Hello Survivors,
We just launched our latest update to Survival Mode, called PERILOUS CONSTRAINT. This update includes:
- New to Survival! Blackrock Region added to Survival Mode. It connects to Pleasant Valley via a Transition zone, and to Timberwolf Mountain via a cave system.
- New to Survival! The Noisemaker from Episode Four is now available for crafting and use in Survival Mode. Note that the Blueprint unlocks after you find your first Noisemaker, currently only discoverable in Blackrock Region.
- New to The Long Dark! The Ballistic Vest. It’s the first piece of protective gear in the game and offers strong defense against physical harms from wildlife attacks.
- Various quality-of-life improvements, including making Crampons repairable, and a new piece of soundtrack music, along with many bug fixes.
You can check out more information about the update here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Mod Support in 2022We’re setting up a small internal team dedicated solely to supporting Modding and User Generated Content at Hinterland. Our initial focus will be on supporting The Long Dark, but we plan for this to be a long-standing investment in time and resources, and the things we learn and the modding community we build with you, will hopefully become a strong foundation of more things to come in future Hinterland games.
As first steps, we’re setting up a
Modding & UGC section of the official Hinterland forums. We’ll have dedicated focus from our Community team on this area, so please focus your mod discussions here so we can best support you. We’ve also set up a new email alias, “
[email protected]”, which you can use to contact us with any requests or information you’d like to share.
In the Spring, we’ll be sharing more info about our Creator Hub, which will have documentation, some tools, and other resources for modders, and other types of fan creations for The Long Dark. Until then, we’ll be active in the new Modding & UGC section of the official forums, and we’ll also be proactively reaching out to many of you who have been busy modding the game over the past years. We want to know more about what you need in terms of tool support, documentation, and also to provide you a clear path to communicating with us as we grow this area of The Long Dark’s community.
Survival Mode Updates in 2022 & BeyondWe’ve been working on a plan for how to tackle ongoing support for Survival Mode between now and Episode Five’s launch, and beyond. I’ll share more details about our plans in the new year, as there are a lot of technical aspects we’re still figuring out. But as a high-level direction, based on the guidance we’ve received from many of you in our player community through our community poll earlier this year -- and after providing nearly over 7 years of free updates to Survival Mode -- our plan is to move to a more sustainable paid update path.
One of the first stages we’re working towards is splitting Story Mode and Survival Mode into two separate games and executables. This won’t affect your ownership in any way -- everyone who currently owns The Long Dark will automatically have both games. In fact, depending on how we handle this, the split may be mostly on the back-end and invisible to you as a player. This split is mostly about how we structure content and data in the game on the development side.
Until now, Story content has been a layer on top of the core Survival Mode foundation, which has allowed us (over the years) to share the world and mechanics between the two modes, then using tuning variables and a complex system of scene layering to keep the two different experiences separate but relatively cohesive. This was a fantastic decision for us earlier in the project when the game world was smaller and we had less episode content, but as the years have passed it’s become harder and harder for us to maintain this structure, and we feel it’s become overly limiting to our ability to continue to grow The Long Dark for the future.
One illustrative example of this is that every time we change an element of UI, or a foundational art asset or system that is shared between the modes, we have to then test all the episodes, all the survival mode regions and content, and all the Challenge modes against this change. As a result, over time we’ve had to spend an increasing amount of effort on testing and validating our existing content and systems every time we want to release something new, and this has prevented us from updating the game as frequently as we would like. It’s also limited the kinds of things we can update, and we feel that many of the architecture choices from back in 2014 and onward have now become detrimental to the game’s growth and evolution in 2021 and beyond.
What splitting the game into Story and Survival will mean for us is that we’ll be better able to compartmentalize content, features, cinematics, etc. so that every time we make a change in Survival, we don’t have to retest the entirety of the rest of the game, and vice versa. In theory, this should make it easier for us to update the game in the future, both shortening the testing cycle and ensuring it can be more focused on a narrower band of changes. Our belief is that this will help us better maintain the game and ensure a high-quality experience for our players. We’ll share more details about this split in the new year, and as I said our hope is that for most current players this split will be very “behind the scenes”.
Beyond this, our plan for 2022 and beyond is to introduce some form of a paid update path for Survival Mode. We’re still working out the details of this -- and there are many! -- but our primary goal in developing this strategy is to focus on: 1) fairness to our current players, 2) creating multiple entry-points so that players can opt-in depending on what they want and what they can afford, and 3) long-term sustainability for the development team.
Part of our update plans also include how to handle next-gen visual enhancements. Thus far the only way to play The Long Dark on Xbox Series X|S, or PlayStation 5, has been through backwards compatibility. We want to create some next-gen native visual enhancements that really capitalize on the greater processing power and memory in the new consoles, and also on high-end PC, but again because of how our game is structured -- and because of how the platforms prefer developers to handle this content -- it’s been tough to reconcile the dev work required to make these changes with the impact they would have to our bottom line. We think we have a good plan for this and we’ll share more news about our approach and the list of enhancements we’re tackling at the same time we roll out more details about the paid update path for Survival Mode.
And just to be crystal clear -- none of these changes will have any impact on the delivery of Episode Five. This will still be free for all existing customers. If you own The Long Dark, you will not have to pay extra for Episode Five.
And speaking of Episodes, in case you missed it, we released Episode Four: Fury, Then Silence, in October. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, we encourage you to play it over the holidays!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Studio ClosureAs usual for this time of year, the Hinterland team will be enjoying well-deserved rest with loved ones this holiday season, and the studio will be shut down from December 20th to January 3rd. If you run into any issues with the game during that period, and wish to contact us, please use our Support Portal. Please keep in mind that due to being on holiday, our responses might be delayed.
We’re excited to share more news with you in the new year, but until then, get some rest, stay safe these holidays, enjoy time with your loved ones, and we’ll see you in 2022 to begin a whole new phase of The Long Dark.
All the best, and thanks for your support this year.
- Raphael
*****
The latest update to Survival Mode is called PERILOUS CONSTRAINT— v1.98 (87574).This update includes:
- New to Survival: Blackrock Region is now available in Survival Mode. It connects to Pleasant Valley via a Transition zone, and to Timberwolf Mountain via a cave system.
- New to Survival: The Noisemaker from Episode Four is now available for crafting and use in Survival Mode. Please note that the Blueprint unlocks after you find your first Noisemaker, which is currently only discoverable in Blackrock Region.
- New to The Long Dark: The new Ballistic Vest is the first piece of protective gear in the game, offering strong defense against physical harms from wildlife attacks.
- Various quality-of-life improvements, including making Crampons repairable, a new piece of soundtrack music, and many bug fixes.
There are also a couple of known issues affected players should be aware of:
- Please note that on Switch, the Main menu art will not be updated with the release, though the game should still update. Players can verify the correct version via the top left-hand side of the main menu screen v1.98 (86821).
- When attempting to repair the Crampons, you need either the Simple Tools or High Quality Tools item. If you do not have these items, you will receive an error message stating the Sewing Kit is required.
Don’t forget to visit our
Support Portal for useful articles, or if you need to log an issue. To stay up-to-date with news and information about The Long Dark and Hinterland,
sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter (
Game |
Studio).
ART, ENVIRO, and UI
- [Enviro] Fixed numerous areas the player could escape/leave the regular game environment.
- [UI] Fixed an issue in Survival Mode that caused six incorrect Possible Old Bear Locations to appear in the list of Mystery Lake Surveyed Locations.
- [UI] Fixed an issue when using a Controller that caused the Start Fire menu to skip when starting a fire in a Fire Barrel.
- [UI] Fixed an issue that prevented items from appearing in Inspection Mode when the HUD was disabled in Options.
- [UI] Fixed a performance issue that caused the WINTERMUTE menu to become unresponsive when the Player had many save files.
GAMEPLAY
- [General] Updated Feats, so they now always save up completion.
CHALLENGE MODES
- [Darkwalker] Fixed an issue that could prevent the game from saving correctly.
WINTERMUTE
** Please note that this section contains spoilers for WINTERMUTE. **
- [Ep4] Fixed a bug that could cause the game to save in an unloadable state.
- [Ep3] Fixed a bug that caused the UI to disappear after exiting various sequences, such as a phone call or a dialogue sequence.
- [Dialogue] Fixed an issue that caused the text to appear distorted during a dialogue sequence.
### END OF RELEASE NOTES ###
