The Long Dark Explained

The Long Dark
Developer:Hinterland Studio
Publisher:Hinterland Studio
Director:Raphael van Lierop
Designer:Raphael van Lierop
Alan Lawrance
Composer:Cris Velasco
Sascha Dikiciyan
Engine:Unity
Released:Linux, macOS, Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
August 1, 2017
Nintendo Switch
September 17, 2020
Genre:Survival
Modes:Single-player

The Long Dark is a first-person survival video game developed and published by Hinterland Studios. The player assumes the role of crash-landed bush pilot Will Mackenzie who must survive the frigid Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic storm. The game received seed financing from the Canada Media Fund, and further funding was secured through a successful Kickstarter campaign in October 2013.[1] [2]

An alpha version was released through Steam Early Access in September 2014.[3] The alpha version was later launched on the Xbox One as one of the first two launch titles associated with Microsoft's Game Preview Program in June 2015. Early reviews of the alpha release were generally positive, and the game went on to sell around 750,000 copies by April 2016. It was officially released on all aforementioned platforms on August 1, 2017, as well as for PlayStation 4.[4] In 2017, it was announced that a film adaptation of The Long Dark was in the works.[5] On September 17, 2020, it was announced that the game would be coming to Nintendo Switch later that same day.[6]

Gameplay

The Long Dark is a survival game which takes place in the frigid Canadian wilderness, and is played from a first-person perspective. The player must manage their body temperature, calorie levels, hunger, and fatigue.[7] The Long Dark has three game modes available to the player: story, survival, and challenge.

The game's map is divided up into 12 main regions: Mystery Lake, Coastal Highway, Pleasant Valley, Forlorn Muskeg, Desolation Point, Timberwolf Mountain, Mountain Town, Broken Railroad, Hushed River Valley, Bleak Inlet, Ash Canyon, and Blackrock Mountain. Alongside these are transition regions, which are significantly smaller and whose purpose is to connect these regions together through a small region. They are: Crumbling Highway, Keepers Pass North, Keepers Pass South, Ravine and Winding River. The Tales from the Far Territory DLC added four regions: Transfer Pass, Forsaken Airfield, Zone of Contamination, and Sundered Pass, and a smaller connecting region being the Far Range Branch Line.[8]

Survival mode

Survival mode is set in an open world environment where the only objective is for the player to survive as long as possible, with Permadeth and now a "cheat death system, though in the mode misery, permadeath is the only option.[9] To survive, the player must manage their body temperature, calorie levels, hunger, and fatigue, levels, avoid dangerous wildlife, manage illness and injury (such as frostbite or broken ribs).[10] Fire is used for warmth and cooking.[11] The game simulates a full day/night cycle, where night is significantly colder.[12]

Survival has four game difficulty levels modes: pilgrim, voyageur, stalker, interloper, misery, and custom difficulty levels. Difficulty levels affect resources that can be found, wildlife, and weather.[13]

Story mode (Wintermute)

Story mode (also known as "Wintermute") is an episodic adventure game, with survival elements, and does not have a permadeath feature. In Wintermute, the player assumes the role of a crash-landed pilot struggling to survive after a geomagnetic storm and cannot freely travel across the game world, being restricted to certain geographic regions.

Story mode was initially planned to be released late 2014, but was pushed back to late 2016.[14] Development was pushed back again and the game was ultimately released on August 1, 2017, with the first two episodes of the five-part story released together.[15] The episodes are:

Due to complaints by players, a new version of episode one and two was released in December 2018, with many changes made to the gameplay, presentation and mission structure.[18] Episode three, known as "Crossroads Elegy", was released October 22, 2019. Episode four entitled "Fury, Then Silence"[19] was released October 6, 2021.[20] Raphael van Lierop has stated in December 2023 that episode five is planned to be released in late 2024.[21]

Development

Planning

Following completion of his work as director on , Raphael van Lierop left Relic Entertainment to work on projects which he felt were "more personal" and "more representative of [his] values". Van Lierop also left Vancouver, moving his family from the city to the northern part of Vancouver Island. Inspired by these new surroundings, he formed Hinterland and began to work on The Long Dark, a game about surviving the Canadian wilderness.[1] [22] Hinterland wanted to explore a post apocalyptic world from the fringes, away from the urban apocalypse, which "we've all seen a million times" and away from "B-movie cliches like zombies".[1] Van Lierop was also keen to impart a Canadian identity upon the game, having been frustrated with homogenised AAA video games which sacrificed character for mass market appeal, he summed up his approach with, "I'm Canadian. This game is Canadian. Deal with it."[23] [24]

When van Lierop announced the Hinterland team in September 2013, members included Alan Lawrance, formerly a lead at Volition, Marianne Krawczyk, writer of the God of War series, and David Chan, BioWare's first audio designer.[25] A year later, they were joined by Ken Rolston, the lead designer of .[26] Hinterland operated as a virtual team, with its members remote workers. Lawrance cites remote work as a crucial factor in his decision to join Hinterland.[27]

Funding and alpha release

Hinterland obtained seed funding from the Canada Media Fund, and in September 2013, launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Long Dark to raise C$200,000 and build a community around the game. The campaign was successful, raising C$256,617 upon its completion in October 2013. PayPal contributions following the Kickstarter campaign pushed the final total to over C$275,000 by March 2014. Hinterland announced the game's voice cast during the Kickstarter campaign, allowing The Long Dark to capitalise on the actors' individual fan bases; the cast announced were Mark Meer, Elias Toufexis, Jennifer Hale and David Hayter.[28] [29] An alpha version was released through Steam Early Access in September 2014. Hinterland were mindful of the game's scope, not wanting to expand the team's size and increase risk, and so limited their Kickstarter stretch goals to those that added quality, rather than those that added in-game content.[30] Van Lierop spoke of their studio's approach to early access at the 2015 Game Developers Conference where he warned against allowing the player community to dictate the game's direction, with Hinterland deciding to stick to their original vision.[31]

Full release

In April 2016, Van Lierop posted an update about the Story-mode release, explaining that Hinterland had elected to delay the launch of Story mode until it contained 4–6 hours of initial gameplay instead of the originally planned 2 hours. He also declined to set a release date, saying, "You won't get another promise from me about when it will ship, until we are close enough to being done with it that I can say with 100% certainty, and give you a definitive date that I know isn't going to end up with us pushing out an experience we aren't 100% satisfied with". He pointed to the evolution of Sandbox mode as another reason for delay, saying that its popularity had grown to the point that Hinterland decided to bring back regular updates for it, even though it was originally conceived merely as a test-bed for the Story mode. His post also provided a developmental road-map with short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for additions and improvements.[32] [33]

In February 2020, the developers asked Nvidia to remove The Long Dark from GeForce Now, a cloud streaming service, shortly after the service exited beta and went "live". The developers said that their game was improperly placed on the service without any sort of licensing agreement; Nvidia agreed to remove it as a result.[34] The game returned to GeForce Now in May 2020 after Nvidia announced they would switch to an opt-in policy for including games on their platform.[35]

Expansions

In October 2022, Hinterland announced the development of their first paid content expansion named "Tales from the Far Territory", the expansion plans to add additional gameplay systems, regions and Tales, narrative-themed challenges that explore the regions added. Additionally Hinterland plans on adding free content along with each update of the paid expansion. On December 5, 2022, Tales from the Far Territory officially released.[36]

The second part to the expansion pass, released March 31, 2023, added the first Tale named "Signal Void".[37] The third expansion named "Frontier Comforts" was released on June 21, 2023, with the fourth expansion and second Tale both named “Buried Echoes” which also added the new region Zone of Contamination along with it, releasing on December 5th, 2023. The fifth expansion named “Last Horizon” added the third and final tale of the expansion and added another region named Sundered Pass on June 24th, 2024. The last and final expansion part six is set to release later in 2024.

Reception

Early access

Following a period of alpha access exclusive to backers of the crowdfunding campaign, a version of the game featuring only its sandbox-style survival mode was released on Steam Early Access in September 2014 for Windows.[38] It later arrived on Linux in November 2015.[39] Early impressions from critics were generally favorable, but noted the incomplete nature of the game.

Leif Johnson, writing for PC Gamer in June 2014 felt that the game's small unchanging map rewarded route memorisation whereas the game was most engaging when allowing the player to discover its systems.[40] Andy Kelly, writing for the same publication a month later, praised the atmosphere, highlighting the art style, sound design and lighting. Kelly felt that the game's "focus on atmosphere and environmental survival" made it "[stand] out in an increasingly crowded genre".[41] Also at PC Gamer Martin Musgrave wrote that The Long Dark made for one of the greatest survival games to date.

At GameSpot, Shaun McInnis had similar thoughts, seeing that while the survival genre was becoming ever more crowded, The Long Dark was "one of the few games in this genre focused on capturing the solitary wonder of fighting to staying alive in the brutal wilderness".[38] John Walker, writing at Rock, Paper, Shotgun in August 2014, enjoyed the game and found it "impressively full of things to do", but felt that the accelerated passage of time detracted from the realism.[42] In an early access review for GameSpot in October 2014, Nick Capozzoli too criticised unrealistic systems, noting that one should not need "a dozen energy bars and a pound of venison to sustain yourself day-to-day" and that "a crowbar [shouldn't] lose half its integrity after being used to pry open a couple lockers". Instead of stretching his resources as a survivalist would, he felt "like an insatiable force that roves through the environment, picking it clean." Like Johnson, he criticised the limited area given to explore.[43] With an update later that October, Hinterland doubled the size of the playable area, and expanded it again in February 2015 to bring the size of the game world to 25 km2.[44] [45]

Wired writer Matt Peckham labelled The Long Dark a "troubling yet beautiful gem",[46] and joined IGN columnist Lucy O'Brien in recognizing the game's beautiful artistic vision, with O'Brien noting that "Developer Hinterland has gone to great lengths to make the world itself a beautiful place to explore".[47] In a 2015 interview with Creative Director Raphael van Lierop about The Long Darks launch on Xbox One, Gameranx's Holly Green addressed the unique nature of the game's survival mechanics, writing it was "one of the first pure survival games on console, separating the genre from its horror roots and taking its themes of minimalist resource management to their most logical conclusion".[48]

Commercial reception

By January 2015, the game had sold 250,000 copies[49] and by August 2015, 500,000 copies had been sold. In April 2016, Hinterland announced that over 750,000 copies had been sold across all platforms and expressed gratitude over the 99.78% approval rating from the Steam user-base.[32] As of September 2019, 3.3 million copies have been sold.[50] [51] Sales reached 5 million copies by 2021.[52]

Accolades

The game was nominated for "Best Art Direction", "Best Game Design" and "Best Music/Sound Design", and won the award for both "Best Writing" and "Strategy/Simulation" at the 2018 Webby Awards.[53]

Notes and References

  1. News: Post Arcade: Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop talks about The Long Dark. Chad. Sapieha. Financial Post. September 13, 2013. March 4, 2015.
  2. Web site: THE LONG DARK, a first-person post-disaster survival sim. Hinterland. Kickstarter. September 16, 2013. March 4, 2015.
  3. Web site: Matulef . Jeffrey . September 18, 2014 . Jennifer Hale voices a playable character in The Long Dark . March 4, 2015 . Eurogamer.
  4. Donnelly. Joe. The Long Dark story mode launch trailer teases origins of winter apocalypse. PC Gamer. July 31, 2017. 2 August 2017.
  5. Web site: The Long Dark is getting a film adaptation. 2017-07-31. Hall. Charlie. Polygon. 2024-01-20. en-US.
  6. Web site: Everything Nintendo Announced in Today's Partner Showcase. September 17, 2020 .
  7. Web site: Faq - The Long Dark . September 9, 2014 . Intothelongdark.com . June 10, 2015 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150610111228/http://intothelongdark.com/faq . dead .
  8. Web site: 2022-12-15 . The future is bright for The Long Dark with the arrival Tales from the Far Territory . 2024-05-15 . Shacknews . en.
  9. Web site: The Long Dark . 2024-05-15 . Gaming Nexus . en.
  10. Web site: MacLeod . Riley . 2017-08-10 . The Long Dark's New Story Has Problems, But The Game Is Still Brilliant . 2024-05-15 . Kotaku Australia . en-AU.
  11. Web site: Gault . Matthew . 2017-10-27 . 'The Long Dark' Is a Video Game Where the Main Character Is the Wilderness . 2024-05-15 . Vice . en.
  12. Web site: Natividad . Sid . 2021-07-10 . The Long Dark: Things Beginners Should Do First . 2024-05-15 . TheGamer . en.
  13. Web site: 2021-10-09 . The Long Dark review: Pinnacle of survival . 2024-05-15 . Shacknews . en.
  14. Web site: The Long Dark Story Mode trailer is very dark indeed. Andy. Chalk. PC Gamer. December 16, 2015. December 18, 2015.
  15. Web site: Kotaku. The Long Dark's New Story Has Problems, But The Game Is Still Brilliant. MacLeod, Riley. August 9, 2017.
  16. Web site: 2020-02-13 . The Long Dark Episode 3: Crossroads Elegy impressions . 2024-05-15 . Shacknews . en.
  17. Web site: 2021-10-06 . The Long Dark Episode 4: Fury, Then Silence impressions . 2024-05-15 . Shacknews . en.
  18. Web site: Episodes One and Two REDUX & Survival Mode Update - News. December 13, 2018.
  19. Web site: DEV DIARY – SEPTEMBER 2021. September 9, 2021.
  20. Web site: The Long Dark -- Episode Four -- FURY, THEN SILENCE -- Teaser. YouTube. September 22, 2021.
  21. Web site: October 10, 2022 . The Long Dark -- Dev Diary -- October 2022 .
  22. Web site: Inspiration in isolation: The Long Dark takes on a different kind of survival fiction. Leigh Alexander. Gamasutra. September 17, 2014. March 7, 2015.
  23. Web site: The Long Dark is about self-reliance in a hard country. It is a game about Canada. Colin. Campbell. Polygon. July 1, 2014. March 8, 2015.
  24. Web site: The Long Dark brings Canada to videogames. Reid. McCarter. Kill Screen. December 2, 2013. March 8, 2015. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20150214212912/http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/long-dark-brings-canada-videogames/. February 14, 2015. mdy-all.
  25. Web site: AAA devs form Hinterland. Brendan. Sinclair. GamesIndustry.biz. September 9, 2013. March 7, 2015.
  26. Web site: Elder Scrolls Veteran Ken Rolston Joins The Long Dark. Rachel. Haas. IGN. September 12, 2014. March 4, 2015.
  27. News: Interview: Hinterland On Going Indie, Avoiding Zombies. Mitch. Bowman. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. October 2, 2014. March 7, 2015.
  28. Web site: Canadian-developed game The Long Dark was born during its creator's darkest moments. Igor. Bonifacic. Canada.com. July 21, 2014. March 8, 2015.
  29. Web site: Case Studies: The Long Dark (CA). Canada Media Fund. March 12, 2014. March 7, 2015. January 1, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150101055601/http://crowdfunding.cmf-fmc.ca/case_studies/the-long-dark-ca. dead.
  30. Web site: Talking through The Long Dark with Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop. Rob. Zacny. PCGamesN. September 27, 2013. March 7, 2015.
  31. Web site: How The Long Dark was almost lost in the woods of early access. Charlie. Hall. Polygon. March 3, 2015. March 4, 2015.
  32. Web site: » Community Update: Story Mode Progress. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20160408052755/http://hinterlandgames.com/community-update-story-mode/. April 8, 2016. mdy-all.
  33. Web site: The Long Dark Roadmap. Hinterlandgames.com. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20160412023239/http://hinterlandgames.com/the-long-dark/roadmap. April 12, 2016. mdy-all.
  34. News: Hall . Charlie . Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service loses another game over licensing dispute . 7 June 2021 . Polygon . 2020-03-02 . en.
  35. Web site: van Lierop . Raphael . The Long Dark Returns to Geforce Now . May 28, 2020 . 14 December 2021.
  36. News: 2024-05-14 . Snowy survival hit The Long Dark is adding a cougar to pursue players all over its map . 2024-05-15 . Eurogamer.net . en.
  37. Web site: Tales from the Far Territory. Hinterlandgames.com. 17 April 2023.
  38. Web site: The Long Dark Is a Brutal Yet Beautiful Twist on the Survival Genre. Shaun. McInnis. GameSpot. July 15, 2014. March 8, 2015.
  39. Web site: The Long Dark Officially Released For SteamOS & Linux, Steam Controller Support Added Too. GamingOnLinux. November 10, 2015 . en. 2019-09-23.
  40. Web site: The Long Dark: hands-on with Hinterland's single-player survival game. Leif. Johnson. PC Gamer. June 30, 2014. March 9, 2015.
  41. Web site: Survival gets serious in The Long Dark. Andy. Kelly. PC Gamer. July 29, 2014. March 9, 2015.
  42. News: Hands On: The Long Dark Early Access. John. Walker. Rock Paper Shotgun. August 11, 2014. March 9, 2015.
  43. Web site: The Long Dark Early Access Review. Nick. Capozzoli. GameSpot. October 9, 2014. March 9, 2015.
  44. Web site: The Long Dark update doubles world size with new Coastal Highway. Julian. Benson. PCGamesN. October 30, 2014. March 8, 2015.
  45. Web site: The Long Dark gets bigger, again, and wolves can be scared off. Fraser. Brown. PCGamesN. February 10, 2015. March 8, 2015.
  46. Survival Game The Long Dark Is a Troubling Yet Beautiful Gem. Wired. September 3, 2015.
  47. Web site: E3 2015: In The Long Dark, What Kills You Makes You Stronger - IGN. June 18, 2015. September 3, 2015. O'brien. Lucy.
  48. Web site: Exploring The Emerging Survival Genre with The Long Dark's Raphael van Lierop. Gameranx. June 30, 2015. September 3, 2015. January 30, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200130120419/https://gameranx.com/features/id/28929/article/exploring-the-emerging-survival-genre-with-the-long-dark-s-raphael-van-lierop/. dead.
  49. Web site: The Long Dark has sold 250k copies on Steam Early Access. Jeffrey. Matulef. Eurogamer. January 20, 2015. March 4, 2015.
  50. Web site: Five Years - News. September 21, 2019.
  51. Web site: How to Survive The Long Dark. EPN. September 10, 2015. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20150923085618/http://epn.tv/all/platform/gaming/xbox/how-to-survive-the-long-dark/. September 23, 2015. mdy-all.
  52. Web site: Stephany. Nunneley. The Long Dark has sold 5 million units and has seen over 8.5 million players to date. VG247. March 20, 2021. December 3, 2021.
  53. Web site: 2018 Winners. The Webby Awards. April 24, 2018. June 25, 2018.