Dear players,
It’s been a busy few months since we wrapped up the final part of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY in December, and shipped the final parts on Switch in March. We’ve been working on a variety of things in the studio, so I wanted to update you on some of those things and address a few outstanding topics that I know are on your mind.
Episode work is ongoing. I know you are all wanting more specific updates, but we’re really trying to avoid spoilers so we won’t be sharing much in detail about the episode until the first teaser. I will say that the episode is the most ambitious we’ve built so far, and it has quite a few systems we haven’t used in other episodes, so it’s proving to be quite challenging for the team. We also feel the weight of anticipation and need to ensure we ship something of the highest quality. We know many of you -- like us -- have been waiting for years for this story to be completed. And once it’s done, we can never go back. So that’s really on our minds. The episode can’t just be good; it has to be great.
To clarify the episode’s scope for you: Episode Five has between two to three times as much cinematic and story content as Episode Four, which is our largest episode to date. The game world you’ll be playing in is about three to four times as big as Episode Four. There are a lot of story threads to tie up across all the episodes, to wrap up the Wintermute storyline, but also to set the stage for the future of THE LONG DARK, so we have to take you to several different places and hear from a lot of new people. Because of what the story needs, we’ve focused on narrative more than we have traditionally, and the mission flow for Episode Five is probably more linear than previous episodes as a result. The episode will take you through many new locations -- everything in the episode is new to the game and the world, so these will all be places you’ve never seen before -- and this final episode of the story has you playing as both Mackenzie and Astrid, and you’ll also be seeing some of the key characters from previous episodes, so...there’s a lot! We’re also using new motion-capture tech for our team, to attempt to deliver an ever higher bar for story delivery than we have achieved so far. These are all things that exist outside the context of Survival Mode, although some of the work in TALES helped set the foundation of some of the things we’re attempting in Episode Five. I can confidently say that Episode Five will be the most ambitious thing we’ve done on THE LONG DARK at Hinterland to date. I know that won’t mean much to you until you have it in your hands, but hopefully that gives you some sense of the ambition behind the episode.
The majority of the development team at Hinterland is working on Episode Five, with a smaller team working on BLACKFROST, so you can be sure that this is our primary focus, and will be until we ship it. In order to ensure the team has enough time and focus to finish the episode to our highest standard, I’ve asked them to work on it through the remainder of the year, with a plan to launch towards the end of the year. We’re also pushing out other planned Survival Mode updates (see below) to ensure the team can focus all their efforts on Episode Five at this point, as we know how critical it is that we wrap this up and deliver a strong finale for the story. That’s what we’re focused on, so if we are heads-down and you hear less from us than usual, this is partly why. We are just very, very busy.
For any of you who missed the news or have been holding off for the Expansion Pass to be complete, here’s a reminder that all parts of the DLC are now complete and available on all platforms.
While TALES ended up taking much longer than expected to complete, we’re happy with how much we were able to add to the game. We also believe this is tremendous value for money. To showcase all the additional content and mechanics, we made a recap video:
If you want to support our studio and our work, we hope you’ll consider buying TALES. And if you aren’t in a position to buy it now, keep an eye on the various sales on Steam and the consoles and grab it when discounted! We also added quite a few free updates to the base game along with TALES, so you already have many of those even if you didn’t buy TALES, including Safehouse Customization, which players are really enjoying!
We’re excited to announce that these are finished! The Visual Enhancements builds are with the Test team so they can validate everything is working well. Our plan is to release them in a staggered pattern, starting with PC first, then the consoles.
The team created a video to help showcase the enhancements. Check it out!
Here’s a list of all the Enhancements and which platforms you can find them on.
Keep in mind that, by nature, most of the enhancements are targeted at high-end systems, so they will mainly apply to high-end PCs or the top-end consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S or X).
Our plan is to get the Visual Enhancements out to Steam and Epic Game Store by the end of May, with the console versions following in June.
With the visual enhancements for high-end systems now complete, we’ve taken this opportunity to properly bring THE LONG DARK to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X systems. You should be getting these updates by mid to late June, platform certification timings allowing. These versions of the game will come upgraded with the visual enhancements, so this is the way to enjoy those enhancements if you play THE LONG DARK on PlayStation or Xbox. Keep in mind that you will need to own one of the Generation 9 consoles (PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S or X) to play the enhanced version of THE LONG DARK. But don’t worry, you can continue to play the existing unenhanced version on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One if you don’t have the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S or Series X.
There will be some additional information around how to migrate existing saves from the last-gen (Xbox One, PS4) to the current gen (Xbox Series, PS5), which we’ll share closer to release.
If you currently own THE LONG DARK and are playing it on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X, you will automatically be upgraded to the Enhanced version (on Xbox Series S or Series X) or optionally install the Enhanced version (PlayStation 5) when it goes live. No additional purchase is necessary.
We recently made a change to the game that prevents Ruined food items from being used as ingredients in Cooking. This was an intentional change, as using Ruined items went against the philosophy of the system in general (you can’t generally use Ruined clothing or gear items, so why food?), but we recognize that this introduced some issue for people who were locked out of certain recipes because in long-running Survival games, some ingredients might already have been ruined by the time you found them, with no really viable way to replace them.
We’ll be releasing a hotfix that addresses part of this issue, by rebalancing some of the Condition decay rates on specific food items -- in particular, canned goods, and fresh meat or fish. This will buy players more time to process harvested food (from hunting and fishing) to ensure it has longevity, but without rewarding hoarding tons of fish or meat that you can’t realistically process or store. You’ll need to plan your hunting and fishing activities accordingly. With things like Salt added to the game, you now have new options for preserving meat and fish long-term.
We’ve also added some rare food items required for some of the more complex recipes (ex. Canned Peaches) as Trade Items with Sutherland, so they will now be available through the Trading system. We also tuned some of the costs to make them a bit more accessible, and worthwhile for you. So even if you end up in a game where most of a certain type of ingredient no longer exists in your game, you should be able to trade with Sutherland to get it.
These fixes will be added to the same update that adds the Visual Enhancements to your game, so if you’re playing on PC (Steam, Epic Game Store, etc.), you should see these changes later in May, and they should come to console in June.
Some of our Switch players have encountered game crashes since we released Parts Five and Six of TALES back in February. The dev team was able to isolate the issue to a memory-related crash when playing in Docked mode. To fix it, we introduced some dynamic resolution scaling for certain regions, but only in Docked mode. This fix should not impact Handheld play, and even for Docked the impact should not be visible. It’s a solution we’ve used for other very large regions in the base Survival game, like Pleasant Valley, so if you’ve been playing docked Switch in the base game regions so far and been happy with how the game looks and performs, you should still be happy after this change. This Switch-specific fix has been approved by Nintendo and we’re expecting to launch it on Monday, April 28th.
We had planned to release a Quality of Life update with new content for the Trader and Safehouse customization, as well as some gameplay balance tuning, bug fixes, etc., before we shipped Episode Five, but the team felt stretched too thin between this work and completing Episode Five, so I’ve decided to push this update off until after Episode Five ships.
The team has done some work towards these features but, as with the QoL update, it was splitting focus and resources too much and with Episode Five needing to ship this year, I’ve pushed Mod Support and Enhanced Custom Settings off until after Episode Five ships.
That’s a great question! Shipping Episode Five will be a big inflection point for THE LONG DARK. It’s been years in the making, and in most ways, the completion of the WINTERMUTE Story Mode represents “the end” of THE LONG DARK.
I’m writing “the end” in quotes because we still intend to continue updating the game, but completing story mode has been a point of accountability for Hinterland all these years. With the story mode finished, we are looking forward to having some breathing room to figure out next steps and continue to do our work without the weight of a big promise hanging over us.
So, for a little while at least, we’re going to think about shipping Episode Five and finishing Wintermute as THE END. We’ll have delivered on our promises, lived up to our obligations, and hopefully you’ll be happy with the results and feel they were worth the wait.
Beyond that, we have to make some choices about what to do with the game, and we’ll be interested to hear your thoughts about what you’d like to see. I’ll probably share a community survey around this before the end of the year, along the lines of the one we did before we committed to building TALES. This survey will give you a chance to influence the future of THE LONG DARK.
As mentioned, there will definitely be -- at least -- one more QoL update, improved custom settings, mod support, and we’ve also promised Hunted Part III. Beyond that, we have many ideas of how we could keep supporting and expanding THE LONG DARK into the future, but we don’t want to do that without consulting with you and figuring out what you’d like to see and how you would like to continue supporting the game. It costs a lot of money to run a studio like Hinterland, and we’ve invested a lot in THE LONG DARK and the sequel, BLACKFROST, over the years, so our focus will be on how to continue building games and supporting them for years to come, in a financially sustainable way that is safe and fair for our team. And all this against a backdrop of ongoing industry turmoil that have seen a lot of our friends and fellow independent studios shut down over the last couple of years, not to mention the dark economic clouds on the global horizon.
We wouldn’t want to move ahead without you being part of this journey, so we want to hear what you’d like to see more of, whether it’s more regions, more mechanics, more story (?). The survey will include all kinds of questions around this. What’s exciting is that there are many paths we can take, including really ambitious stuff and more modest but sustainable stuff, and we really want to find a healthy way to continue supporting THE LONG DARK and keep you playing in this world for years to come. Along with some of our other work, which brings me to my next topic...
I imagine many of you noticed the launch announcement for BLACKFROST: The Long Dark 2 at The Game Awards in December. There was a lot of excitement about this from many of you, as well as some understandable questions about “but how can you announce a sequel before the current game is finished?”. I thought it might be helpful to talk about why we did this.
Larger companies with multiple revenue streams, or publisher-backed (or owned) studios who don’t have to pay their own bills, can afford to have extensive downtime -- often years -- between projects. Those years are spent working on new things, in anticipation of launching them in the future. During those periods, the studios are being paid out of development funds provided by the publisher, or investment, or payroll from a parent company, but most often the studios aren’t generating meaningful revenue during this time.
Hinterland is an independent studio, and our annual costs are covered out of revenue from THE LONG DARK and DLC like TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. It wouldn’t be feasible for us to “go dark” for 2-3 years in between finishing up THE LONG DARK and launching the sequel, because we generate revenue from sales of the game to new players, and that’s what keeps our studio going. Also, since we only charge once for the things we make and don’t have extensive DLC or other ongoing revenue streams, we’d simply go out of business if we didn’t release something within a reasonable distance of wrapping up THE LONG DARK. So, we need to build up new projects at the same time as we continue shipping and supporting our existing game.
Another factor is that it’s a lot harder to bring an audience to a sequel if you’ve lost them along the way. Our hope by continuing to update THE LONG DARK at the same time as we’re building BLACKFROST, is to show that your time commitment to the first game has not been in vain -- you can still play it and enjoy it well into the future as we build up BLACKFROST. And after BLACKFROST ships in Early Access, in between updates there, you’ll be able to bounce back to THE LONG DARK to continue experiencing the Quiet Apocalypse. This way, you can keep playing in this larger world we’re building for you, and you can continue investing your time knowing the game will always be there for you. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. And then over time, gradually, we’ll put a larger proportion of our time and resources into building up BLACKFROST, as it will also need the same focus and dedication behind it that THE LONG DARK has had for over 10 years. But see both games supporting each other, and the player community behind both games being part of a blended community who loves the broader idea of “The Long Dark” as a setting, the quiet apocalypse that unites the games.
It’s also really important that independent studios have the opportunity to gradually build up excitement around new projects. We don’t have massive marketing budgets to promote our games with. We sell directly to you, and our relationship is directly with you. Powerful systems like Wishlists on Steam are a way for studios to generate anticipation for their projects and to gather goodwill and interest, with some hope and expectation of converting those wishlists to sales over time. The more Wishlists a game launches with, the more likelihood of the launch going well, hitting that critical mass to gain attention and help it break out of the 1000+ new games that launch every month on Steam (there were almost 19,000 new games on Steam last year!), and the wishlists also indicate some general sense of how well the game could sell over time, which also helps with our own long-term planning.
This system is very core to how Steam works, as every launch or sale is an opportunity to ping the wishlisters with a reminder to buy the game. So we really need to be able to use this system as we build up towards the Early Access launch of BLACKFROST. But the Wishlist system only works if we can talk about our work, share it, and get new people excited about it!
We know that some of you were unhappy to see us announce BLACKFROST before we completed THE LONG DARK, as you have been waiting a long time for Episode Five, but if we have to wait until shipping Episode Five before we talk about our other work, our revenue could simply run dry before we get to the BLACKFROST launch, which would be a pretty serious problem for us! Our current plan is to launch BLACKFROST in Early Access about a year after we ship THE LONG DARK. We think that is a good amount of time to create space between the two games.
I understand the sentiment that we owe you Episode Five and that we have yet to deliver, and I get that you’ve waited a long time for it. We will be shipping it this year, and the game will be finished. I know it’s been frustrating. I’m not trying to minimize or ignore any of those feelings. I’m not making excuses and we take our responsibility to you very very seriously.
But I also know that we’ve been afraid to share any of our work outside of THE LONG DARK, for fear of alienating or angering players, who can sometimes be quite hostile, and this has held us back in many ways.
So, I’m asking you to try to be patient with us (as so many of you have been!), and give us the space to talk about BLACKFROST without pushing other fans out of our community or attacking the dev team or studio. There’s no BLACKFROST without THE LONG DARK, but the opposite will also become true. After Episode Five, there’s no TLD without BLACKFROST. The projects’ combined futures, and their roadmaps, are intertwined.
And someday, we might even talk about other non-TLD/BF projects! We hope we can be open with you and share our excitement about some of these things, knowing that even if you can’t feel excited about it with us, that you’ll leave some space for other fans to be happy and excited. We’re all here because we love the game, and we want for Hinterland to be more than “just” THE LONG DARK. We hope that you can come to care about our team and studio and all the things we hope to make in the future. Not just the game you’re playing right now. So please let’s together make sure we create a safe and positive space for that love of TLD and our future projects to be shared without attacking people for it.
I’d like to be able to start sharing more info about BLACKFROST in future dev diaries. If that’s going to be triggering for you while you wait for Episode Five, then I suggest you skip my dev diaries until Ep5 ships, and then come back and read them after.
We have to be able to share our work in order to make the games we want to make and run the studio the way we want to run it! I hope you understand, and will support us in this.
And if you want to support Hinterland and our future, please consider Wishlisting BLACKFROST on Steam.
If you’ve been playing THE LONG DARK on Tencent’s WeGame platform, we want to let you know that soon the game will be updated to have parity with Steam and Epic Game Store with the full update product structure (THE LONG DARK = Survival Mode + Wintermute) and also TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. If you already own THE LONG DARK, you will continue to own it (including WINTERMUTE), with no new purchase necessary.
Some of you have also asked about bringing the game back to GoG. We’ve been working with the business development team at GoG and are close to finalizing an agreement to bring the game to the store. As with WeGame, anyone who previously owned THE LONG DARK will automatically be updated to the latest version, with the option to purchase TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY if you wish. I want to be clear that the agreement isn’t yet finished; we’re still working through some details, but I’m hopeful we will get there and find a good path forward.
As a final note, you may notice that starting April 24th, for four days, THE LONG DARK will be -- for a very limited time -- available on Steam with a deep 90% discount. This is an experiment we are trying with Steam, to test some theories around pricing elasticity. This won’t apply to most of you reading this as you already own the game, but if you think we’ve done good work and you want to support us, you could mention it to a friend that you think would also enjoy the game! I doubt we’ll have the game discounted to this degree again for a long time.
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That’s pretty much it for this Dev Diary. Thanks for reading, and I hope you found the information useful and interesting. If you want to discuss anything in this dev diary, we encourage you to do so in the Official Forums (registration required, Hinterland & volunteer moderated), in Steam (volunteer moderated), or Reddit for THE LONG DARK or BLACKFROST (both community moderated).
You can also subscribe to our Newsletter to be notified of news on new products in our Store or other general newsworthy topics, or follow us on Bluesky (Hinterland | The Long Dark | Blackfrost).
All the best, and stay safe out there.
- Raphael
Founder & Creative Director
Hinterland
