The Long Dark News

Hello community,


We’ve released our first hotfix following the launch of Episode Three - v1.61 [55716]. We’ve addressed a number of issues specific to Episode Three, added Lost and Found boxes to all regions, and fixed the lighting issues some players were experiencing. Lighting should now be closer to what you experienced in Steadfast Ranger. Note: This change list may contain spoilers!

If you still encounter issues while playing The Long Dark please visit our Support Portal.

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If you have any other questions or are just curious to know more about the game, please also consider joining our weekly Milton Mailbag Q&A.



Changelist v1.61 [55716]



Gameplay

* Added Lost and Found boxes to all regions.
* Fixed issue that caused animations for crouching, opening drawers, and the swinging of the lantern to play slower than intended.
* Fixed issue that caused animals to clip into the ground when the player sleeps.
* Fixed issue that caused Bears to sometimes spawn under the map.

UI/World/Art

* Fixed issue that resulted in brightness to be incorrectly calculated.
* Fixed visible seams on the Rural Region Houses.
* Fixed Timber Wolves Morale bar resetting if they fled during the Tutorial.
* Fixed missing collision on the Community Hall Sign.
* Fixed stretched texture in the back of the Burnt Ridge Cave.
* Fixed flickering on some rock edges in Pleasant Valley.
* Fixed disappearing snow texture near the Shed in the Rural Region.
* Re-enabled player placed light sources during a cinematic.

Episode Three

* Subtitle and localization tuning.
* Polish pass through the episode.
* Fixed issue preventing Timber Wolves from transitioning to and from Aurora state.
* Fixed being able to run while carrying a survivor after trying to place them and then opening and closing the inventory.
* Fixed issue that caused a currently carried Survivor to disappear when manually saving and loading in the Community Hall.
* Fixed issue that caused Molly’s photo to change size after it’s picked up.
* Fixed cinematic playing from an incorrect angle when arriving at the plane crash site from a specific direction.
* Staggered animation will no longer play when exiting or entering a location, while triggering dialogue.
* Fixed missing collision on some of the plane seats at the crash site.
* Fix to prevent Astrid’s arm from popping into place after closing the Diagnosis UI.
* Fixed rare issue that caused Weather effects and the skybox to disappear after exiting a cinematic.



###END OF RELEASE NOTES###

Our annual Halloween Event -- 4 Days of Night -- is back for 2019!

The Event kicks off Sunday, October 27th, at 10PM Pacific.

For complete details, please visit our official forums below:

https://hinterlandforums.com/forums/topic/35657-four-days-of-night-2019/?tab=comments#comment-182480

After a long wait, we're proud to present to you, Episode Three of The Long Dark: CROSSROADS ELEGY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqXDGS6qNuc

We hope you enjoy it!

Please be respectful of other players and avoid discussion spoilers in the community. And if you run into any issues while playing the Episode, please make use of our Support portal at www.hinterlandgames.com/support

For all those new players joining us, you can jump straight into Episode Three if you like. Welcome to the Quiet Apocalypse!

- The Hinterland Team

It’s been a long time coming, but Episode Three is just around the corner. At 6AM Pacific on Tuesday, October 22nd, you’ll all have the opportunity to jump in to CROSSROADS ELEGY, and learn more about the story of the Quiet Apocalypse. We’re very excited to share this new part of the story of Mackenzie and Astrid, the mysteries of the aurora, and what’s happening on Great Bear in the midst of this (potentially?) world-changing disaster.

But before that, we have a few “housekeeping” things to update you on, so here goes!



For those of you that have been following The Long Dark for years, you’ve known that our intention with WINTERMUTE, our story mode, has always been to show aspects of the story from each of our main characters’ points of view. Episodes One and Two were presented from Mackenzie’s viewpoint, and Episode Three picks up the story of Astrid after she and Mackenzie get separated in Milton at the opening of Episode One.

We’re excited to be able to share part of Astrid’s story with you, and we know you’ll find her version of events just as compelling as Mackenzie’s.



Since you are playing as Astrid, you aren’t continuing your same playthrough or save from Episode Two. So, we decided to just unlock the three episodes for existing and new players, so that if people prefer, they can start by jumping directly into Astrid’s story in Episode Three, and then go back and play the first two Episodes. There may be some minor spoilers for the earlier episodes, but in general we think this flow can work. We still recommend new players go through the episodes in order, but this way you have the choice!



Historically, making significant changes to existing regions in the game has sometimes resulted in people losing stored items. Since we’ve just done a major overhaul of the Pleasant Valley region for Episode Three, we’ve implemented a new system designed to avoid us accidentally wiping out your hard-earned loot. The Lost & Found box will appear any time we have changed a scene to the extent that your loot would have been deleted — we just respawn it all in the Lost & Found box for you to grab it. You can only take things out of the Lost & Found, not put things into it, and once you have emptied it, it disappears.

THESE ARE NOT LOOT BOXES. These are just our way to safeguard your items in the event that a scene edit would have resulted in us deleting your stuff.



With the Episode Three update, we are also including our enhancements to the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. These enhancements include HDR lighting (works on Xbox One X, XBox One S, PS4 Pro, PS4), and High Resolution support (4K on Xbox One X, 1440p on PS4 Pro). All versions of High Resolution support feature dynamic scaling.

You’ll notice we’ve added a new calibration screen for HDR settings. Keep in mind that there is currently no standard implementation of HDR lighting so your results will depend heavily on the TV you are using. If you run into issues with these enhancements, please submit a ticket to our Support Portal: www.hinterlandgames.com/support



This shouldn’t affect 99% of our players, based on the statistics we pull from Steam’s hardware survey, but we have stopped supporting a 32-bit version of the game. This only matters if you are still running a 32-bit CPU, which would be fairly old by now. The main CPUs impacted by this would be:

• Intel Pentium 4E (released in 2004)
• AMD K7 (released in 2004)
• Intel Atom CPUs (released in 2013; mostly used for netbooks and tablets)

So if you have a system that uses those CPUs, The Long Dark will no longer work for you. All our other builds have been 64-bit only for a while, so this switch to only supporting the 64-bit version of Windows for The Long Dark will result in some nice performance gains, and also helps eliminate some crashes that were only occurring because of the 32-bit support.



We will be reprising our annual Four Days of Night Halloween event this year, starting at 10PM on October 27th (Pacific) and running to Nov 1st. Unfortunately, given our focus on shipping Episode Three, we weren’t able to add any new twists on last year’s formula, so the 2019 event is the same as 2018, but with updated Badges to reflect 2019 participation.



We’re still on track for a December Survival Mode update. We’ll share more details of what’s in that update after things have calmed down a bit. We expect to be pretty busy in the immediate aftermath of the Episode Three launch, so I’d like to give the Survival Mode update information its own room to breath. You can expect more details about it in November.

***

That’s pretty much it! We’ll be heads down doing support for Episode Three’s launch on October 22nd. We can’t wait to hear what you think about our latest work, and we look forward to hearing from you in the forums at www.hinterlandforums.com, and on our social media channels. And remember, if you run into any issues, please use our Support Portal at www.hinterlandgames.com/support to get help.

We’re really excited for all of you to experience the next chapter in the WINTERMUTE story. Watch out for those Timberwolves!

– Raphael

Hello community!

We shared a whole bunch of news and updated around our Fifth Anniversary announcement last week, so you might have missed the news that we're launching Episode Three: CROSSROADS ELEGY, on October 22nd.

That's only a little over three weeks away!

Here's the teaser:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We'll be sharing more information leading up to October 22nd. We hope you enjoy the teaser, and we look forward to bringing CROSSROADS ELEGY to you very soon.

- The Hinterland Team