Since announcing the upcoming Katmai Coast game expansion two weeks ago, we've seen a lot of discussion and received a lot of questions about it! In today's devblog I'll address a few of those.
First: Many people are using the term "sea wolves" when talking about wolves in the Katmai expansion. This term is generally used to describe wolves who live on Vancouver Island and along the coast of British Columbia. That is some 3,000 kilometers from Katmai National Park, so that's different location, different ecosystem, and different population of wolves than in Katmai. Sea wolves are certainly cool, but we chose the wolves of Katmai for a variety of reasons: the beautiful location, the rugged coastline, the dominance of brown bears, and the primacy of marine mammals as main food for the wolves. Since the Katmai coast is not an archipelago, wolves don't spend much of their time swimming from island to island -- which is good because wolves don't swim very fast. (In the game they actually swim a little faster than they do in real life.) It would become tedious if you had to swim around all the time from one island to another. So, I would call these coastal wolves, not sea wolves.
Another notable thing about the Katmai coast how remote it is -- no roads reach it. And the site of the game map is very isolated even from the rest of Katmai National Park. Just inland, only a few kilometers from the shoreline, is a long line of volcanoes. They are severely steep and glaciated -- simply not navigable by land animals. This line of volcanoes extends all the way down the Aleutian Islands and beyond, forming part of the Ring of Fire that circles the Pacific. These volcanoes mostly wall off the coastline from the interior. Some animals have wandered here in enough numbers to establish a population -- bears and wolves being the two big ones -- but others, even including animals like caribou and coyotes that live elsewhere in Katmai National Park, have not found the way through the few navigable routes to get here.
As isolated as the coast is from the rest of the park, the Katmai coast is even farther from Yellowstone National Park. It's quite unlikely that a Yellowstone wolf would find its way up to Katmai. And until recently, I figured that we should not allow moving between the Yellowstone maps and the Katmai Coast. But in the Saga, you can play thorough multiple generations of your wolf pack, and it becomes quite limiting to be stuck on one map. That's why we decided to allow moving between Lost River and the Yellowstone maps. So we then decided to allow moving between Katmai and the other maps. While it's very implausible, we decided it was an important to compromise on this for the long-term game experience. (If that bothers you, just don't do it!)
Finally, in case there was any uncertainty, this is going to be a DLC package that will cost money to buy. It's a game expansion, which means got a lot more new stuff than a DLC map, so it will cost more than a DLC map, but less than the price of the game. We haven't yet landed on exactly what that price will be.
We'll share more about the upcoming Katmai Coast game expansion in future devblogs, so stay tuned!