After a long delay—it was initially scheduled for release in December of 2018—the third episode of The Long Dark's narrative Wintermute mode is out now. It's called Crossroads Elegy, and it has players, now in the role of new protagonist Dr. Astrid Greenwood, exploring Pleasant Valley to "uncover local mysteries and rescue lost survivors as you navigate treacherous blizzards and face devious Timberwolves". From the trailer, it seems like there's going to be a lot of those wolves.
The Long Dark - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
The third episode of icy survival sandbox The Long Dark‘s story mode arrived today. Crossroads Elegy switches protagonists, putting us in the hiking boots of the doctor we were searching for in the first two episodes. Handy thing to be in the icepocalypse, a doctor. More useful than a pilot without a plane. Here, see a wee bit of Astrid Greenwood’s story in the launch trailer below.
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!
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!
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
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.
ALL EPISODES UNLOCKED
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!
LOST & FOUND
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.
CONSOLE VISUAL ENHANCEMENTS
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
NO MORE 32-BIT CPU 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.
FOUR DAYS OF NIGHT (4DON)
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.
DECEMBER SURVIVAL MODE UPDATE
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!
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:
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 Long Dark - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Natalie Clayton)
The Long Dark has been in early access for five years now. To celebrate all that time in the snowy wastes, developers Hinterland have announced the release date for chapter three of the game’s story mode, and tinkered with just a little bit of time travel.
Developer Hinterland Games has announced that the long-awaited, and very delayed, third story episode of its sub-zero survival experience The Long Dark will finally come to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on 22nd October.
This month, The Long Dark is celebrating five years since its enormously successful early access launch in 2014. That initial release offered a purely sandbox experience, and a wonderful one it was too - delivering a punishing but engagingly authentic winter survival adventure in a breathtakingly atmospheric, post-apocalyptic world.
Hinterland's ultimate goal was to translate that compelling survival core into an narrative-driven experience, and the initial fruits of that labour arrived in 2017, with the first two episodes of The Long Dark's story mode, known as Wintermute.
The Long Dark's third episode is, finally, imminent. Those playing through the chilly survival game's story mode have had a long wait, and there are still two more episodes to go, but next month the story will continue. In the meantime, check out the teaser for Crossroads Elegy above.
It's been over two years since The Long Dark left Early Access with the first two episodes. The third episode was originally due out at the end of 2018, with the rest of the episodes coming before the end of this year. Those plans obviously changed.
A big factor was Capcom Vancouver shutting down. Hinterland ended up making six new hires and started interviewing more. With new artists, testers, programmers and some new mo-cap equipment, the studio decided to push back the release date so it could improve Crossroads Elegy. That was last November.
Since then, the first two episodes have been overhauled, which is great if, like me, you've completely forgotten what's going on and are planning to start again.
Hinterland isn't giving too much away about the episode yet, but you won't be playing Will Mackenzie. Instead, the episode will show events from his ex-wife's perspective. Astrid and Will are separated during the plane crash at the start of the game.
"Episode Three: Crossroads Elegy is the culmination of the foundational work we did in Redux, and presents a series of events experienced from Astrid’s point of view," Creative director Raphael van Lierop wrote in a blog post. "In our own way, and in our own style, it moves the story forward. I don’t expect all of you to like it. But it’s a story that is true to the world of The Long Dark, true to Astrid, and I believe, also true to the world we live in today."
Crossroads Elegy is due out on October 22. In December, the survival mode will also receive an update, with Hinterland promising more details soon.
We launched THE LONG DARK on Steam Early Access on September 22nd, 2014. Since then, we have updated the game over 150 times. Until now, everything but the most current update has been unavailable to our community.
We created the TIME CAPSULE to let you step back in history and play every major update since our launch. Think of it as a playable retrospective of how the game has evolved over the years -- based on developer vision tempered by player feedback.
We have created a forum on the official Hinterland forums for players of THE LONG DARK to discuss playing these TIME CAPSULE builds and sharing their experiences in the earlier versions of the game.
The TIME CAPSULE builds are all unsupported, meaning that we no longer are providing fixes or updates for them.
Please do not submit queries to our Support team for anything but the MOST RECENT (Current) update. We have taken steps to protect your Save Files but please ensure you follow the TIME CAPSULE instructions carefully.
Five years is a long time to work on a single game.
Truth be told, I’ve probably been working on The Long Dark for closer to seven years. I officially started Hinterland back in the summer of 2012. I knew how to make games, but I didn’t know how to start a business or run a company. I’m grateful to the people who’ve been there to support me along the way. This all feels like so long ago.
When did I know I wanted to start Hinterland? I always knew I’d want to start my own studio one day. I just needed to get experience. Later on in my career, it became important that I make something that felt a truer expression of my creative values than most of the games I’d worked on to that point. I’d often thought about striking off on my own over the years, but one moment that really stands out in my memory is reviewing Ridley Scott’s IMDB page, and seeing that he’d already made something over 70 films (including several medium-defining ones), and when I looked at the paltry four titles to my credit to that point, I felt my legacy as a game creator would be pretty insignificant unless I could start shipping games more frequently. So yeah, after years in “triple-A” — working on games that took years to ship — I started Hinterland with the intention of making smaller games, shorter projects, so that I could ship multiple games per year.
Whoops!
Like for some of you, for me The Long Dark started out as a game but is now a significant part of my life. I think about it all the time. I’ve watched my kids grow up from small children to being almost teenagers, while I’ve thought about The Long Dark. My youngest doesn’t even remember a time where I wasn’t working on The Long Dark. This game and studio has dominated my life for years. It’s become part of who I am, woven into the fabric of my being. Working on this game and running this studio has also afforded me the opportunity to be there for my wife and kids in ways I wasn’t able to when I worked for other people. That’s been this game’s biggest gift to me, and that flexibility has informed a lot about how I run Hinterland today, to be able to provide that same flexibility to others.
When I now look around our studio and see the nearly 40 people who put their time and energy into making The Long Dark for you, I think about the deep honour that has been bestowed upon me, being able to work with so many incredible people, as well as the responsibility I have to them due to the faith they have placed in me. They are paying mortgages, putting their kids through school, carrying the worries and stresses we all carry, watching their own families grow up within the shelter The Long Dark has provided us all. A game is more than a thing players experience — it can also be a thing to build a future around.
I feel a huge weight of responsibility to each and every person who buys The Long Dark — will they feel good about their purchase? Will they see how much care we’ve put into what we’ve given them? Will they understand what we’ve tried to show them? Today, it’s so easy to be cynical about the industry and the motivations of developers. Most of the cynicism is, in my opinion, an easy cop-out, and deeply unfair. Most developers are in it for the love of the craft. For us, the motivation is simple — to create work of lasting meaning. We hope our work speaks for us.
I feel a weight of responsibility to preserve a place for the pride of craft that is a big part of why we chose to dedicate our lives to this medium. You often read that a game is nothing without players there to experience it, and while technically this may be true, I strongly believe in the importance of our place as its creators. We aren’t merely here to build something and put it out into the world, ignorant of its flaws and values, waiting for our players to tell us what we have made or where we should take it. That lets us off the hook, and ignores the critical part we play in the dialogue. We are working to create something that has its own inner values, its own truth, and we’re striving to create the best version of that experience we can. That’s what we owe our players. We owe it to them to create something they cannot find anywhere else. We owe it to them to have a clear vision for what we are creating, and then the will to bring it to life. To that end, any successes in The Long Dark are the team’s success, and any failings of the game are mine.
This is what I reflect on, on this day, the fifth anniversary of bringing our creation to the world. Of bringing it to you. I think about what The Long Dark has come to mean to us, and to our players. Is it a finely crafted thing that feels true to its inner values? Where have we hit the mark? Where have we failed? I think about that day, five years ago, where we pressed the launch button on Steam, having only trepidation and very modest expectations about how the game would be received. I think about the days, weeks, and months afterwards, realizing we were going to survive as a company. I think about our growing community, the various wants, backgrounds, and attitudes of our players — what The Long Dark means to them, what they want out of it, and how we can provide for them without breaking this thing we have created. I think about my team and what they need, and will need in the future. I think about where we sit within the ecosystem of the industry, and the community of players, and what our responsibility is to shift the dialogue, move the needle, to try to create a more positive, more thoughtful place for discourse to happen. Again, we hope our work speaks for us.
I think about the next five years, what they will mean for Hinterland, how we will continue our Good Work, the ways in which I hope we leave a legacy for our players, our friends, our families, and what that legacy will be. I reflect on the world around us and how we can use our audience, our work, to have an impact. No art exists in a vacuum. May our work speak for us.
Thank you for the part you have played in helping to give us this voice.
***
At long last, today, we announced the next episode of WINTERMUTE, our Story Mode, is launching on October 22nd — less than a month from today.
Episode Three: CROSSROADS ELEGY is the culmination of the foundational work we did in REDUX, and presents a series of events experienced from Astrid’s point of view. In our own way, and in our own style, it moves the story forward. I don’t expect all of you to like it. But it’s a story that is true to the world of The Long Dark, true to Astrid, and I believe, also true to the world we live in today.
Reflecting on the five years on Steam, we’ve also published a TIME CAPSULE, unlocking access to the 15 major Steam builds we’ve released since Sept 2014. We hope you enjoy this playable archive of The Long Dark’s development history. It’s been fun for us to look back at some of our own work and see how far the game has come in the past five years.
We’ll have more tidbits to share about Episode Three in the weeks ahead. We’ll also shed some more light on the next Survival Mode update we have planned for December. In the meantime, we really hope you enjoy today’s Teaser for CROSSROADS ELEGY, and the TIME CAPSULE content.
Thanks for all your support over the past five years. I know our progress hasn’t always been what you’d like to have seen, and I know a lot of you probably thought we’d never release Episode Three. Thanks to all who kept the faith and believed in us all this time. We may not work quickly, but we do work hard, and we hope you — like us — feel excited about what’s to come.
All the best, and heartfelt thanks from the team at Hinterland.
