Sorry to keep anyone who may be interested in Call of the Wild waiting anxiously for another entry. It's been a really hectic past 2 weeks and the team, including me, haven't had a whole lot of time to do as much as we would like to unfortunately. Hopefully, this long ass entry will make up for the lack of updates in the past month. On the flip side, Frostbrand and I did manage to iron out a great deal of details regarding the quest progression, piercings & equipment, Frostfall compatibility, shapeshifting abilities, reworked some spells, and touched up on the capstone abilities. After carefully reviewing all the good feedback you guys have been leaving and taking into consideration the possible benefits & drawbacks of our choice, we have come to a decision in regards to quest progression. As with any major decision, it didn't come without heavy debate and a comprehensive plan. Naturally, there's bad news but also good news to go with it.

The Bad News

Foreword

To start off, we're going to dive head first into the bad news. (because I know you like good news so much ) If you have kept up with Call of the Wild's development from the very beginning, you'll know that we originally planned for the new sexual spells to be based off "subschools" of magicka. Each subschool was to be derived from a vanilla school (destruction, alteration, illusion, etc), keeping its "flavor" but adding a twist to it. A twist like... oh, I don't know... SEX. Without stating what is already obvious, we'll cut to the chase.

Perks, Magick Subschools & Perk Trees

The Allure, Decay, Ferocity, and Growth subschools of magic will likely be scrapped in favor of a more centralized MCM perk tree. The reasoning behind this was that modifying or even overhauling perk trees would cause an assload of incompatibility issues for players who use mods like SkyRe or similar mods. It would be unfair to force players to uninstall such a popular mod for the sake of being able to use CotW. The drawback to this is that we will likely have to cut down on the number of perks we had originally thought there would be. Reworking perks and perk trees isn't very fun at all, at least not for us. Forcing the player to spend those hard-earned (assuming you don't cheat!) perk points on what might probably be overpowered/underpowered perks doesn't seem like a very appealing idea for anyone either. What this means is that we'll have to rethink our approach and go the MCM menu route instead. We're aware that some of you might not like nor use SkyUI, but we feel the functionality this menu grants is too valuable to pass up.

Quest Progression

Now comes the part you've all been dreading. After a great deal of consideration and discussion with Frostbrand, we've come to the conclusion that there will be a need for interaction with other sentient beings in order for quests to move forward. Even though a great deal of you preferred to keep human contact to a minimum, if at all, there will be plenty of opportunity to play as the reclusive druid. Visiting the Thornwood Covenant tribe village will most likely be kept optional to an extent. The vast majority of quest progression will be done outside of the village, on your own, and well within mother nature's domain. You will seldom be required to interact with someone outside of the tribe, but you will frequently be interacting with nature's beasts and possibly doing radiant quests such as protecting the Skyrim's forests from encroachment by people.

The Good News

Foreword

We're aware that to some of you, this may not necessarily be good news at all. Please keep in mind that almost every decision we make is based off or influenced through your feedback and we don't take each lightly. Unfortunately, there are some aspects of Call of the Wild which you might not have a say over because this is the way we as a team envision the end product. Anywho, on to the good news!

Subschools of Magick, Perk Trees, and You

As mentioned before, the new perks and abilities unique to CotW will come in the form of a MCM menu skill tree. Unlike the default skills system already in-game, these new perks and abilities will not cost you a single hard-earned perk point. Instead, you'll be earning some form of "XP", leveling these unique skills, and spending special points on the new perks. For now, we'll unofficially call these new "points" Primal Points, for a lack of better term. The new skill system will imitate the way S³ handles it's Slaver skill, but with a menu to facilitate Primal Point distribution, progress tracking, perk planning, and even to unperk from any given branch of the Primal Magic perk tree. The upside to the centralized perk tree is that it will keep the confusion of having several new skill sets to a minimum and will ultimately make the new perk system a whole lot cleaner and user friendly while remaining complex enough to keep the player engaged.

As Frostbrand and I continue to discuss perks and abilities, we'll make a final decision on whether we should keep or completely do away with the originally planned subschools of magic in CotW. Remember, nothing at this point is written in stone and is prone to constant change.

Quest Progression

When touching on the quest progression topic, this was a lengthy and difficult debate. Personally, I favored a progression system where the player can keep human (or elven) contact to an absolute minimum and the quests themselves would focus on the player interacting with their environment, creatures, deities, and the likes. Ideally, the player would only ever need to come in contact with other sentient beings is to either have sex with them or to pry something from their dead fingers.

Unfortunately, that will not be possible for several reasons. The first being that creatures in Skyrim are generally very dull and lack animations aside from the basic movement and attack animations. While there are bestiality animations, there is only a handful of them compared to the relatively large collection of animations for humanoids. The second reason is that it limits what we can do with the plot of quests. While CotW is primarily a sex mod, we also have great plans for creating an expansive arc of content-rich quests, which will ultimately form a story for players to enjoy. The way we see it, there is only so much you can do with creatures in the way of plot devices to keep the quests interesting and engaging enough to want to actually do them. This is where the Thornwood Covenant will step in and save the day.

However, this isn't to say that you will be forced to follow around and serve a bunch of loonies living out in a garden of weeds. There will still be plenty of opportunity to lean away from your tribe and its people to do some of your own discovering and progression. Interacting with your tribe will be largely optional, with the exception of a few critical features of CotW such as learning your first Primal Magic spells, getting your first tattoos inked on, tribal orgies, and for "orientation" on your new abilities as a member of the Thornwood Covenant. After the initial stages of CotW's questing, you'll be set free and allowed to do your own thing. A good portion of the quests will progress on the periodic interactions with four wise and powerful sages, which will be hidden and scattered across Skyrim living in solitude (not the city! @_@). The plan originally was to have each of these sages be a master of a single subschool of Primal Magic (Allure, Ferocity, etc). The higher level spells and capstone abilities will all be learned from these sages once you have progressed enough through the quest arc where you will need to reach out and find them in order to advance your training.

The quests from the sages would be a variety of things such as acquiring an ancient forbidden tome, collecting rare ingredients (ingredients unique to CotW) from dangerous locations, performing sexual favors for them, slaying Forsworn trying to expand into your forest, amongst many other things. Doing these smaller, meaningless tasks will eventually earn you their respect and begin to trust you with more important things. At each stage, they will offer to teach you a new spell or capstone ability, ink you with another tattoo, or teach you a new ritual which you can perform on your own later. We may or may not include interaction with creatures like spriggans or wisp mothers at this point, but there will be ample opportunity of bestiality.

Man Overboard!

As many of you have probably noticed, RangedPhoenix is now on a hiatus, which means he'll probably not be involved with CotW's development. He has stated in his own blog that he'll also be shelving the mod he was working on independent of CotW. Hopefully he will return in the future. You can read the details about it on his blog here on LL.

Moar Shinies from Johnny's Vault!

And the part of the entry that you've all been waiting for is here! Here are some more screenies and pics of stuff I've been doing for Call of the Wild. Some of these are actually pretty old, but decided to show you guys anyway for hell of it. Again, none of these pics represent what will be in the game or how they will appear in-game once CotW is released. As always, everything beyond this point is NSFW!

A set of older pics of labia piercing concepts. Largely intact still, but without the Ankh.

New bone piercings for the nipples!

A revised version of the older labia piercings. Got rid of the dangling bits, thought they were too much.. still not satisfied though.

This is an alpha version of an early perks concept I put together a while ago. Needless to say, after deciding to scrap perk tree overhauls, this is largely irrelevant now. It's still a nice concept though. The perks would automatically turn into penalties upon equipping a piece of armor or clothing, and revert back into a boost when taken off. Fully functional, but somewhat inconvenient to the player since you had to spend perk points. It was also unbalanced and could become extremely crippling, or stupidly overpowered at times.

Bonus Pics!

While on the subject of mother nature, here's what the spriggans thought about being made less important within CotW. Fair word of warning, these have nothing to do with CotW nor its development!