TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY Launch Clarification & Apology
Hello players,
TL;DR:
Long version:
I want to apologize for the hiccups around last week’s launch of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. I know we didn’t hit the quality you expect from a paid product, and I want to try to explain a few things that happened to hopefully provide a bit more behind-the-scenes info on what was going on. Unfortunately it seems that between confusion around some aspects of the launch, and some deliberate misinformation, some of you have been given the wrong impression and I want to clear some things up.
The inception of TALES was the community’s own desire for us to continue expanding Survival Mode, which we’ve done with free updates over the past 8+ years of development. Between Episode Five work and other new projects at the studio, there are many things our team can be working on, and it no longer made sense for us to continue putting out free updates to Survival. But we knew there was interest in us continuing to expand Survival, so we put together various potential plans, one of which was to launch a 12-month update campaign that would bring back some of the energy and “buzz” of our original Early Access. It’s an experiment, as we’ve often said.
Since our players have received free updates for so long, it was important to us that we continued to provide some amount of free content alongside the new paid content, because we know not everyone is in the position to spend more money on the game. We also didn’t want the “base game” to start to feel too outdated compared to the paid stream in TALES. So we planned dual update streams -- one paid, one free -- that would launch simultaneously. The paid updates are entirely optional.
We’ve never telegraphed too much about what would go into our free updates, and for TALES we wanted to maintain that same strategy because it’s allowed every update to feel like a big exciting moment that our players can celebrate together. But we knew that for TALES, as a paid product, we’d have to provide a bit more info so people would know what they’d eventually be getting, so we set out a Roadmap that outlines what will be included over the course of the entire 12-month campaign. All through our communications around the expansion, we’ve been clear that the full Roadmap would be released gradually over the 12 months, with new content dropping every 8-10 weeks.
In order to be able to embark on this update campaign, we needed to split the Survival and Story parts of the game, because over the years the testing burden of having to review all the Story episodes, every part of Survival, all the Challenges, etc. has made it very difficult to update things frequently, or quickly. And since we had to split the game anyway, we thought this might also be a good opportunity to offer a stand-alone Survival Edition to new players, which could later on be updated with the WINTERMUTE episodes via DLC, for anyone who wanted both parts of the game. This way, you could get into THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode for a lower price point, and not pay for Story if you didn’t want it.
All through communicating this process, we’ve been super clear also that anyone who bought THE LONG DARK before Monday’s launch, would continue to have both Survival and Story, and would still get Episode Five (included in the price) at launch. Same for anyone who buys THE LONG DARK moving forward. You only pay for WINTERMUTE if you want to upgrade the SURVIVAL EDITION, and again, it’s entirely optional.
On Monday, we made a mistake, and a few unexpected things also happened. The combination of those things meant that we confused a lot of people, and it seemed like we had gone back on promises I’d made.
The mistake was releasing an incomplete game package to Steam when we launched at 10AM on Monday. This meant that as soon as players started updating the game, they got a failed package (it was missing some important files) and the game crashed. We realized the mistake immediately, worked to fix the package, and verified it internally, and then released the fixed package to Steam. So the crash issue existed for about an hour, between the initial launch and the moment where we were able to get the fixed package out. We also requested that people restart Steam, or restart their machines, because often this forces Steam to get the latest game update, and without that we couldn’t verify if people were struggling with the initial crash we’d caused, or some other issue in the game. Unfortunately, quite a bit of damage had already been done at that point, with thousands of the first players encountering the crash bug, and many of them going straight to Steam to write negative reviews. Most people, upon restarting Steam, were able to get the corrected update and the crash was resolved.
Simultaneous with this crash, we discovered -- to our surprise -- that our Survival Edition SKU, which was meant to be a standalone $19.99 version of Survival Mode that could be updated via DLC to include WINTERMUTE, was instead set up as an “Edition” on the TLD Steam page. An Edition in this sense is a different version of the base app. It doesn’t get its own Steam page, and so all the material we’d prepared -- screenshots, copy, infrographics, etc. -- to help communicate how the SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE DLC fit into the overall plan, and how it was different from THE LONG DARK (combined Survival + Story) was missing. And to anyone who came to the TLD page, it would look like they had the option to purchase WINTERMUTE DLC. Many people interpreted this to mean that we were asking them to re-purchase WINTERMUTE -- which we had said over and over would not be the case. It was a misunderstanding, caused by a mistake in how the SURVIVAL EDITION product was set up, but again, people were understandably confused, and some were angry and felt we had misled them.
I apologize for this mix-up and take full responsibility for it.
We spent a lot of time on Monday -- through our community team -- in Steam and the various forums and social channels, the support team, and on my own Twitter account, to try to clarify these things, to reach as many people as we could. We appreciate everyone who approached this moment with patience, and also regret that we inadvertently caused the initial crash. We’re still working with Valve to try to remedy the issues with the store page.
Besides those two issues, and some other bugs we discovered over the first couple of days of launch -- ex. local settings being reset which put the game back to Low-quality settings, or reset of Autowalk, a change in the radial due to the addition of the new Tool Variants, etc. -- we also found that some very old Steam packages, going back to Kickstarter Backers, or the 2015 BAFTA Awards judge’s package, hadn’t been given the proper WINTERMUTE entitlements, and so for those players it appeared they no longer had access to WINTERMUTE. This reinforced the fear that we were asking people to repurchase the Episodes. This issue has since been fixed, but if you have bought WINTERMUTE a second time, please request a refund.
Within the first 24 hours of launch, the team released 3 hotfixes, and we had the crash (fixed in the first hour) and most other game issues resolved within the first few days. There are also some other minor issues trickling in that the team is working to fix before the studio shuts down for the holidays. If you encounter issues, please consider reporting them to our Support Portal, so the team there can help you out.
Again, I apologize for the launch issues. This isn’t the way we wanted things to go after preparing for more than a year, which included splitting the game into two and rebuilding the entire foundation from scratch, making other global changes to the base game (ex. loot respawn), adding the structure that will enable us to add paid content to the game, adding the additional SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE products, as well as the huge new region plus transitions, the other new features and content we added in the Paid and Free streams of Part One of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. We’ve learned a lot in this first week, and we’re confident that the release of PART TWO, as well as the console launches in the new year, will go more smoothly for all of you.
I hope this information provides a bit of insight into what happened last week. Again, I’m sorry to anyone impacted by the launch issues, and we’ll work hard to earn back your trust.
We hope those of you who chose to join us in the FAR TERRITORY are finding things they like in it so far, and we’re excited to roll out the subsequent Parts based on the Roadmap over 2023.
- Raph
TL;DR:
- I’m sorry about the issues around launch.
- If you owned THE LONG DARK before Monday, you still own it and also own WINTERMUTE. You do not have to repurchase it.
- THE LONG DARK includes both Survival and Story. SURVIVAL EDITION is only Survival, and you can upgrade this by buying the WINTERMUTE episodes as DLC if you like.
- TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY is completely optional. Both paid and free content is being released in multiple Parts over the next year.
- We’re still fixing some bugs. If you encounter any, please report to: hinterlandgames.com/support
Long version:
I want to apologize for the hiccups around last week’s launch of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. I know we didn’t hit the quality you expect from a paid product, and I want to try to explain a few things that happened to hopefully provide a bit more behind-the-scenes info on what was going on. Unfortunately it seems that between confusion around some aspects of the launch, and some deliberate misinformation, some of you have been given the wrong impression and I want to clear some things up.
The inception of TALES was the community’s own desire for us to continue expanding Survival Mode, which we’ve done with free updates over the past 8+ years of development. Between Episode Five work and other new projects at the studio, there are many things our team can be working on, and it no longer made sense for us to continue putting out free updates to Survival. But we knew there was interest in us continuing to expand Survival, so we put together various potential plans, one of which was to launch a 12-month update campaign that would bring back some of the energy and “buzz” of our original Early Access. It’s an experiment, as we’ve often said.
Since our players have received free updates for so long, it was important to us that we continued to provide some amount of free content alongside the new paid content, because we know not everyone is in the position to spend more money on the game. We also didn’t want the “base game” to start to feel too outdated compared to the paid stream in TALES. So we planned dual update streams -- one paid, one free -- that would launch simultaneously. The paid updates are entirely optional.
We’ve never telegraphed too much about what would go into our free updates, and for TALES we wanted to maintain that same strategy because it’s allowed every update to feel like a big exciting moment that our players can celebrate together. But we knew that for TALES, as a paid product, we’d have to provide a bit more info so people would know what they’d eventually be getting, so we set out a Roadmap that outlines what will be included over the course of the entire 12-month campaign. All through our communications around the expansion, we’ve been clear that the full Roadmap would be released gradually over the 12 months, with new content dropping every 8-10 weeks.
In order to be able to embark on this update campaign, we needed to split the Survival and Story parts of the game, because over the years the testing burden of having to review all the Story episodes, every part of Survival, all the Challenges, etc. has made it very difficult to update things frequently, or quickly. And since we had to split the game anyway, we thought this might also be a good opportunity to offer a stand-alone Survival Edition to new players, which could later on be updated with the WINTERMUTE episodes via DLC, for anyone who wanted both parts of the game. This way, you could get into THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode for a lower price point, and not pay for Story if you didn’t want it.
All through communicating this process, we’ve been super clear also that anyone who bought THE LONG DARK before Monday’s launch, would continue to have both Survival and Story, and would still get Episode Five (included in the price) at launch. Same for anyone who buys THE LONG DARK moving forward. You only pay for WINTERMUTE if you want to upgrade the SURVIVAL EDITION, and again, it’s entirely optional.
On Monday, we made a mistake, and a few unexpected things also happened. The combination of those things meant that we confused a lot of people, and it seemed like we had gone back on promises I’d made.
The mistake was releasing an incomplete game package to Steam when we launched at 10AM on Monday. This meant that as soon as players started updating the game, they got a failed package (it was missing some important files) and the game crashed. We realized the mistake immediately, worked to fix the package, and verified it internally, and then released the fixed package to Steam. So the crash issue existed for about an hour, between the initial launch and the moment where we were able to get the fixed package out. We also requested that people restart Steam, or restart their machines, because often this forces Steam to get the latest game update, and without that we couldn’t verify if people were struggling with the initial crash we’d caused, or some other issue in the game. Unfortunately, quite a bit of damage had already been done at that point, with thousands of the first players encountering the crash bug, and many of them going straight to Steam to write negative reviews. Most people, upon restarting Steam, were able to get the corrected update and the crash was resolved.
Simultaneous with this crash, we discovered -- to our surprise -- that our Survival Edition SKU, which was meant to be a standalone $19.99 version of Survival Mode that could be updated via DLC to include WINTERMUTE, was instead set up as an “Edition” on the TLD Steam page. An Edition in this sense is a different version of the base app. It doesn’t get its own Steam page, and so all the material we’d prepared -- screenshots, copy, infrographics, etc. -- to help communicate how the SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE DLC fit into the overall plan, and how it was different from THE LONG DARK (combined Survival + Story) was missing. And to anyone who came to the TLD page, it would look like they had the option to purchase WINTERMUTE DLC. Many people interpreted this to mean that we were asking them to re-purchase WINTERMUTE -- which we had said over and over would not be the case. It was a misunderstanding, caused by a mistake in how the SURVIVAL EDITION product was set up, but again, people were understandably confused, and some were angry and felt we had misled them.
I apologize for this mix-up and take full responsibility for it.
We spent a lot of time on Monday -- through our community team -- in Steam and the various forums and social channels, the support team, and on my own Twitter account, to try to clarify these things, to reach as many people as we could. We appreciate everyone who approached this moment with patience, and also regret that we inadvertently caused the initial crash. We’re still working with Valve to try to remedy the issues with the store page.
Besides those two issues, and some other bugs we discovered over the first couple of days of launch -- ex. local settings being reset which put the game back to Low-quality settings, or reset of Autowalk, a change in the radial due to the addition of the new Tool Variants, etc. -- we also found that some very old Steam packages, going back to Kickstarter Backers, or the 2015 BAFTA Awards judge’s package, hadn’t been given the proper WINTERMUTE entitlements, and so for those players it appeared they no longer had access to WINTERMUTE. This reinforced the fear that we were asking people to repurchase the Episodes. This issue has since been fixed, but if you have bought WINTERMUTE a second time, please request a refund.
Within the first 24 hours of launch, the team released 3 hotfixes, and we had the crash (fixed in the first hour) and most other game issues resolved within the first few days. There are also some other minor issues trickling in that the team is working to fix before the studio shuts down for the holidays. If you encounter issues, please consider reporting them to our Support Portal, so the team there can help you out.
Again, I apologize for the launch issues. This isn’t the way we wanted things to go after preparing for more than a year, which included splitting the game into two and rebuilding the entire foundation from scratch, making other global changes to the base game (ex. loot respawn), adding the structure that will enable us to add paid content to the game, adding the additional SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE products, as well as the huge new region plus transitions, the other new features and content we added in the Paid and Free streams of Part One of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. We’ve learned a lot in this first week, and we’re confident that the release of PART TWO, as well as the console launches in the new year, will go more smoothly for all of you.
I hope this information provides a bit of insight into what happened last week. Again, I’m sorry to anyone impacted by the launch issues, and we’ll work hard to earn back your trust.
We hope those of you who chose to join us in the FAR TERRITORY are finding things they like in it so far, and we’re excited to roll out the subsequent Parts based on the Roadmap over 2023.
- Raph
