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The Long Dark

Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
66
I'm so glad that in this game you can only craft a few essentials that make sense (relatively speaking) and you don't need ten thousand different items to do so. And base building would go against the spirit of the game. There's already a bunch of bases ready to use, they're called abandoned buildings.
 
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Gord

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Got that game recently from the Humble Bundle. Played it over the last days. Honestly, I think that as long as you have some patience (because walking is fucking slow, everything else is across the entire map and you also need about 10 kg of meat per day to not starve), it's a nice experience as far as those survival games go.
Don't see myself playing that for 100+ hours, but then again, I didn't spend much money on it, so that's fine.
Anyway, I've probably played it for longer time already than other games of the genre combined.
But maybe that just means that I'm not actually a survival-games guy and TLD isn't really one?

And btw. Subnautica is actually a pretty cool experience the first time you play it and discover the various stuff. Outside of (somewhat pointles) base-building, there's not too much replayability, though.
 
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Stavrophore

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Strap Yourselves In
Long Dark is a nice game for 20-30h to just tinker with some mechanics, try to survive a week or two. After that it gets boring. If you are persistent masochist you will try to climb timberwood mountain on interlooper, and this might prolong your gameplay time to 50-100h if you aren't the fast learner. There are maps with loot spawn on the steam, so you either can memorize this shit ingame which is pointless or you can check the maps.
 

Burning Bridges

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TLD is like heroin. Everyone can get an immense kick out of it the first 5-10 times, until it doesn't work anymore. And then he will use the needle another 100-5,000 times until he realizes it's finally over.
 

SymbolicFrank

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Bought it, played it, liked it.

Until I got food poisoning by trying to cook raw meat: cooking is clicking left, right, left, while eating it is left, left. Horrible user interface.

I tried to fix it by eating the prescribed antibiotics, but I ate 24 of them which all gave the message: "That didn't work". It turns out you have to eat two, ignore that message and rest for 10 hours. I was still busy brewing and drinking antibiotic tea by that time. Horrible user interface.

I tried to quit and restore the game, because normally it only gets saved when you enter a building or sleep / pass time, but it turns out to get saved immediately when you get ill. Horrible!


Next up, I got stuck in the bowl next to the stove in the camp office. As you cannot jump and there is no "no-clip", that was the end. I browsed the forum, tried the hints, which didn't work. Fuck you, start a new game.

After reading those forums some more, it turned out that very many people had the same problem. And I really didn't like it. So, I tried lots of things and figured out what the problem was, and after some more tries a work-around. Cool!

Of course I posted both those things on the forum. I hate it when someone posts: "Never mind, figured it out.", without posting the solution! So that's what I did. Both how the devs can fix it and a work-around for players. And guess what: a developer removed them. It wasn't sanctioned. Users should suffer! Or perhaps, it isn't a bug, but a feature, to make the game harder! Like eating cooked meat from predators still giving you internal parasites.

Bah.
 

spectre

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So, what is the best game in this genre?
Probably UnrealWorld.
Maybe Stalker: Call of Pripyat.

Jokes aside, I guess it depends on what you're after.
I really liked the Long Dark in its broad strokes, but the more I've gotten into the game, the more I disliked some of the design choices (like for example having to go to the forge to make arrowheads).

Here's some of the shit I played, maybe it helps you narrow it down:
Project Zomboid - I liked this game better when it was a bit more lightweight, as for now, it feels cluttered and the UI doesn't really support all the shit you can do in the game.
On paper, it offers reasonable depth when it comes to the actual survival mechanics out of all the zombie-survival subgenre - scavenging, first aid, growing your own food.

State of Decay - it's like the opposite of Project Zomboid, tries to be serious and sombre, but quickly shows its arcadey side. I had fun with it, but the game doesn't really have any depth to any of its mechanics. Not really a survival game imo.

The Forest - Tried it a few times, didn't click with me. It's more of a horror game with a prominent story than survival because the systems don't really have a lot of depth to them.
Nice graphics though, shame there isn't a better game behind them.

Subnautica - again, not sure while it's classified as a survival game. It's more of an enjoy the view, underwater hiking game.

Robinson's Requiem - oldie but goodie. Check it out if you havent'. It's heavily SF, which might not be everyone's cuppa.


Problem with most of this shit is that is seems to be stuck in perpetual beta/early access hell or requires you to put up with other people in multiplayer.
I haven't played Don't Starve and Miasmata so I can't comment on those.
 

Burning Bridges

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So, what is the best game in this genre?

Apart from this, The Forest and Subnautica.

I played a bit The Forest in the last days because a mate nagged me to play MP. Theoretically this is a much better game than The Long Dark. The island is huge with tons of secrets and dynamic vegetation. The graphics and athmosphere are nice, and the game is way more complete than TLD-.

The downside is that these new survival type games follow a slightly different blueprint. That is, workload is on the player to work like a dog.

I gave up on The Forest not because it is a bad game. I gave up on it because I could no longer muster the motivation to cut down another hundred of trees and cook another 100 rabbits after I had done so for 20 hours, you are just working all the time, collect sticks, leafs, cook and also remember to drink, while being forced tio use one of the most reatrded and clumsiest inventory, deal with numerous bugs, server quirks and hackers and on top of all fight increasingly annopying cannibals! In the end I just sat there at the fire and ate fish and watched while my mate was shlepping logs like an ant.

But if you are used to this kind of game like 7DTD etc, and want to have some real fun with a mate, The Forest is the most complete of this batch from what I know.

Subnautice is yet a different experience and with the latest performance patches I can actually recommend you to use it, though a lot of what I said applies to this to. Just replace the things with surfacing for air, collecting titanium and using the fabricator. But personally I had more phases in Subnautica where I could actually lean back and enjoy the athmosphere, while TF is just frantic, tedious work.

State of Decay - it's like the opposite of Project Zomboid, tries to be serious and sombre, but quickly shows its arcadey side. I had fun with it, but the game doesn't really have any depth to any of its mechanics. Not really a survival game imo.

That's also a lot of fun for a couple of days, yes. But unfortunately the devs fucked it up and are lazy mofos who did not provide any new content in years.
 

spectre

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Yeah, Subnautica was a very enjoyable experience, it's very casual (not necessarily in a bad sense, think something laid back and relaxing) and felt quite smooth and decently polished. But that's maybe because I've seen too much unfinished early access garbage.
What I liked is that it had an unobtrusive story to it that integrated quite nicely with the flow of the game.

I kinda agree with you on the Forest, it somehow didn't click with me. As in, I started questioning if I really should be bothering with the genre at all.
Though it appears it's not just me and the feeling of tediousness is universal.
In the end, I looked up the story conclusion ending and decided i'll be skipping it.

That's also a lot of fun for a couple of days, yes. But unfortunately the devs fucked it up and are lazy mofos who did not provide any new content in years.

I heard good stuff about the DLC, but I felt the base game overstayed its welcome at that point. That one offering endless mode with increasing difficulty felt like a nice idea, unfortunately, it was still the same map. While it was quite sizeable, it wasn't that big either.
They did release State of Decay 2, but it's a Win10 exclusive which means it's a no go for me.

I also have a bunch of other shit on my radar, but the genre seems to have been polluted by the recent battle royale fad.

Scum - this one is still in alpha, but they're promising single player content. Not sure how big will the survival aspect be, but the production looks very professional thus far, and it promises a lot of attention to detail.
(like puking when you try and sprint yourself to exhaustion)
Not sure how the whole prisoners with hi-tech chip implants being stars of a survival show plays out, but I really liked what I saw in the dev diary.

Die Young - tried this one on a whim. Not sure if its really a survival game, or some sort of a sandbox/platformer/exploration hybrid (you have to manage hydration, hunger is tied directly to hit points, so it's fairly basic).
First game resulted in a quick death after a hilarious chase by a guy carrying a scythe. Combat feels tedious and should probably be avoided. Exploration was quite all right, but it was mostly jump puzzles, which I cannot stomach in first person.
All in all, feels like a weird mix of Mirror's Edge and Far Cry, minus the urban setting and minus the guns. Yeah, where's the fun of that?
Interesting concept, but not really what I wanted.

Miscreated - looks like one of those DayZ clones, but it somehow caught my attention because it looks like something more up my alley. I've seen keys for less than 10 euro, but I've yet to decide if its worth it.

Escape from Tarkov - still stuck in Beta, which should really be called Alpha. I'm using it as a substitute for Stalker with a degree of success. It tries to be both a hardcore PvP shooter and a slow paced scavenging game.
At the moment it doesn't really lend itself to either playstyle, but it might come together once (or perhaps if) a hideout and freeroam map gets implemented.
Survival wise, the game has a solid foundation - a detailed damage system with damage to individual body parts, bleeding and fracture, all requiring slightly different treatment. Radiation and poisoning is planned but not yet in,
hunger and hydration is in, but it's not an important gameplay factor at the moment. The game is a gunporn galore, which is why I am sticking with it despite its problems (mostly server issues, hackers and a general sense of incompletness).
 

spectre

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What's the state of Zomboid now? I haven't heard much since the dude got his laptop stolen and got set back a ton because of it.
Not sure what happened afterwards, because I wasn't following the drama. It seems that the development is still ongoing and it actually had a fairly big update recently featuring driveable vehicles.
I've noticed plenty of additions since the last time I played (which was quite a while ago), a crapton of items, a working skills system, character traits, actual crafting recipes.
It's all good, but they've made the game feel very clunky as the UI wasn't that great to begin with, and now it barely supports all the features. IMO, the game calls for a major overhaul in this area.
 

Burning Bridges

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Stranded Deep is also ok, though horribly aimless. Miscreated is also all right, but has mostly toxic players, turning it more into a battle royal game than survival.

If I just want to see realistic landscape, I also play The Hunter and Arma. The Hunter for example has winter map that is actually leaps and bounds over The Long Dark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8LeuDMA-po
 

SymbolicFrank

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Ok. So, I thought I should post a review first:


The Long Dark

The long dark is a survival game that takes place in Canada. It's white and cold. Everyone but you died. You can play sandbox or story mode, but I only played sandbox.

There's lots of snow, ice and trees. You cannot cut down trees, only collect fallen branches. You can fish, but you can only hack a hole in the ice from inside a fishing hut. Which is strange.

To survive, you first have to roam around and scavenge stuff that's left in wooden cabins. There's about ten of those in each map. The most important things to find are clothing and tools.

There is no auto-map. There is some kind of mapping in-game (you can sketch a rough map of your immediate surroundings with charcoal), but it isn't very usable. It does show landmarks, but not your position.

Which isn't such a problem, right? You can look at the Sun to orient yourself, and walk between the landmarks.

Eh, no. There is no Sun (!), and the map doesn't show where you can walk. This is supposed to make it easier to get lost (and the game harder), because the areas aren't very big. And to make it even harder, the maps don't have the north at the top.

Fortunately, you can simply pick up and drop any stick: it will always drop with its point to the north. This is obviously not as intended, but it makes orientation possible.

The cabins range from trailers to three-story houses in tiny outposts. They're often positioned strangely, not very ergonomic and don't seem very lived-in (with one exception). And they contain the wrong items and furniture.

For example, only about one in five of them contains heating and a stove. And only a few of those have pans and pots. Cooking pots are rare.

This is in Canada, where it is cold and the primary good available is wood. You would expect each house to have at least a wood stove, next to optional electrical cooking and heating equipment. And lots of equipment to cook wildlife.

You would also expect them to have lots of survival tools, like really warm clothing, knives, axes, saws, fishing gear and rifles. And lots of bullets and/or a reloading bench. But they don't. All of those are rare to nonexistent (depending on the game difficulty). There are no reloading benches available.

All the people who lived here, in the middle of nowhere, or came here on holiday, didn't have the tools they needed to survive.

Anyway. To survive yourself, you need lots of warm clothes, firewood, water and food. Scavenge everything, cut down the chairs and tables, use empty tin cans to boil snow, and eat all the food left behind.

But at some point, you have found all the tools you need, seen all six the maps, collected the best clothes and the still edible food, and you want a base. You pick a nice location, a house with a stove, a workbench and lots of containers for storage, and settle down.

By that time, your clothes will have become rags and your food has run out. Time to start living off the land.

You can improve your clothing by harvesting cloth and leather from the pieces you don't need, and use those to repair it. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter what piece of clothing you rip apart, it will end up as interchangeable pieces of cloth and/or leather.

Your clothing and tools are all of really bad quality, as you can see them fall apart rapidly. And the tools to keep them in shape, like sewing kits, whetstones and rifle cleaning kits, are limited to the ones you can find. It's really strange, but you cannot use a stone to sharpen your knife or axe, or a rag and oil to clean your gun. The way you would normally do it IRL.

Longer term, and to collect food from the land, you need to hunt the wildlife. Which consists of rabbits, deer, moose, wolves and bears. You can throw stones or use snare traps for rabbits, and shoot the rest. With a rifle, if you found one and still have bullets, or a bow.

Strangely enough, the hides from those animals don't turn into generic leather after curing. You cannot use them to repair existing clothes. Rabbit hide only makes mittens, deer hide makes pants and boots, the rest coats. This is really strange and inconsistent.

Because the hunting is hard, you can get really close to animals. If you get too close, rabbits and deer will run away. Wolves and bears will come after you. Which is quite strange as well.

There are many rabbits and deer, but there are no vegetables for them to eat. And IRL, solitary wolves will very rarely attack a human. Even when hunting in a pack, they have to be really hungry to do that. And there's rabbits and deer in abundance.

Wolves and bears do hunt rabbits and deer, which is a nice touch.

A bear is different. It will generally leave you alone as long as you don't bother it, but if you do it will kill you. Unless you shoot it in the head with a rifle. That will kill it. IRL, that is, not in this game. Hunting bears is very dangerous.

After you killed some wildlife, you can harvest them and turn them into meat (in 1 kg chunks), hide and gut. Gut is important for making leather clothing, bows and fishing lines. I doubt you could use gut as fishing line IRL.

For fishing, you need gut lines and fishing hooks. You can make those hooks at any work bench from random pieces of scrap material. And I don't believe that for a second.

If you run out of whetstones, you can forge knives and hatchets out of scrap metal, but you need a forge for that. Which is the wrong way around: making a knife or axe from scrap metal shouldn't be very hard, as long as you're allowed to use a stone to sharpen them. But a fishing hook is complicated and would require a forge.

And that's it for crafting. Next up is cooking. Cooking is strange as well.

You can make a fire on almost any flat surface outdoors. It will have some stones around it, on which you can put cans or cooking pots. You can also place those on top of wood stoves. You can use the cans to cook canned food or melt snow, and you can use the cooking pots for that as well as for cooking meat and fish.

This was quite frustrating for me at the start, as I didn't have a cooking pot (they're rare). Later I only had one. And eating raw meat or fish makes you sick. (Depending on the game difficulty, eating cooked meat from predators might make you sick anyway. Stupid, but true.) And it seemed so obvious to put the meat on a stone or the stove to grill it. But that didn't seem to be possible.

The wiki was saying, that grilling meat and fish was easy. And on the forum they talked like that as well. I couldn't figure it out. Finally, I found a thread with an embedded video that showed how to do it. Jay!

It turned out that there are two ways to do it: drop the chunks of meat on the ground, right-click them and drag them onto the fire / stove, or hover the cursor over the fire, select the meat from the "eat" menu, and click the right mouse button to place it, instead of the left mouse button to eat it.

The first way is cumbersome, but safe, the second is fast but dangerous.

Cooking is a whole ritual: you need to go fishing / hunting, have matches, tinder and a book to light a fire, add enough firewood and then cook or grill all the pieces of fish and/or meat. You can put one or two pieces on top at any time. (There is one location where you can cook six things at the same time.)

Cooking meat or fish takes about an hour to one and a half hour. It is probably that long because a day in game normally only takes two real-time hours. But it is still a long time to wait. And if you go do something else, you have to make sure the fire goes out just when the meat is done. Otherwise it will burn.

Alt-tab to do something else won't work, as the game will stop. So, you need in-game activities to pass the time.

And yes, there are some that work, like reading books, repairing and crafting, but not enough. And you can only rest in increments of whole hours. So, it is best to go outside in the morning, do things like hunt and chop wood during the day, and save all those activities for the evening, to pass the time while waiting for the meat to cook. Very inefficient anyway.

And when you are cooking those ten or twenty chunks of meat, you have to keep sharp, because if you inadvertently eat the raw meat instead of placing it (clicking left instead of right at the wrong time), you get sick.

At that point, the game prompts you to ingest antibiotics. And when you do, it will say: "That didn't help".

Which brings me to illness. There are different drugs and bandages that fix different wounds and illnesses. When shit happens, the game prompts you to apply the right medicine. And it will either say: "That didn't help", or fix it immediately.

Except when you have food poisoning through eating raw meat: you have to eat two antibiotics, ignore the warning that it doesn't work, and sleep for 10 hours...

At this point, I lost interest. But still. Next day, I decided that when I had enough cooking pots, this wouldn't be an issue. So, I started a new game, with the goal to collect as much cooking pots as soon as possible.

This worked out well, until I accidentally got stuck in the terrain.

There are a few locations in the game, that make a great base. Inside that base, you will spend most of your time in front of the stove. And right there, there is a bowl which might trap you when you walk across it. Yes, at one of the locations in the game where most people will spend much of their time. You're standing and walking close to that bowl for hours.

And if you get stuck, it is Game Over. The developers won't help. If you figure out for yourself what causes the bug and how to fix it, don't post it on their forum to help all the other players who have the same problem. Because the developers will delete and ignore it.

Well, ok. Save often, right? Except, you cannot. The game saves automatically when you rest, enter a building or get ill. And you're always playing iron man: die and the save is gone.

Which brings us to the last point: the developers and the community. The community consists of newbies who ask for help, and fanboys who mostly say: "Get good, or fuck off. The game is totally perfect as it is. Well, far too easy, but otherwise it's perfect. Learn to play."

And the developers only listen to them.


Do yourself a favor and play something else.
 
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SymbolicFrank

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So, what is the best game in this genre?
Probably UnrealWorld.

Totally different, but this might be worth a try. Wishlisted.

Maybe Stalker: Call of Pripyat.

Actually not a bad idea.

Project Zomboid - I liked this game better when it was a bit more lightweight, as for now, it feels cluttered and the UI doesn't really support all the shit you can do in the game.
On paper, it offers reasonable depth when it comes to the actual survival mechanics out of all the zombie-survival subgenre - scavenging, first aid, growing your own food.

Zombies...

State of Decay - it's like the opposite of Project Zomboid, tries to be serious and sombre, but quickly shows its arcadey side. I had fun with it, but the game doesn't really have any depth to any of its mechanics. Not really a survival game imo.

Arcadey...

The Forest - Tried it a few times, didn't click with me. It's more of a horror game with a prominent story than survival because the systems don't really have a lot of depth to them.
Nice graphics though, shame there isn't a better game behind them

Looked at it, didn't like it.

Subnautica - again, not sure while it's classified as a survival game. It's more of an enjoy the view, underwater hiking game.

Yes, in a sense. Nice to look at. But except for that, there isn't all that much to do. And you have to grind collecting materials.

Robinson's Requiem - oldie but goodie. Check it out if you havent'. It's heavily SF, which might not be everyone's cuppa

Not sure. Wishlisted anyway.

Problem with most of this shit is that is seems to be stuck in perpetual beta/early access hell or requires you to put up with other people in multiplayer.
I haven't played Don't Starve and Miasmata so I can't comment on those.

I played Don't Starve, but it's totally different. Arcadey. Not a bad game, for a few hours.
 

SymbolicFrank

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Escape from Tarkov - still stuck in Beta, which should really be called Alpha. I'm using it as a substitute for Stalker with a degree of success. It tries to be both a hardcore PvP shooter and a slow paced scavenging game.
At the moment it doesn't really lend itself to either playstyle, but it might come together once (or perhaps if) a hideout and freeroam map gets implemented.
Survival wise, the game has a solid foundation - a detailed damage system with damage to individual body parts, bleeding and fracture, all requiring slightly different treatment. Radiation and poisoning is planned but not yet in,
hunger and hydration is in, but it's not an important gameplay factor at the moment. The game is a gunporn galore, which is why I am sticking with it despite its problems (mostly server issues, hackers and a general sense of incompletness).
You can only buy it on their own website, there is little info. I'll wait.
 

Burning Bridges

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Well, ok. Save often, right? Except, you cannot. The game saves automatically when you rest, enter a building or get ill. And you're always playing iron man: die and the save is gone.

There is a pretty simple way to backup the save files actually. You can copy the TLD folder in your c:\User and Settings folder and later restore it.

Which brings us to the last point: the developers and the community. The community consists of newbies who ask for help, and fanboys who mostly say: "Get good, or fuck off. The game is totally perfect as it is. Well, far too easy, but otherwise it's perfect. Learn to play."

And the developers only listen to them.

Do yourself a favor and play something else.

Yes. One of those braindead communities that only consist of demigods and yes-men. Right from the start people kept telling them that wolves and non realtime cooking killed the fun, that the maps were inadequate, the game needed modding and that the campaign sucked ass. But they prefer to listen only to their circlejerk of incloosive fanbois. I assume this will be the first and last game of this fucked up company because not many people will want to go through this again.
 

imajia

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Strap Yourselves In
So, what is the best game in this genre?
Apparently still TLD, but only because there is no survival game in the classic sense: building traps and shelter, squeezing a half eaten frog out of a snake, finding out which berries are not poisonous etc.
 

SymbolicFrank

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So, what is the best game in this genre?
Apparently still TLD, but only because there is no survival game in the classic sense: building traps and shelter, squeezing a half eaten frog out of a snake, finding out which berries are not poisonous etc.
OK. It's Unity. So, I can mod it myself. Am I going to spend the time doing that? There's a lot of stuff that needs fixing.

The developers really hate mods. They tried to make it impossible, and delete anything related on the forums. Modding is teh Devil! It will deviate from the pristine experience they envisioned!

Normally, you make a dll and drop it in the Plugins dir. That's it. And perhaps a config file. But for TLD you need a mod manager that hacks the security and fixes the game to make that possible.

The people who might care get burned the first time when things go wrong and they ask advice on the forum. And the fanboys will tear it apart.

No, thanks. I have better things to do.


But I would like the game you describe.
 

Astral Rag

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Playing this while listening to Thomas Koner right now. It's a very atmospheric and nice looking game. It runs very well too which is something I didn't really expect since so many 3D Unity games run like hot trash. Getting a mostly locked 60fps with my i7 920 and 960 GPU. Most settings are on max, except for SSAO which I set to medium. Left the sliders at the bottom in their default position for the time being. These devs clearly know what they're doing.

Liking this more than I expected. I'm normally not into the pure survival genre but this one seems to click with me.

I'm playing the survival mode (coastal highway) ATM. Maybe I should do the campaign first? Is it any good?
 
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Burning Bridges

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Maybe I should do the campaign first? Is it any good?

The last time I tried it, it was shit. It's a forced tutorial in which you must tediously unlock everything you already know from the alpha, it is chock full of game breaking bugs and sheer idiocy (eg I could not complete the first day where you only have to keep a fire running for 1 night because the game only checks if a fire was running for 8 hours continuously, whereas I had already learned to manage my fire in 1-2 hour / sleep intervals. After almost 1 week of constant firemaking in the cave the last fuel ran out and I uninstalled. What a dumb game mode)

I currently recommend the game only in sandbox mode with custom difficulty settings. Reduce predators to absolute minimum while making making weather, loot spawns etc much more challenging.
 

Burning Bridges

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The sandbox runs indeed a lot better. I also like some of the new features like cooking with empty cans and if you start the game in Milton it is actually challenging.

It's just at some point you realize the game has no goal. Once you are past 1 week you are just running around to eat food and make fires.

At some point you will know all maps by heart and there is nothing left to look for. Instead the game should have vast, openworld maps, real disasters and the ability to build houses and move fireplaces, as well as dog sleds etc. And NPCs of course. Then it would be interesting top become some sort of Nomad who actually can still hope to find a better place somwhere behind the horizon not just the same huts you have already scoured 4 years ago.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
:necro:

Episode 3 on October 22nd:



https://www.kickstarter.com/project...st-person-post-disaster-surviva/posts/2633382

FIVE YEARS

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.

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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.

– Raphael

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