While I definately understand the wolf enthusiasts here and they have a point, we should not forget that this is a FREE Update. Frontier won't earn much additional money with it (as I don't think it will influence new sales a lot), but has put major work into it. Basically unpaid work to react to feedback those of us have, who already bought the game. Of course those will support the game further with buying DLCs, but at the end of the day, the development time for free updates is and will ever be also financially restricted.
I'm not a coding expert, but I am very sure it is much cheaper and faster to implement an undertone under a texture, that can be replicated, as it is to create a few hundred new textures. Because it could not be "just" wolfs then. At the end of the day, this is Planet Zoo and not WolfQuest nor Planet Wolf.
What I hope for is kind if a color wheel range in undertones, that leads to not only light, medium and dark shades of a color in all animals effected, but looking at the pictures, it'll probably be "just" that. Three tones for each. And I can settle with that, because I get this improvement for free and as I can't effort to work for month for free for my customers, because they have extra detailed wishes, so can't Frontier. And remember, we have still a lot of other stuff on our list we would likem to see as a free update, so maaaybe being a little less demanding on one single feature would be cool.
See, the problem with this argument is... this is something that should have been in the game in the first place, at launch. The uniqueness and individualism and realism of the animals was literally an advertisement point in early game promos. We were told animals would all look unique from eachother, even have their own personalities, but we don't have that, at all.
And now we're
finally getting an update for some of what should have been included at launch in the first place, but it still seems to be severely lacking. I get that this isn't "Planet Wolf", but if you're going to include an animal in your roster with that much color and pattern diversity, you should at least make an attempt to do the animal justice, otherwise... why even include it at all?
Part of the fun of games like this is breeding and seeing the cool colors and patterns you can end up with... but if there's no actual variation beyond just basic color changes, then... it's not nearly as fun to breed.
It's why I prefer Sims 3 over Sims 4 when it comes to playing with pets. In Sims 3, you have all these different layered markings and whatnot that can mix/match and pass onto offspring. In Sims 4... offspring can only be carbon copies of their parents, or just take on one of the default preset coats, which makes breeding completely boring and has no surprise factor at all.
It's the same idea with Planet Zoo. Right now, I enjoy breeding cheetahs more than ANY other animal ingame because right now, cheetahs are the most varied. They have at least 3 different coat colors, as well as a bunch of different spot marking textures that can be anywhere on the body and mix/matched in such a way that even in a large group, they're all somewhat unique and it's interesting to see what might be produced.
But you can't deny that there is a problem when cheetahs have more overall uniqueness and variation than wolves, one of the MOST diverse species in coat color, patterns, markings, etc. on the planet.
Most IRL cheetahs will look more or less similar in terms of coat color, minus differences in spot pattern, but wolves come in a MASSIVE range of coat colors and fur patterns. Cheetahs come in... yellow and orange and shades in between. Wolves come in gray, black, white, brown, cream, tan, silver, red- and even wolves of the same 'color type' can look very different from eachother via having different markings.
At launch, cheetahs got color variants.
Wolves did not, and were all 100% carbon copies of eachother, not a single bit of variation in the least, despite being THE MOST varied species IRL, pretty much.
Now, with the update, it looks as if these wolf variants are just hue changes done in photoshop to the base wolf texture, and no other differences in coats, which isn't accurate in the slightest. A real brown wolf would not look like a basic gray wolf just with a color change.
It kind of makes it look like the devs just straight up don't like/don't care about the wolves at all, which makes me wonder why they even bothered adding them into the game in the first place instead of another animal they are more interested in giving attention to.
The main reason I'm bringing up wolves in specific is because they are the most major example for this- an animal with EXTREME levels of coat/pattern variation realistically, but received 0 attention or care in the game compared to other animals that realistically have much less variation.
I'd just like to see more care and attention given to the existing animals in the game that sorely need it. I don't really want more DLCs until the BASE GAME is actually finished with all of the features we were initially promised, and all the existing animals are fully fleshed out- and that includes animals like wolves being given the attention they deserve, which means at the very least different types of patterns for the different coat colors, or markings like the tigers/cheetahs/wild dogs have.
Or, the ideas listed above, i.e.a WolfQuest-style coat and color system.