The Long Dark News

Hello Survivors!


We wanted to update you all and let you know that TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, Part Three is getting close to launch. We are in our final stages of testing, tuning and bug fixing, so expect a launch toward the end of June.

Below, you’ll find more information about what content will be in Part Three of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, along with what to look forward to in the base Survival Mode’s free June Update.


TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY


Frontier Cooking



One of the big additions in Part Three is a new feature called Frontier Cooking. We’ve added seven new ingredients to the game, and now with Recipes you can cook more complicated foods that involve multiple ingredients -- things like Rabbit Stew, Fish Pies, and so on. The Frontier Cooking system is launching with 15 Recipes, as well as 9 Unique recipes that can be found in the world. We’re also adding a Skillet to enable new cooking options, and completely overhauled the Cooking user interface.


All of these new items will appear in existing TALES save games, and we have also done a careful pass over the placement and frequency of new food items to ensure game balance is preserved for Interloper players. 

Good luck, Survivors! 


Ptarmigan



The little Ptarmigan is the new wildlife we’ve added in Part Three. They can be found in most regions, but prefer more remote, higher ground. You can, of course, hunt them for meat, but you’ll also be able to collect their down, which you can utilize in a couple of new crafting recipes.


Tool Variants



We’ve also added three new Revolver variants, another Bow variant, and an alternate Flashlight. Each of these items has a unique look and some stat differences from their basic counterparts.

All of these items, and the ones relating to cooking, will all be available in new or existing save games.


FREE UPDATE

For our base game Survival Update, we’ve added and updated a few elements.

We've overhauled the Fishing system to provide more freedom around where you can fish, as well as adding some new species and giving you some new tools for catching and maintaining your fishing options. This is the first major overhaul of the Fishing system since we added it years ago, and it's one of the systems the community has been asking us to revise for a while, so we're excited to see what you think of the changes that are coming.


And finally, as you explore the regions, you’ll come across a new type of harvestable plant – Burdock. You’ll need a tool to dig its root out, but the root can then be eaten raw or cooked up into a recipe for calories, or made into a warming tea. 


That’s it for now, Survivors. We will share the full update list containing details on new Paid and Free content, along with any game improvements and bug fixes, in the release notes when we launch TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, Part Three. 

For all other technical issues, please reach out via our Support Portal.

Thank you for reading, and good luck exploring the new content when it launches later this month!

Hello everyone.

We’re nearing the mid-way point of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, our paid expansion pass campaign for Survival Mode, and this seems like a good time to talk about how things have gone so far.

In my opinion, they haven’t gone that well.

Certainly not how we want them to go. Certainly not how *I* want them to go.

When we originally discussed the idea of doing an expansion pass for THE LONG DARK, we did so recognizing that in the years we’ve been working on getting the WINTERMUTE Episodes out, we’d naturally had less time to focus on Survival. We wanted to give Survival some love, but also wanted to see if we could do so in a more financially sustainable way, that might set a path for the future.

You see, Hinterland is an independent studio, and THE LONG DARK is a self-funded, self-published project. This means we get to keep our revenue and don’t have to share it with a publisher, and we can work without external interference. But it also means that we carry all the cost and risk for the project ourselves.

This is how we like it, and our independence is paramount to who we are and what we make. But for a large and complex game like THE LONG DARK, one we’ve been updating for years without asking for any more money from our players, we wanted to experiment with the idea of creating a new revenue stream that would help us continue updating the game well into the future, in a financially sustainable fashion.

To a large degree, the ongoing financial health of THE LONG DARK, which we’ve built an entire company around, also determines what we can make in the future. So while this is a passionate endeavour for us, it’s also a business, and we’re focused on running it ethically and sustainably, and taking good care of our people. That means finding the right way to generate revenue from it, one that is fair to our players that doesn’t burn out the team. We believed TALES would be one way to do that.

Because we knew that charging for updates would come with greater expectations than when people were getting them “for free”, we wanted to provide some assurances of what you would get, and when, so that we weren’t just saying, “hey, here’s a thing, give us some money even though most of it isn’t made yet”. That’s maybe fine for Early Access, but we graduated from Early Access in 2017, and we felt that we needed to do better for this.
And in wanting that, I made some decisions that led us to the present challenges around the Expansion:

• We committed to a specific roadmap of features and content, which we knew we’d have to produce to a quality level exceeding what we’d included in the game as free updates over the years.
  
• We committed to a specific number of Parts that we’d release as part of the Expansion Pass campaign.
  
• We committed to a specific cadence; we’d aim to release a Part every 8-10 weeks, to try to recapture that “buzzy” feeling from the Early Access days, and see if we could boost player engagement with more frequent updates.
  
• We committed to a specific timeline; we’d release all six Parts in a year.
  

Why did we do this? Well, honestly, I felt that despite being able to hit this release cadence years ago in Early Access, we’d lost some of that muscle memory over the years. We’d also lost a bit of that excitement that comes from frequent game releases, and I wanted to find a way to get some of that back. Also, the COVID years of 2020-2022 had been such a struggle. I hoped that this ambitious project would be healthy for the team, and give them some exciting new features to work on, to see the game refreshed and the community excited. So, after plenty of internal discussions and everyone signing on to deliver this, we rolled up our sleeves and jumped in. We launched Part One in December.

And we ran into issues almost immediately. You’ve experienced some of these yourselves, and some have been behind the scenes. But the reality is that, we’ve failed to hit the 8-10 week release target for any of the Parts so far, and we’re not going to be able to achieve it for Part Three either.

With each Part release, there have been issues that have forced the team into a hotfixing cycle which has taken away from the progress around the next Part. That’s created pressure that has led to mistakes being made, that then force more hotfixes, and the cycle continues. This has been a cascading issue for the past six months or so, since the December release of Part One. It’s put an enormous amount of pressure on the team, not just the development team working on THE LONG DARK, but the other teams in the studio that support our launches: test, releasing, marketing, community, and so on.

This is my studio and my responsibility. I stepped away from the project to focus on new things, and the issues around timing, delivery, quality...these all roll up to me.

I’m sorry I’ve let you down.

I can’t change the past but I can try to fix the future. I’m painfully aware that you’ve heard some of this from me before, with the early WINTERMUTE episodes. I’m painfully aware that there are people out there, reading these words right now, feeling gleeful that we failed to deliver. I know there are a lot of “I told you they couldn’t hit this cadence” posts about to hit our forums and other channels. Those comments are entirely deserved. I take them on myself.

We won’t be able to hit the 8-10 week cadence for the Expansion Part releases. I’m not going to provide a new number, even though we have an internal one, because ultimately we need to focus on quality and team health, and build the timeline around that. There’s no sense in shipping Parts on a schedule if the experience you get when you play is disappointing. There’s no sense in shipping on a schedule if it burns out the team. There’s no point in promising dates that we fail to hit. Yes, we already knew this going in. We’ve faced these constraints before. I should have known better. I applaud the teams out there that are able to put out significant updates to their games every 8 weeks or so. We don’t seem able to do it.

We’re still going to deliver the full roadmap we’ve promised. We probably won’t get it all done before the end of this year, but we’ll still deliver the six Parts, and we’ll get them in your hands as soon as we can.

The team is going to catch their breath, get Part Three done and out the door, and my hope is that with a little bit of extra time now, we’ll be able to get you a better quality update that doesn’t require so many fixes after the fact. After that, we’ll dig into Part Four and continue the work.

The 60FPS fix that the team has been working on for the past few weeks will also now be delayed so that we can release it along with Part Three. This will save us from doing an additional release in between now and Part Three, allowing the team to focus on getting that content finished and tested. (Remember, every time we release an update -- no matter how small -- it comes with an amount of overhead for testing and releasing.) So the 60FPS fixes for Xbox and PlayStation should be part of the Part Three launch.

Many of you have asked about the status of the Switch version of TALES. As you know, we had originally planned to have this out earlier this year. When both the Xbox and PlayStation versions came in late, this pushed out the work on the Switch as well. I can’t promise you a date for Switch yet. There’s a fair amount of work we need to get done before we can ship it, and I’m not sure how we will fit it in on top of the other work we are doing for the Parts. We’re looking into some options, including bringing on some more dev help to get that done. At this point, I would say we’ll do our best to get TALES up and running for the end of the year, and if we can get it done sooner, we will. I’m really sorry about that delay. It absolutely sucks if you are a Switch TLD player right now.

I completely understand if any of you feel burned by this situation and want to have TALES refunded. We can’t issue refunds ourselves, but you can request them from the platform you purchased the game on. We hope you won’t do that, but again, I understand if you feel that you’ve had enough. My hope is that by the time the Expansion is finished, you’ll choose to come back and give it another chance.

In addition to giving the team more time and breathing room to get the Parts out, I’m also going to be stepping back in to focus the TLD team and get development back on track. I’m going to dive back in to the design as well and make sure the systems we’re delivering to you are as good as they can be. I’ll be there “in the trenches” with the team, so to speak, to guide them through this. That’s my promise to you.

My goal now is to make sure that when you look back at the end of this campaign, and see all that we’ve added to both TALES (paid) and THE LONG DARK (free updates), you’ll find that on the whole it’s been a great addition to the game and really refreshed the sandbox. I’m excited about the new features we’re adding in Part Three, and in the rest of the roadmap.

Regarding Episode Five. A lot of you have been asking about it. As mentioned several times, but I’ll say it again here, we won’t be saying anything about Episode Five release dates until we’re close to shipping it, which won’t be this year. I do promise some kind of update with some non-spoilery details around what to expect in Episode Five later this year, so you won’t go the whole year without hearing any news. But for now, we don’t have anything more to say, except that there are a lot of story threads to tie up in Episode Five, and it’s going to be a big one.

The last six months have been tough on the team, and we appreciate your ongoing support and patience. Thanks for reading, and I hope to have better news for you next time you hear from me.


- Raphael

Hello Community,

We have just released our v2.16 (113628) Hotfix for THE LONG DARK (including Survival Edition) and TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY on Steam and Epic Games Store. Please note that WINTERMUTE’s version number has not changed. This Hotfix addresses a bug introduced in the v.2.15 update for TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY.

GENERAL

• [TALES] Fixed an issue where Transmitters in Forlorn Muskeg and Pleasant Valley reverted to being unrepaired, even when players had previously repaired them during the Tale. Players who previously lost progress will once again find their Transmitters in the appropriate repaired state.
  

To check current releases on each platform, please visit our new Build Status Page.

Please visit our Support Portal (or consult our Known Issues page) if you encounter any issues while playing the game. For additional news and information, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter (Game | Studio).

Hello Community,

We have just released our v2.15 (113209) Hotfix for THE LONG DARK (including Survival Edition) and TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY on Steam and Epic Games Store. The update is currently scheduled for Xbox and Playstation during the week of April 24. Please note that WINTERMUTE’s version number has not changed. This hotfix addresses TALES items not spawning in Interloper mode, including the Handheld Shortwave. Details on these changes can be found in our latest Dev Diary found here.

GENERAL

[SURVIVAL] Enables TALES content in Interloper.
[SURVIVAL] Using the Handheld Shortwave Interloper players are now able to locate Trackable Hidden Caches, which will provide loot that is also balanced for Interloper.
[SURVIVAL] Players are now able to find the Handheld Shortwave at the Airfield’s Control Tower and start the Signal Void Tale, while playing in Interloper.

• TALES will be accessible via your existing save and do not need to start a new Survival save in order to get these changes
  
• The bunkers discovered in Signal Void have been adjusted to provide less loot on Interloper
  
• A few extra Transmitter repair supplies will be newly available in Interloper to ensure the initial repairs are possible (applies to both existing saves or new)
  

To check current releases on each platform, please visit our new Build Status Page.

Please visit our Support Portal (or consult our Known Issues page) if you encounter any issues while playing the game. For additional news and information, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter (Game | Studio).

Hello Survivors!

Now that TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY is available on Steam, Epic Game Store, Xbox, and PlayStation, we wanted to provide a quick update about some upcoming changes, and bug fixes we are currently working on.


Adding Interloper to TALES

It’s been a couple of weeks since we released TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, Part Two: SIGNAL VOID, which included the introduction of the first ‘Tale.’ We have been reviewing feedback, and we appreciate the time many of you took to file tickets via our Support Portal. While we are working to resolve some high-priority bugs following the release (more on that later), we also wanted to acknowledge the feedback from many Interloper players in our community, and how we plan to address Tales moving forward.

By introducing the idea of Tales to Survival Mode, we wanted to give our Survival Mode players more reasons to explore and more objectives to follow, while still weaving in some compelling narrative elements. When tuning for the Interloper experience mode, we are always especially careful not to upset the balance of the game, and so we tend to approach changes to Interloper with caution and thoughtfulness. Interloper is a very stripped-down experience; many gear items are either excluded entirely or heavily restricted, containers are mostly empty, and the general tuning settings are designed to be punishing. The addition of new locations, new gear items, places you can scavenge more loot, and resources run the risk of upsetting that “survival on a knife’s edge” feel, so anything we add into this experience mode does require an extra layer of consideration. When designing both the transponder systems that would enable the new Supply Caches to be found, and also considering the significant amount of effort that would go into completing the “Signal Void” Tale, we strongly felt that these systems would not work well in Interloper, and in particular we felt the Tale would be extremely difficult with almost no pay-off (necessary to preserve the Interloper balance), which would simply be frustrating.

After hearing from many of you in our player community who very strongly align yourselves with the Interloper mode (to the point that you don’t play any other modes in the game), we understood that you didn’t really mind if the experience would be a massive struggle with little reward. You just wanted that option.

So, after careful consideration, we have decided to introduce the “Signal Void” Tale to Interloper, with some modifications designed to preserve game balance for that specific Experience Mode:

• Bunkers will be adjusted to provide less loot on Interloper.
  
• The final Bunker will still contain a couple of rare items, but adjusted for Interloper.
  

Additionally, once you have the Handheld Shortwave you will be able to explore and discover the hidden Supply Caches, which will provide loot that is also balanced for Interloper. A number of them will be empty, while others will have loot that is consistent with what you would expect on Interloper.

For those Interloper players wondering how to access the new content, you will be able to access the Tale and any new changes via your existing save, and there will be no need to start a new Survival save in order to get these changes. Simply pick up the Handheld Shortwave in the Control Tower at the Forsaken Airfield region, and you’re on your way. Just please know that your experience of the Supply Caches, and “Signal Void”, will be extremely tough, without much reward apart from bragging rights.

We plan to release these changes in the next week, so you should have access to the Tale very soon. Keep an eye out for the official release notes!

For more information on the Tale and Part Two: SIGNAL VOID, please visit the March Dev Diary.


Xbox and PlayStation - Uncapped Frame Rates

Following the release of v2.09 on Xbox, some players may have noticed a change to the frame-rate cap on Xbox Series S/X. While this change isn't part of the overall Visual Enhancements we have promised with TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, we'd like to clarify what has changed, and what our plans are for the future.

Recently, we upgraded THE LONG DARK to a newer version of the Unity engine and Xbox Unity plug-in. Prior to the Unity update, the console frame rate was limited to 30 frames per second (FPS), and the game would use a method of “dynamic resolution scaling” (a standard practice on consoles) to maintain this target frame rate to ensure a smooth experience.

This Unity latest update has now uncapped frame rates on the Xbox Series S/X, so they are no longer limited to 30 FPS. These Xbox platforms should now be able to achieve up to 60 FPS with dynamic resolution scaling.

Upcoming Changes: We have made additional adjustments to uncap frame rates on Xbox One X in an upcoming update. Additionally, in order to ensure parity on PlayStation, we have done some work to enable up to 60 FPS on PlayStation 5, as well as higher than 30FPS resolutions on PlayStation 4 Pro. These additional changes are planned for release at the end of this month.

To summarize, following these improvements, players can expect:

• Xbox One X – Up to 60 FPS at 1080p
  
• Xbox Series S – Up to 60 FPS at 1080p
  
• Xbox Series X – Up to 60 FPS at 1080p
  
• PlayStation 4 Pro – Up to 45 FPS at 900p (using dynamic resolution scaling)
  
• PlayStation 5 – Up to 60 FPS at 1080p
  

Once the changes are live, you will be able to manually enable the higher frame rate cap, or change it back to the 30 FPS cap, in the Display Settings. We will share more information alongside the Release Notes later this month.

Please note that this change does not impact the Switch, or any of the PC or Mac-based versions of the game. (PC and Mac have always been able to run at higher than 60 FPS, provided the hardware is powerful enough.)

We will continue working toward additional improvements, including providing official support for next-gen consoles, additional visual enhancements, and more. We will provide more information in the coming months.


Upcoming Bug Fixes

In addition to today’s Hotfix on Xbox, we are working on a series of other high-priority fixes and will release them in hotfixes as soon as possible.

We have introduced the Known Issues section on our Support Portal. This list provides a regularly-updated summary of high-priority bugs organized by platform. While this list is not exhaustive, it does provide a good starting point to check whether your issue appears, and it includes some helpful workarounds and tips where applicable.

If you currently require technical support, please reach out via our Support Portal. We are working to respond to inquiries as quickly as possible.


Thank You

Thank you, Survivors. We will share more information on TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY in the coming weeks.