I will write a longer opinion some time but PLEASE add an “Are You Sure” to certain Ignore events. I have accidentally Ignored a Wild Wolf three times now by reflex (while hunting for them) and it is making me extremely frustrated.

Semi-updated thoughts;

The game is not difficult, though punishing in the early game (to its detriment for player retention, I believe, the players' first week on a site is extremely important).

What it still is, is incredibly tedious, and a lot of it seems pointlessly so. There are still a lot of unnecessary timers, and many of them of perfect length to remind me of mobile game mechanics that would be designed to be monetized (which lorwolf has not been and we are thankful for*), hurry-up-and-wait simulators. Optional alerts would be a great boon here, as well as the ability to queue more items in the cooking/crafting lines when spaces open, without having to wait for the whole thing to clear, because right now you are either stuck waiting an awkward amount of time on things to finish or risk forgetting about them.

A lot of the mechanics are still lacking a lot of QoL with no changes from the beta, suggested or otherwise. More excellent feedback continues to be shared in the suggestion forums.

Crafting suffers from almost every recipe requiring so much bone paste. A re-balance is needed here somewhere; it makes sense moonstones should take a chunk, but it shouldn't be a limiting factor in almost everything, geeze. Both crafting and cooking really would benefit from the ability to sort and filter available recipes and plans, in many ways; from the ability to hide things we don't have the resources for, to being able to filter by ingredient, etc.

The battle system would definitely benefit from a log, and more QoL in hover-overs and general feedback about what is actually going on, but otherwise is nice as a baseline. The campaigns are cute, but a lot of the quests are weighed so poorly vs random, time-wasting events that eat energy and give nothing that the intentional slow-down is just frustrating and feels poorly implemented. It made sense to slow people down for beta since the campaigns are not done, but I sincerely hope once the full thing is in place that we aren't bogged down so hard. It doesn't need to be totally 100% sequential by any means, but if I only get to progress a quest timer that needs 20 interactions a total of once, or no chance at all through an entire stamina bar, that is way too low.

Hunting is one of the mechanics that is largely a waste of time, energy and resources as it's implemented right now, with the rewards paling in comparison to the food/pebble requirements. Higher level mining is like this also, the ability to keep getting copper just trashing up a loot pool in an area that takes a long time to level up to access to the point it's almost more beneficial to just ignore it unless you like blowing through pickaxes.

Fishing is fine, though it would be nice if the site in general had some accessibility options for keybinding the interaction with ripples if nothing else. While I don't personally need it, I've seen that feedback enough from people that do to think its warranted.

Farming needs to be tied in better with cooking at bare minimum, and its extreme demands for babysitting reconsidered. The NPCs can still be beneficial to temporarily pausing those demands without making the non-buffed timers quite so long and requiring as much frequent interaction.

Gauntlet is… mostly a waste of time as implemented with it's input energy requirements vs its rewards, which is a shame because it could be quite fun. Otherwise it's fine, though it needs the same things the battle system for campaign does otherwise. Same with the Arena, it's a solid base, typically fun! But it suffers from a lack of transparency in what is actually going on that is not a design choice so much as a baffling oversight. There is honestly way too little to tell you how your “deck” is synergizing and what moves any of them have access to without needing to go dig through your bestiary, which is a pointless endeavor because of the arena's timed nature. The timed aspect of it is fine, but players need access to more information in all of these systems, the arena just happens to show it the most.

I'm a new player--I've been keeping an eye on Lorwolf since the kickstarter but wasn't around in beta. Figured I'd give my two cents! There's a lot I like here, but definitely some room for improvement.

First and foremost, as many have said before me--the gameplay is severely hampered by lack of an on-site tutorial. When I first joined, I had no idea where to start. Linking the forum guides for certain activities is helpful, but these guides are easy to miss, and there also isn't (to my knowledge) a guide for the campaign, which is where a lot of new users will go first as that seems like the logical first step. Lorwolf would greatly benefit from a beginning game NPC that shows you around the site like in Lioden. Basically, anything that's a walkthrough of the mechanics, especially when you first sign up, because I was basically entirely lost.

The early game is hard. I think this is something that could definitely be helped by an in-game tutorial, because it could alleviate a lot of confusion and allow new players to focus on progressing. For example, when exploring, it took me a minute to realize I could add another wolf to my party, and even longer to realize that I could add companions. Once I realized that, I stopped getting bodied by kapuras and could actually progress and level my wolves up. An in-game tutorial showing you how to change your party, how synergies work, etc would have streamlined the process immensely.

Once you get past the initial hump of “what do I do” and start learning the ropes, the campaigns get significantly easier. I finished all pack campaigns within three days once I realized that I could rotate through different questlines to level up my wolves more gradually. The different questlines themselves are somewhat confusing--each one starts with me asking to join a different pack, when I thought we chose our pack when signing up? Regardless, I also agree with others in this thread saying that the EXP rewards you get from fights are wack. I don't think leveling up is all that difficult once you learn how everything works, but it's really weird to get more EXP from finding mushrooms in a cave than from defeating a bear above your level. If they want to keep the level progression the same, they could up the EXP requirements but reward more EXP for fights--similar result, but it helps give players a more real sense of progression. I will also say that I'm currently off work for the holidays and so I could stand to blow a couple hours a day tooling around on a petsite--I'm not sure how quickly I'd be able to progress during my regular working schedule.

Some other notes:

• Breeding is confusing. It took me a while to figure out how to actually breed my wolves, and the whole “wait to send your wolf to a nest” system only adds to that. Even if the wolf won't give birth for a couple days, you should be able to send them to the nest immediately after breeding if you want. It's also very weird to say that female wolves are in heat when they're ready to breed which is basically all the time they aren't pregnant; I thought at first that Lorwolf had a heat cycle like Lioden/Wolvden. This terminology should be scrapped--it's confusing, not biologically accurate, and also a little odd in a game where the wolves are so heavily anthropomorphized.
• The minigames/professions are largely okay, but could also stand a walkthrough of some basic game mechanics. For example, I held off on sending a wolf to mine for a while because I thought that I wouldn't be able to do anything else with them while they were mining. An explanation that you can have the same wolf doing multiple activities at once, and that the leveling is not wolf-specific, would be helpful.
• I appreciate that farming stopped having crops die, but I still don't love how I have to babysit the page to ensure maximum yield when basically no other profession requires that. It's definitely better than it was before, though.
• Mining needs a walkthrough. It's not intuitive that you need to send your wolf back up to the furnace after mining ores, nor that it takes five ores to make a bar, so you just have ores sitting in your minecart if you don't have enough.
• Cooking, similarly, could benefit from this as well. It's really confusing at first to figure out if you're supposed to buy complex recipes like for crafting, or if you're just supposed to spam click ingredients and figure it out. Also, am I able to cook my crops to make more stuff? Because I have 96 corn and 85 wheat just sitting in my inventory, never popping up on the cooking page.
• The Arena is very fun once you get the hang of it, but it's a pretty significant time commitment where you can't leave for even a second. I really wish there was a pause option for the botted games; there's been several times where I'm midway through a match and something comes up irl (family member needs help with something, pet starts eating something, important phone call comes in) where I'll have to abandon the match for a few minutes and then get bodied for the rest of the game. It's unfortunate because I really do enjoy it, but I can only play it during a time where I 100% know I won't be disturbed for a little bit, which isn't feasible for a lot of people.

Overall, I think Lorwolf is a promising game, as once you get past some of the hurdles it's a pretty fun gameplay loop with the professions. However, the lack of an in-game walkthrough or tutorial makes things very confusing up front and will probably end up driving some players away. I do think a lot of these issues that I mentioned could be solved with a tutorial, or at the very least, ameliorated into tolerable levels.

So! I've come in mostly blind to Lorwolf. Wasn't here for beta testing, did the barest amount of skimming for info and saw a few posts about it from friends.

I've been here less than a day, so here are my fresh newbie thoughts:

Sign-up process:

Singlehandedly the Most Emails I've ever had to receive to sign up for a petsite. Likely part of being in Early Access and not The Full Thing, but that's definitely something that should be streamlined in the future.

Starting Out:

You get to see some banners with a little bit of explanation for some factions(?) based on some sibling(?)… deities? Legends? And you are meant to pick one to align with.

According to friends, each of the factions/deities actually represents one of the Four Horsement of the Apocalypse (modified), and they have designs floating around somewhere. Apparently?? I think it would be nice to include these as part of the information for each faction when you join. Show off the art assets on the actual website!

Lore:

It's all in the RPG forums for some reason? It's also out of date with regards to having breeds missing. The lore needs its own section on the site, some sort of lore compendium outside of the forums, with each breed or important lore event having its own page.

I find it slightly disappointing that the dialogue for each of the pack quests doesn't change depending on your chosen faction. It's a little… What exactly is the Point of the factions if the main storyline isn't going to acknowledge it?

Forums:

Lots of missing features already detailed by other people. I would also say that the sales forum needs a lot more splitting up. Wolf Sales, Wolf Buying, Item Sales, Item Buying at the very least. Having all of that mixed in together is extremely chaotic and even with such a small site population… after a brief foray in there it's a little too much. In the future, when we have more users, you are going to need more forum subdivisions for sales or no one's going to be able to find anything in there.

General UI and Homepage

The UI is pretty nice! It's fairly slick, darkmode is nice. There's definitely a few places where it could be tightened up - a lot of the buttons and bars around the site are very bright against the Darkmode colours, and others - like page indication on the forums/flea market/etc are - need a little more contrast. Or maybe just unbold the numbers other than for the page you're already on.

The Homepage is nice. Might be good to have a little blurb about what Lorwolf actually is - canine based petsim with a mysterious plot.

Edit: I don't think I actually have the energy to continue writing here, Overall Lorwolf seems like a nice site, but it's definitely not ready for full release just yet. That's what this EA state is for though!

As someone who's played for a few weeks… meeeeeeh?

All of the gameplay stuff has been talked to death (most of which I agree with), so I'll just say half the time other player's wolves don't even load- and that's boring! This is a pet site; I'd love to see the pets.

This is pretty much just a ramble, so apologies for the messy post.

I registered on the 6th of December, played for a few days and then just… forgot about the game for around three weeks due to how punishing and slow the early game felt. The lack of a tutorial and the fact that the signup process never clarifies that you need to create two wolves definitely didn't help.

Campaigns were rough at the start, but things started to go more smoothly once I was able to buy some wolves from the market. I've finished three of the four campaigns by now (haven't started Goldsea yet). I feel like rotating through all the campaigns seems to be the smart choice if you don't have many wolves yet, though it's not the most intuitive.

I really like the autobattling feature! It's great stim, and the fact I don't have to engage with battles is nice - I'd take that over a tedious battle system.

I've just gotten started on breeding wolves a few days ago, so I can't comment much on that, but I'd love it if the den feature was changed so you could send wolves there after breeding and if the “In heat” text was changed to “Ready to breed” or something among those lines, for reasons explained by other users on this thread (TLDR; it's confusing and not biologically accurate).

Fishing is my favourite activity, though I'd love if the trip timer was reduced a bit. Cooking and crafting could use a tutorial on how to unlock more recipes, but they're alright as they are. Mining needs a tutorial, as it's not intuitive that you need to send your wolves back to the furnace after mining ores (I spent an entire hour waiting for my wolf to go back to the furnace on my first day). I haven't played around with farming on hunting enough to give an opinion.

Haven't played around with the forums too much either, but I noticed that it's not possible to preview your posts or to reply from any page of the thread save the latest.

UI looks nice, darkmode does its job well though I'd appreciate if the green buttons got changed to a more neutral color (perhaps blue?).

Lorwolf looks promising overall, my biggest gripes with the game are the rough start and the lack of tutorials/guidance for new players.

Hi,

I think pretty much everything gameplay wise have been said multiple times. I just have a couple of things to say.

I've been part of the beta, and now playing in EA for a couple of weeks now (yes I was very late). And there is one big thing that stuck for me, we are in EA and the game is mostly the same as during the Beta. At this point, we should be having access to the full game, not a still in dev version of the game. I was expecting to have if not the full campaign, at least more of it. And not I'm bored with the game, I've already done all of this once, I don't know what to do anymore.

This brings me to my second point. Lorwolf is my first pet game ever, so I have a bit of a different opinion about it than the majority of people here who have already played one if not multiple pet games. Since beta, I still think the timers to breed wolves are way too long. And at this point I don't know anymore if it just that for me, they are too long or if there are so few things to do that everything feel longer. I'm here to play a with wolves, and only getting them every couple weeks (I know I'm exaggerating there) is making me lose interest.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game and I want it to grow up, but right now, I'm a bit skeptical for the future.