already where everything is so stamina heavy and food is precious. If we at least were guaranteed 100% success- but we arent, because RNG gods suck, leaving you with quests where none of you progenitor wolves match any of the synergies, thus you only have 50% chance at even succeeding. (And after spending 45 min, spending 100 stamina and 100 food? That smarts.) Get rid of synergies recquirement or do a pity rewards, half the stamina recquirement, anything- but rn the hunting is just not worth doing.

Campaign is so far so mind numbing, with combat not getting enough experience, leveling up not getting any stat change for my wolves, and majority of stamina is spent digging holes or rolling in smelly ‘mud’ with no reward given (oh yeah, you get 1xp point, lovely). Can't say anything so far about the quests; the lore didn't hook me, nor any of the characters I so far met. But it's ‘great’ that all my sniffing and rolling and drinking bad water got me to level two while game is throwing level 4 and higher enemies at me, that's a rather steep hill to climb out of sudden.

Gauntlet is unplayable to me right now. I have Jocols, both getting smoked in the first round, because clearly there is no balancing done whatsoever. Untill I have more wolves to fill the gauntlet party with, I guess that activity is blocked for me.

And finally Arena.
Man, what to say about Arena? I can guess the idea behind it was some sort of Pokemon style battle, when players will take their Companions and fight it out- but in its current itteration, I cant see that working at all. Since there aren't any popups or tutorials or anything from the game to explain, you will, like me, flounder and scratch your head to figure out how to start Arena. That there is currency called ‘Paws’ (why does the game have so many currencies?) that you use to temporarily buy companions or refresh the ‘store’. That each companion has synergy similar to your Wolf (and works the same way as in Gauntlet) and that you really want to built up the best team with most synergies. But nothing will tell you that to level up a companion in Arena, you need 3 same star-level companions of the same kind. Meaning to get a companion to level three, you need to buy 9 of 1-star level of that companion. Sounds easy- it is not easy. RNG once again striking, as you furiously hit refresh after refresh, not getting what you want. (and each refresh costs 2 Paws. You should be getting a free refresh after every fight I think? But it doesnt always work) And it will only get worse the more companions and more breed are available in the game. Oh, and another gripe of mine with Arena? Companions are not made equal. Some are stronger than others; some have better abilities. The rarer the Companion, the better overall stats it has. Combine that with deadly RNG and synergies, and there are some fights you just cant win.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I would appreciate more transparency in both Arena and Gauntlet, by having a battle log of some sort. It's ‘nice’ to see your wolves/companions battling it out while having no idea what they are doing or what any of the stat effects on them do.

I am disliking how the Mole Market is very bare bones. Nice that we have so many breed changes and fur coats but where are the other items? I dont know how long the market refresh is, I assume 6 hours or so, but to have only 5 option per item kind to buy? And some of them in limited quantities? (Looking at you, seeds) Not a good show.

Overall, I dont have a desire to return to Lorwolf at this moment. I spent good several hours with it, testing and exploring everything, and as a person with full time job and limited time, this is just such a punishing time sinker. The only rewarding ‘daily’ had been fishing so far.

I could be criticizing more; like premium shop chock-full of options, push for beginner packages and support bundles, and merch (so much merch). For a site that just entered early access??? Also, a planned subscription service, are you serious? A check box at the beginning of the registering where I can agreed to recieve offers and deals????? Is this a pet sim site or an E-shop??

TLDR; Right now, the game is largely unfun, lacks necessary information/tutorial, is too chaotic iand too punishing/grindy. There is no idle gameplay, no dailies that would lure a player in, and me, personally, is put of by the monetization choices that were put up and prioritized over any design that would even keep the players hooked long enough to the site to consider buying premium currency. As I said, I won't be returning to Lorwolf after today, and maybe only when there is some effort done in making it better. We will see.

(Also to have reply button in a Forum thread be only present at the very end of the forum? Another odd design choice.)

Okay yes it hasn't been that long, but I reflected more on the features and wanted to be more detailed about some things:

One thing in specific that I am enjoying, is that the different tasks have a wide variety in effort required to do them. I do like having some things that require/allow for more frequent checking, and many things that can be set-and-forget for a long while. I am someone who works from home, and has ample desktop time in my day for quick check-ins, so my opinions are totally biased towards my lifestyle. I had accepted that farming is something I can only really do with focused, active-online play time, but I can also see how it might mean a large portion of players just won't be able to do it at all if they have to check it so frequently. Perhaps they can still die (I still think it's neat to have a high-risk task type mixed in) but a slower decay on their nutrient levels? Of all the activity types, it is the only one I have been not able to do today due to dying plants. But, that also leads me to think, is it okay to have a feature that only certain playstyles will be able to handle? Part of me thinks that because of the flea market, it's okay that some features are more demanding. Another part of me thinks that could be unfair to decide, for people who do like to max out all levels and generally participate in everything. So hmm, it's a tough one. I do want to say good luck to the dev team in figuring out and deciding how to balance things. ^^

Otherwise, pros and cons for me specifically:

pros

• autobattling (seriously adore this. I hate having to do it manually when it'll always become a grind anyways regardless, so huzzah on that!)
• the character & items art
• having eye color as a gene
• the overall aesthetic and design of the site + how it feels
• has a pretty solid mobile-friendly design already
• dark mode!!
• I like the player profile layout
• wide variety of things to do
• amusing story + actual missions
• completable goals + dailies that rotate through tasks + give rewards, very nice!
• a fun amount of various things to discover and do by random chance while doing the various activities
• personally, I am a fan of the premium implementation and the idea of an eventual subscription service. These kinds of website are not profitable ventures, and I have always wished one would take more advantage of helping people support them properly. It would be awesome for this not to have to be a side job for one person, but a real career for multiple people, and based on the kickstarter of $47k, just that amount is significantly less than a decent tech-skilled person's salary for one year. I know they've continued to do sales (I bought the bundle things, wasn't here for kickstarter stuff) but especially as there are already other very established petsite, it is going to be difficult to make something that makes enough money to get to where it needs to be anyways. So anyways, yay, easy support systems!

cons

• forums are missing some key features (subscribing, “last post” details at a glance, quoting people, @ ing people, deleting your own posts)
• forum profile customization is sparse + many colors are pack mandatory, but on the upside it does look very cohesive
• no easy way to preview things before you buy them
• hard to understand where to start
• not obvious enough built-in tutorials for features on the feature's page; required outside exploration to figure things out (discord, guides, forum) and some buttons & labels are vague (mining was the most confusing for me to grasp)
• first 1-2 levels in campaign are very difficult to get through, as you are required to lose in fights quite and bit, and do many encounters, to get strong enough to start k illing anything. Makes it seem like a difficult uphill battle, but it does get easier once you are level 2+ and can start accruing battle wins. Would be preferable to be easy to start, then harder later.

I've been reflecting more on the concept of this game being slow, and how different I feel from a lot of the posts here. I do think a huge part of what paints the mechanics themselves in a bad light, is the lack of easy tutorials for everything. It doesn't feel good to be lost and confused. It also doesn't feel good to start campaign, lose to everything, earn a single xp for every task, and see your wolves need 130 to even reach level 2. So, if you only have like ~30 minutes or less a day to play, it is going to seem immediately too difficult to even want to do. I have been at my desk all day learning every single thing, and playing through it anyways, and on the other side of the initial bottleneck of pain, it's been fantastic. But that first-time-experience does really, really, really need to be worked on.

It's fun for me to think about all these things, and I am really excited for the future! :D

I have mixed feelings so far. I’m surprised (and disappointed) that so few of all the excellent QoL-suggestions players made during beta have been implemented during closed development.
The UI still feels very unpolished on many pages. For example, the wolf profile is still mostly a wall of text of the same font size, with no flair whatsoever. The ad placements are very clunky on most pages, but maybe they need to be or people will not pay for the premium subscription. The forums don’t look finished.

The game is very hard in the beginning, and I think one of the reasons might be because both explore and gauntlet expect you to have 5 wolves (or leveled companions), which is impossible for a newbie, and that leads to a lot of frustration. One solution could be that the game gives you 3 randomly generated wolves in addition to your starter wolves. Then you would have a full team from day one, making you better prepared for the challenge. If you don’t want the random wolves you can simply release them.

Farming is not at all what I hoped it would be, and I won’t use it in its current state. Hunting I think I might like once I level up my wolves some more.

With all that said, I’m still optimistic about Lorwolf, and think the game has a lot of potential. However, I have lowered my expectations regarding how soon a full launch may come.

My first impression is that this site is absolutely incredible for being put together by such a small team. The art is gorgeous everywhere and I can see the level of dedication that has been put into the game. I honestly find it being a lot of fun.

I can see where everyone is coming from saying that the beginning levels are too steep for activities and the campaign, and that exp gained seems unbalanced in the latter, but personally I haven't had any issues in the campaign since I got plenty of exp still while ignoring battles for a while. Exploring with just 1 wolf brought in enough food to save up for exploring with multiple wolves and I got to lvl 10 by exploring with just one of them pretty fast. The quests were very hard had first, but after just exploring for a while and gaining exp they aren't too hard. I also wouldn't want to be able to complete the campaign in just a couple days, but that's just my personal opinion. Tbh though attacking was extremely difficult starting off so I do see where everyone is coming from.

Honestly I can see myself getting completely addicted to this game and the custom apparel option makes me so excited that I almost can't contain it. The Pageant is also really awesome as well.

I haven't done a lot with activities like farming or mining so I can't say anything about those but I plan on taking my time and getting involved with those more heavily after launch. They do seem to require more involvement and I'd rather go through the grind and figure out recipes after launch instead of having my effort wiped.

My opinions!

Cons:

• The Professions suck.
• Hunting has hard requirements and a low chance of success.
• Leveling up in Professions and Campaign is very difficult.
• If you're not lucky, Mining is so slow.
• First bit of Campaign is very hard. Fighting two level 3 creatures with two level 1 wolves on Quest 2.
• Forums are missing a lot.
• Many mechanics, little information. The bits of information are very vague.
• Overall, chaotic layout.

Pros:

• Art is wonderful!
• The concept is excellent.
• Cooking is great!
• Auto-battling.
• Dark mode! This is great.
• Mobile-friendly layout!
• Campaign is very immersive, save for the cons listed above!
• The live clock in the corner is great!

I think it has a ton of potential!

A lot of what I was thinking was already echoed here, but what I did notice was that a lot of the current features feel more like a mobile game rather than a pet sim, which is…not necessarily a bad thing, but can drive off other players, especially if they don't have a lot of free time. I recall someone echoing that they could perform certain things because they're WFH, and that's the same for me, but yeah I dunno if a lot of people are going to appreciate having to sit around and watch the game too much.

I was going in blind for a while and was quite lost as well. Only got a better feel of what to do after looking at some of the guides, though I had to figure out a few other things that have not been posted yet (ex. Smelting only works when you have five of the same ore. I was wondering why my two silver and three copper didn't do anything).

Would definitely appreciate some tutorials or at least a help button per page. I was looking more for a button to tell me what to do for that activity rather than a hand-hold walkthrough. I'm hoping the help page is much easier to code and implement and I think it would help out others quite a bit! Of course, there's still the matter of the grind at the start, which I also agree should be adjusted to help new players settle in better without feeling like they're walled too hard.