Dev Diary – October 2024

Hello players,

As the end of the year approaches, we have many many things to update you on, so I’m going to dive right in. This dev diary is a big one, as in addition to news about THE LONG DARK, I’ve tried to answer some commonly asked community questions relating to the game, and other things we’re doing at Hinterland.

WINTERMUTE, EPISODE FIVE

You may have noticed that we haven’t announced a release date for Episode Five. Our last update on progress was last December when I said we would launch it by the end of this year. Unfortunately, the episode is not quite ready yet. Wrapping up TALES for the end of this year took up much more time and resources than we originally planned for, including the time needed to redo the Cougar. 

The good news is that with Part Six of TALES coming out in December, that will wrap up our work on the DLC, and from that point onward the *entire* TLD team will be heads-down focused on finishing Episode Five and releasing it ASAP next year. Everyone on TLD will be working on finishing and shipping this final part of our story.

As a recap, Episode Five, titled “The Light at the End of All Things”, concludes the WINTERMUTE storyline, and wraps up all the various threads introduced in the previous four episodes. The Episode takes us to the Suzuki Radio Telescope, the enigmatic Atwood, Perseverance Mills, reveals the contents of Astrid’s mysterious hardcase, and brings to a head the conflict between Mackenzie and Mathis. You play as both Astrid and Mackenzie in this episode. It’s our biggest episode to date, and will be the end of the Story Mode for THE LONG DARK. Episode Five also reveals what is *really* going on with the Aurora, and sets up the fiction and IP for future stories, in more games, film, television, and beyond.

You’ve waited a long time for this, and we’re well aware of all the delays that have got us to this point. This puts all the more pressure on us to make sure that what we release at the end is worth the wait. There’s enormous pressure. The team is handling it by staying focused on doing their best work, and only putting out an episode that we are proud of and believe lives up to all the time and effort that has gone into THE LONG DARK until now.

COUGAR 2.0

We’ve nearly completed work on the revised Cougar, taking on board all the feedback from players who wanted to see this predator as a more active presence in the world. The revised system removes a lot of the previous game mechanics around territory control and timers, and instead builds the Cougar up as a dangerous hunter in the world. It can be avoided by players, but will become increasingly hostile if players seek to encounter them. You can choose to hunt them, but you may find yourself hunted instead. Rather than relying on in-game HUD elements and map counters, the new Cougar systems will put the information in the world, and you’ll have to pay close attention to the sounds and signs that warn you of its presence. It’s a much more dynamic system, but still designed so that the risks can be avoided by making good decisions.

Since every release requires Test and Release Management effort, to avoid creating redundant work by splitting the launches of Cougar 2.0 and the Part Six release, we’ve rolled the updated Cougar into Part Six, and they will release together. This will ensure the team can keep their focus on validating the system and ensure it launches in the best shape possible, along with the rest of the Part Six feature set.

Nintendo Switch

We’ve been struggling with various memory issues and crashes on the Switch since releasing the first four Parts of Tales. We’ve had programmers and technical artists working on finding ways to optimize further and to solve the crashes. Unfortunately, we have really pushed the Switch hardware to its limit and it’s proving very difficult to address the issues. We are deep into the guts of the game and the system, trying to find where to extract more performance headroom.

Our plan is to release a Switch update ASAP that fixes as many of the performance issues and crashes as we can, so that our Switch players can enjoy TLD and the first Parts of TALES without crashing. This means the Switch release of Parts Five and Six, along with the revised Cougar, have been pushed out until the new year, as releasing more of TALES before these issues are addressed will only make matters worse on the Switch.

We’ll share an updated timeline for Parts Five and Six on Switch once the crash issues are resolved. We’re hoping to be able to release a fix to the crashes before the end of the year, but it will depend on our success in identifying and addressing the issues. As with the other platforms, the revised Cougar will be included in Part Six, although our plan for Switch is to release Parts Five and Six together, so it all comes in one big release. I apologize to any Switch players who have been impacted by the crashes — it’s not the quality or experience we wanted to give you.

TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, PART SIX

We are releasing TALES Part Six in December, on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Epic Game Store. This final release will conclude the TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY DLC for THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode.

Part Six has some of the most significant features in the entire expansion pass campaign:

• The Trader. An enigmatic figure and a voice on the radio. They’ll trade with you, but getting access to their best items might require you get comfortable with some questionable demands. What has this survivor been doing on Great Bear Island since the Quiet Apocalypse? Note that this system also includes a variety of new items that are only available via the Trader. (Players who don’t want the Trader in their game will have the option to exclude it.)
• Safehouse Customization. Move furniture and decorative props around your favourite locations in the game. Repair broken items and clean up the mess. Craft items from an entirely new series of hand-made furniture and decorative props. Collect and move every framed pancake photo in the game to one place. Make pretty much any valid interior in the game your personal Safehouse with this powerful system. Note that “valid interiors” in this case include any interior space that has a separate scene load (ex. Trapper’s Cabin, Quincy’s Quonset, etc.), and most of the structures connected to the region scenes (like the Lookouts and the Mountaineer’s Hut). The possibilities are (almost) endless. There are also some new Safehouse-centric gameplay tools included with the release.
• Cougar 2.0. As described above — a major revision on the Cougar we originally released in Part Five (then immediately removed based on player feedback). The new version is more present, more dangerous, and entirely avoidable if you make smart decisions, but you’ll face a relentless stalker if you don’t. (Players who don’t want the Cougar in their game will have the option to exclude it.)
• Instant Camera. Discover an old manual instant camera. Take photos anywhere in the world and add them to your Album. Craft photos into wall-hangings for your personal Safehouse. Find Colour, Black & White, or Sepia-toned film stock. Be a photographer at the end of the world.

Global Wildlife Refresh. Now that the Cougar is finalized, the team is able to complete the Global Wildlife Refresh. Every wildlife spawn in the entire game has been redone, including all predator and prey animals, so you’ll need to find some new play patterns as you move through Great Bear Island and the Far Territory. It’s a whole new world of wildlife out there.

With these final features completed, we conclude the development of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. We didn’t get it finished in the originally expected time-frame, but we’re happy to have completed it for you and we hope you have enjoyed the journey so far. And if you’ve been sitting on the fence about TALES, waiting for it to be finished before you jumped in, now’s a great time to do so. Also remember: we’re heading into Steam Sale Season.

VISUAL ENHANCEMENTS

As part of TALES, the team has completed a suite of visual enhancements to the base THE LONG DARK game. These are targeted at higher-end platforms like PCs well above recommended spec, and PS5 or Xbox Series S/X, although some of the improvements will also be available on lower-end systems.

To give the team breathing room to focus on finalizing the rest of the Part Six features, I’ve pushed the release of the Visual Enhancements out to the new year. We’ll share a full list and some comparative screenshots or videos along with a Visual Enhancements update in the Spring. These will be available for free to everyone who owns THE LONG DARK.

NOW WHAT?

With TALES now coming to its conclusion, and the team’s focus shifting to Episode Five to finish it ASAP in 2025, you’re probably wondering what’s next for THE LONG DARK, beyond that.

We have some plans to continue supporting THE LONG DARK into 2025 and likely 2026, depending on what happens with our new projects. For 2025, the current general roadmap for TLD is:

• Finish Episode Five, and conclude the WINTERMUTE storyline.
• Ongoing content-focused updates to key game systems, including targeted additional content for the TRADER and SAFEHOUSE CUSTOMIZATION, in the form of new Trade Items, and additional craftable furniture and decorative items. The emphasis will depend somewhat on how many folks buy TALES and whether players are excited about these new systems.
• Visual Enhancements for high-end systems, as mentioned above.
• A completely overhauled Custom Settings system, exposing as many tunables as we can beyond the current offering, so that you can customize your TLD experience along very specific lines of gameplay settings and whatnot. This should be a very powerful set of tools for fine-tuning the TLD experience to your liking.
• Proper Mod Support, including tools, documentation, and a community hub dedicated to Mods. A lot of the modifications we’ve made over the past two years, to the core game structure and content needed to support the development of TALES, will now become useful in providing tools for you to create your own content for THE LONG DARK.

The majority of the TLD team will be focused on Episode Five, so our ability to do many content-centric updates to Survival Mode will be quite limited until the episode is finished. We really need to get this episode out the door so that our players have some closure around WINTERMUTE, and we feel that with the story mode completed, we’ll finally have the opportunity to take stock of our development around THE LONG DARK, and how we want to continue to grow and maintain it in the future. 

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we shift into a bit more of a quiet period of focusing and finalizing Episode Five.

NEW GAMES, AND THE FUTURE

Last year, I hinted that alongside THE LONG DARK, we’ve also been slowly incubating some new games. This probably seems counter-intuitive to folks who have been waiting for us to complete WINTERMUTE, so I wanted to take a moment to explain a bit about why I have decided to do this.

As an independent, self-funded developer, Hinterland doesn’t have the luxury of having multiple years of “down time” between our games to build up our next things and launch them. We don’t have an external publisher paying our bills while we build new things; we are our own publisher, so we have to pay our own bills. This also means that we own our own revenue, rather than having to split it with a publisher, and this means we can invest our own revenue in taking care of our people, running our company ethically, and making the kinds of games we want to make. We can prioritize quality and continuing to invest in our game even when a traditional publisher would have long abandoned it, or forced us to move on to something new. We can focus on working sustainably and supporting our game and community without being primarily driven by maximizing profitability. But we can only do that as long as we generate enough revenue to cover our costs.

Hinterland’s revenue is entirely generated from sales of THE LONG DARK and TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, and generally speaking TLD continues to sell well but only because we continue to update it. Updating it costs a lot of money, and inevitably the revenue will decline over time because no game stays successful, or relevant, forever.

In thinking ahead to the future, I want to ensure the smallest possible window between the time where TLD starts to decline significantly in popularity (and sales), and when our next big game is ready to launch. This will help ensure that the new game is starting to ramp up in terms of revenue and popularity at the same time as TLD starts to wind down. I want to make it clear — TLD has been a super steady success for us over the past 10+ years, with year-over-year revenue that is remarkably stable. Mostly this bucks the trend of games that tend to lose 25% of their revenue every year, until they wind down into a kind of maintenance mode. But at some point the revenue will decline to the extent that it’s not sufficient to keep our operation going, and it’s my primary job as head of the studio to ensure my team has long-term financial stability so they can focus their energy on making games for you. Anyone who tracks the game industry right now, understands how challenging this is for almost every developer at the moment. Not to mention for some of the biggest publishers in the business. So, probably unsurprisingly, a big thing I focus my time on is how to plan the future so that we can live up to our obligations to our current players while also preparing for the future, so that Hinterland can survive another 10+ years.

For the past 4-5 years, TLD revenue has been very very stable (+/- 5% YoY), which has allowed us to maintain the team size on TLD but also to put some resources behind starting up new things. TLD has been a remarkable game for Hinterland — most studios never have a game like this, and we’re super grateful for it and for the community that continues to play and support it. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t, or shouldn’t, continue to update TLD well into the future, as long as there are players who still want to play it and new players who want to buy it. But we can’t really afford to be in a position where there’s a 2-3 year gap between the “end” of TLD and the launch of the next big Hinterland game. And big ambitious games need a lot of time and money to conceive, develop, and launch.

Because of our work on TLD, and the delays around Episode Five, we’ve been really reluctant to say much of anything about the new things we are working on. It’s kind of sad because I’m sure many of you would be excited to celebrate something new from Hinterland, and it’d be a great morale boost for the team. But it’s just never felt like a good idea or really the right time to talk much about things outside THE LONG DARK, mainly because we don’t want to upset people. 

But now that we can see a clear path to the end of WINTERMUTE, I think it’s getting close to the time where we can begin to share some of the things we’ve been working on. I hope that this is ok with you, and that you will continue to support our work. If you are unhappy to see us share news about new projects at Hinterland because you feel we shouldn’t talk about anything other than Episode Five, then I hope you will be patient with us over the upcoming months, as we navigate the completion of TLD alongside the announcement of new things from the studio. If you have enjoyed THE LONG DARK and want to see Hinterland continue to exist as a developer, putting more games out into the world, then I hope you can see the importance of us being able to share more about what we are making. (Or, the importance of supporting us by buying the TALES DLC, which has helped finance our ability to continue improving TLD, including many free updates to the base game for everyone.)

Another reason why it’s important to announce things at some point is because it takes a lot of time to build up to a launch. You need a year or more between announcing, starting to build up a community hub and Wishlists to help gauge interest and excitement about the game (required to ensure a successful launch event), time for internal and community playtesting, time to market and build up hype, and so on. The time between an announcement for our next big game, and when we think we will actually launch it for our players, will likely be at least a year. It could be longer. We need all this time to build up towards a successful launch, as our next big survival game will also be an Early Access title, and we want to maximize the impact of this launch and the potential success of this game for Hinterland, as it will help ensure our ongoing independence years from now. And independence is at the heart of everything we do.

I want to be clear that nothing we are making will ever fully replace THE LONG DARK. But I also think it’s healthy for us to work on ambitious new things, and in fact, we have to. The Hinterland team is full of vibrant, creative developers who want to make innovative new experiences. I personally also need to make more games, more worlds, as this is what drives me creatively. And as much as I love THE LONG DARK and am proud of what we have made, I think it’s only a fraction of what we have the potential to create, and what I want to create, before I’m finished with this crazy thing we call game development. And so while we absolutely love TLD and it will never be replaced, we also want to bring new things into the world, for ourselves and for our players.

I hope that all makes sense, and that when you read news about Episode Five, or about anything else we might work on in the future, that you realize how much of what we’re doing is about the love of our craft, in a world and industry that seems increasingly hostile to hand-crafted game development. And that everything we do is to preserve the independence we have. We can’t do it without your support, and I hope that by sharing some of this thinking I’ve given you a glimpse into my reasoning for incubating and eventually sharing news of new projects, potentially before the current one is completely finished.

THE LONG DARK FILM ADAPTATION

My ambition for Hinterland has always been to create original worlds as games, and once established with strong player communities, take those worlds and stories to other platforms. If you follow games or entertainment in general, you’ll see how much Hollywood has caught up to this line of thinking, with tons of game IP adaptations in the works. 

We haven’t said much about the film adaptation for THE LONG DARK in a while. Over the years, we’ve gone through the cycle of television and film adaptations along with the ups and downs of the entertainment business and how it’s changed through streaming’s ascent, peak TV, COVID, the collapse of theatrical, and whatever the heck it is film/TV is doing now. 

Through all of that, we’ve never lost sight of what makes THE LONG DARK special, and how we can expand the story and world outside of the game. Although I don’t have anything super specific to share around this at the moment, I want you to know that we have not abandoned this project. It’s still underway, and with any luck we’ll be in a good place to share more news about the film, and other adaptation projects, in 2025.

HINTERLAND STORE

Many of you have been asking when the Hinterland Store will re-open, so that you can buy your favourite mug from TLD, or other Hinterland and TLD merch. We’ll have an update around that in the second half of November. I think (hope?) you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

WRAP-UP

That’s a lot of stuff! I hope it was useful for you to read about it. The most important take-aways from this dev diary are that WINTERMUTE Episode Five will be released in the new year (date TBD), and that Part Six of TALES will be released in December (apart from on Switch, where it will come in the new year).

Keep your eyes open for the traditional update video that coincides with the launch of Part Six, which will get into more details about the new systems like the Trader, Safehouse Customization, or the overhauled Cougar. 

Thanks for reading, and keep your eyes on the Hinterland YouTube Channel (we strongly suggest subscribing!), and if you want to get more regular news about what’s going on at Hinterland, we encourage you to subscribe to our Newsletter, which we are overhauling and will start using as a primary tool for community and fan engagement started in the new year.

All the best, and see you in December, for TALES Part Six.

– Raphael