Dear Community,

We’ve just hotfixed The Long Dark to v1.40 [42090].

You’ll find the complete changelist for the hotfix below.


*[ALL] Added online messaging feature to distribute game news through the Main Menu.

Is there something that you've been wanting to ask about The Long Dark? The game's Creative Director Raphael van Lierop has been answering fan questions on our official forums. Fans of the game can ask questions, and for each Dispatch a handful of those are selected and answered.

You don't need to be a member of our official forums to read the answers - though if you do sign up you can ask your own questions!

Be sure to read past Dispatches to see if your question has already been addressed!

So get your questions posted on our official forums now to be considered for the next Mailbag.

Stay informed on the Milton Mailbag and The Long Dark by our newsletter.

Hello community,

I have some news and a progress update to share on how things are going with various parts of the game, and the studio. Some of it is good news, some of it will be disappointing. I hope that for the vast majority of you, the news is mostly good.





Some of you might be clued in to recent industry turmoil and a spate of closures, Telltale being the highest profile of these. A bit lesser known, but really big news for our local Vancouver game dev community, was the complete shutdown of Capcom’s Vancouver studio. About 200 people lost their jobs, and in the weeks following we scrambled to interview people to see if we could help them, and to see how we could build up our own development strength.

Fortunately for us, we already had several ex-Capcom Vancouver people in the studio, so we were able to identify high performers who would fit in to our culture well. As a result of the Capcom situation, along with some other people we were interviewing at the time, we’ve hired six new team members in the last month. This is Hinterland’s most significant growth in the past five years.

One area we were really able to bulk up was animation, which has always been a challenge on this project. Our current animation team of three has been able to do some truly incredible technical and creative work over the past 18 months, but we’ve always been limited on how much content we could produce and that’s held us back in some areas of the project. For example, the decision to ship unvoiced dialogue scenes in the original Episode One and Two. We just couldn’t produce all the animation needed to support full voice over.

For Redux, we adopted some new facial animation technology, and things have improved significantly, to the extent that we’re able to ship Redux Episodes One and Two with full voice-over and fully animated characters. I think this really elevates the quality of the narrative presentation in the game.



We were also able to purchase Capcom Vancouver’s nearly new motion capture studio (or the equipment from it anyway). This purchase gives us a 36-camera set-up which will be more than enough to carry us through the next few projects. Having our own motion capture equipment means we no longer have to plan our production around a motion-capture studio’s availability, which will give us a lot more flexibility to shoot, iterate, reshoot, etc.

In addition to the two animators, we also hired two new programmers, a new user interface/visual effects artist, and a new tester. We’re also interviewing additional people who may end up joining us, including some folks from Telltale and other studios that specialize in narrative experiences, all people who’ve been recently let go and are looking for a new home. This is a great opportunity for us to build up our team in anticipation of future work on The Long Dark, and our next game.

This team growth means we’re big enough to seriously consider splitting the current team into two production teams -- one focused in WINTERMUTE, and another focused on Survival Mode. We’ve long struggled with trying to produce enough content to keep both Story and Survival sides of the project fully resourced. So I’m feeling pretty hopeful for the future of The Long Dark, and our update progress moving forward. Being able to have two dedicated teams will help ensure we can make more consistent progress in both areas of the game.





Suddenly having access to all this new development talent and the motion-capture gear makes a huge difference to what we can accomplish in Episode Three. I’ve decided that I’d like to be able to use these new resources -- along with the new motion capture equipment -- to add more content and polish to Episode Three. This means it won’t be ready for us to ship in December.

There’s not much more to say about that at the moment. I know this will be disappointing.



This may be bittersweet after the Episode Three delay news, but we’ll be delivering the updated “Redux” versions of Episodes One and Two in December.

While the high-level narrative of these episodes remains the same, the details and the implementation of the missions and narrative content is significantly different from what you played last year. Everything has been re-written, re-recorded, and re-animated. There are also new mission beats that didn’t exist before, things that flesh out the experience and story of WINTERMUTE. In December, you’ll be able to play these Redux episodes and get a great sense of what to expect in Episode Three and beyond, as these now serve as the template for how we’ll approach all our mission and narrative content moving forward.

This also means that with the December “Redux” update, we’ll be deleting your old WINTERMUTE saves. They will no longer be compatible with the game after the update, as so much has changed. So, if you haven’t already started playing WINTERMUTE, we suggest you wait until our December update. And if you really want to finish your current WINTERMUTE playthrough, we recommend you do it soon! If you finished the original Episodes One and Two and want to roll right into Episode Three when it launches, you can also do that, although we hope you’ll go back and experience “Do Not Go Gentle” and “Luminance Fugue” again, as they are much changed and improved since their original iterations.





Just so that we don’t leave you without something entirely new to look forward to before the end of 2018, we’re releasing another free update to Survival Mode this December.

I don’t want to spoil the contents yet -- that deserves its own dev diary -- but I can say the update will include the following: New Craftable Hat, New Challenge Mode, New Condition Buff, some UI fixes, some gameplay tweaks, and general bug fixes as well. There may also be a few other surprises in there, if we can get them finished in time.



Remember: we are deleting all current WINTERMUTE saves with our December update.

• If you are just starting WINTERMUTE and don’t mind waiting a bit, we recommend you wait for December so you can play the revised and much improved Episodes One and Two.
  
• If you have an in-progress WINTERMUTE game you’d like to finish before we wipe the save, please finish it soon! Pre-Redux (Predux!) WINTERMUTE saves will not be compatible with the game, post-update.
  
• If you completed the original Episodes One and Two, Episode Three will be unlocked for you when it releases.
  
• This save wipe has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on Survival Mode games. We will not be wiping those. If you play Survival and don’t care about WINTERMUTE, simply carry on.

We’ll release more info about the December Survival Mode update when we get closer to launching it. Thanks for reading, and if you’d like to discuss this dev diary with other members of the community, please jump into the conversation here in our official community forums.


Thanks for reading!

- Raphael

We've added a few more hours to 4 Days of Night to give you more time to work towards the badges. The event will now end on November 1st 10am Pacific Time.

Keep sharing your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames.

Thanks for playing, and Happy Halloween everyone!

Embrace the final night of 4 Days of Night!

You can find details about today's daily challenge below.



For additional details about 4DON, please refer to our original announcement.



Good luck, and we hope you enjoy it! Share your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames where we’ll share regular updates.

– The Hinterland Team

4 Days of Night is on fire for night three!
You can find details about today's daily challenge below.



For additional details about 4DON, please refer to our original announcement.




Good luck, and we hope you enjoy it! Share your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames where we’ll share regular updates.

– The Hinterland Team

4 Days of Night is a howling success and continues for the second day of night!
You can find details about today's daily challenge below.



For additional details about 4DON, please refer to our original announcement.



Good luck, and we hope you enjoy it! Share your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames where we’ll share regular updates.

– The Hinterland Team

4 Days of Night is now (a)live!
You can find details about today's daily challenge below.



For additional details about 4DON, please refer to our original announcement.



Good luck, and we hope you enjoy it! Share your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames where we’ll share regular updates.

– The Hinterland Team

Four Days of Night is back this Halloween! Join us for some lighthearted fun in this time-limited event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyCylzMB-8


Just launch the game between Saturday, October 27th at 11 pm PDT, and Wednesday, October 31st, at 11 pm PDT, select “Four Days of Night” from the Main Menu, and do your best to survive as long as you can.

If you don’t want to participate, simply continue playing Story, Survival, or Challenges as usual!



This year's event sees some significant improvements:

Daily Challenges

Each day brings its own unique horrors to survive through: brutal weather conditions, tuned wildlife behaviors and spawn rates etc. Daily challenges kick in at 11pm PDT every day, starting from October 27th, and each lasts a full 24h. We will post new announcements in this Community Hub, detailing every new daily challenge on the day of.



Players who manage to survive long enough will unlock those unique badges:



TWILIGHT BADGE: Survived for 2 real-time hours PER DAY for any two days of the event.



MIDNIGHT BADGE: Survived for 2 real-time hours PER DAY for all four days of the event.


For the first time, we’re bringing 4DON to our Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players, in addition to Steam. Jump into the conversation around Four Days of Night and use the #4don hashtag on Twitter, or discuss it in our dedicated official community sub-forum.


This year, you can kick off Four Days of Night right from the Main Menu! No need to opt-in to a separate branch. Keep in mind that save files will be 4DON-specific, and are only useful for this year’s event.



Good luck, and we hope you enjoy it! Share your stories, images, gifs and livestreams with us by tagging them with #4DON and make sure you follow us on Twitter at @hinterlandgames where we’ll share regular updates.

– The Hinterland Team

Trailer + Info tomorrow.