Ice wolves in video games

Hi all

Just thought of posting this question of mine (well, not mine alone... some gamers/forumers I know also complained about this)..... why is that a lot of games relate wolves with ice? I know at least 4 games with such idea, 3 of them even use the name Fenrir for the ice wolves....

What do you think?

 

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Because wolves are stereotyped as living in icy (ie cold) mountains?

 

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Frost Wolves in Warcraft

 

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because wolves in cold places usually are more hungry and actually attack people there?

 

when you watch a video of wolves where are they? they are almost always in the snow. Besides, if you are going to make a fire wolf, you may as well just call it a hellhound.

 

A fun RPG board game I used to play when I was younger was called Hero's Quest. It had an arctic expansion pack with yetis, ice gremlins, and yes, ice hounds.

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- N

 

O-okay.... looks understandable enough ^_^

WC also has non-frosty wolves ^_^ but then again, yeah....

 

my guess is that the only areas where wolves still have a presence is in areas too cold to yet hold a large population of people. Wolves in warmer areas where western-culture type people live have largely been killed off.

Most people alive today can't really imagine Wolves living in downtown Washington DC. Montana, Alaska, Cananda's NWT's, etc, on the other hand...

 

bollox

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just a few years ago they killed off a sheep herd and hunters here need no license to shoot wolves (as much as I don't like it) because there are so many of them.

what you say might be true for North America, I don't know, never been there, but there certainly are plenty of them here.

 

We also have wolves in the woods, and it is even warmer than Avatar's place.

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Anyway, I think it has to do with many fantasy games/worlds using nordish myths, names like Tyr, Baldur etc. And in those myths, wolves appear quite frequently, considering that those are of nordish origin, one can assume that it maybe quite cold there, so you got wolves in those frosty reaches up north and since it is a fantasy realm, they absolutely need some magical abilities...so there you go, you get frostwolves.

Of course, this is just an assumption based on a few of the more popular fantasy games/worlds of the last decade.

 

Dreamwalker, your guess actually also gives idea on why some of the games which feature ice wolves use Fenrir as the name..... but then again there is Garm too.... hmmm.

 

where are you guys based?

edit: ah, Latvia and Germany?


Yeah, the US government paid for wolf pelts for years - nearly wiped them out completely in the lower 48 states. I've never seen a wolf in the wild, and I hike about 50 days out of every year.

 

But have you seen ice-wolves?

 

While wolves are less common than they once were in the States, I don't know if I'd call them rare. You don't see them because they don't want to be seen. But they're there. In some areas anyway.

If you want to look at an area that has truly decimated their wolf population, then look at Europe. Dreamwalker mentions wolves in the woods near his home, but I bet you that they're introduced from other areas. Europe exterminated their wolves long ago.

It's been awhile since I've read on this, I forget which areas the wolves were reintroduced from. It's possible that there might have been a couple of small groups remaining of the original European population....


As to Fenrir.
It's because of Fenrir or Fenris. The Fenris Wolf of Nordic myth.

And Garm is another mythical beast from our Scandinavian brethren.

 

Nah, they are. People were paid for a very long while to wipe them out, just like you say about Europe. Now we have a problem with deer. There was much research done to convince people that wolves aren't really that dangerous and evil and there are some reservation parks where wolves are kept.

But, I agree, when you see wolves in computer games it has mostly to do with mythology.

There are no ice-wolves, hahah, but there are arctic wolves.

 

Wolves have never been exterminated in Latvia or the Baltics for that matter.
They are native and feel pretty fine here, and for now there is no danger to their population.

 

No danger? Yeah you just wait till they tranform into ice wolf man.

 

lol

It is possible that there are wolves in the areas that I have hiked. Given that the government population counts of wolves in those same areas are pretty much 0....

I will be hiking MT next summer, so my number of wild sightings might change.

 

Lobo the arctic wolf... PBS shows about wolves in cold places... there's just
alot of entertainment and media that portrays wolves in icey areas. The
combination of fuzzy and cold seems attractive to people and it makes it's
way into video games.

An even more interesting question could be why the heck are there so many
damn wolves in video games? I have an untested hypothesis on this. I have
observed that a hugh amount of programmers are Furries and that wolves are
one of the top animals of choice for them. I suspect a furry game programmer
would take any opportunity to get a animal of choice in the game.