The long dark when the full version comes out. The release of the game The Long Dark, where the world plunged into pitch darkness after the apocalypse

The Long Dark, an arctic survival game, dropped out of Early Access on August 1st. It appeared on Steam Early Access on September 22, 2014, and on Xbox one on the Xbox Game Preview program was released on June 15, 2015. Simultaneously with this, the simulator was released in the version for the PlayStation 4, as well as the first two episodes. story campaign Wintermute. On the eve of the premiere, studio Hinterland announced a full-length film with live actors based on the game. It will be created in collaboration with Resident Evil and Death Race producer Jeremy Bolt, who is currently overseeing the production of the film.

The release on the PlayStation 4 so far took place only in America, and in Europe and Russia it was postponed until August 8. The developers talked about the reasons for the transfer in the official blog. In Europe and Russia, the game was unexpectedly assigned an age rating of "16" (according to the PEGI system). In North, South and Central America, the simulator received a "13" rating, and in Germany, known for its strict age rating system, it was allowed to be sold even to 12-year-old gamers. Surprised by this decision, the creators asked Sony Europe to re-evaluate the game, which is why they had to change the release date.

The developers also reported that by the time the final version was released, the number of sold copies of The Long Dark had reached 1.3 million. Since the release of the early version on the PC, the game has received more than 70, and on the Xbox One - over 30 updates.

Below you can see the trailer for the launch of the story campaign, which the developers promised to release back in the spring of 2016. In total, it will include five episodes, and in the future, the campaign may receive a second season. Released - Do Not Go Gentle and Luminance Fugue - will reveal how the main characters, pilot Will Mackenzie and Dr. Astrid Greenwood, were separated after the plane crash and why the nearby settlements were abandoned.

The studio did not tell about the film in too much detail. It is known that the script will be written by its founder and creative director Raphael van Lierop. The authors noted that the atmosphere and themes involved bring The Long Dark closer to The Road and The Walking Dead TV series.

“The goal of my work at Hinterland is to create original entertainment projects that can be presented in different artistic forms, telling the story in different ways, Said van Leerop. - My collaboration with Jeremy [Bolt] is the first step towards this goal. [Through this film] I will be able to tell a story in the world of The Long Dark using other means of artistic expression. "

“I myself turned to Raphael with a proposal, because already at that time I considered myself a fan of The Long Dark Bolt admitted. - I was fascinated by the beauty of this game, the sinister atmosphere of loneliness and the realistic nature. This is an existential tale of good and evil, emotional and physical endurance. Her characters are very expressive. Trying to translate all this into the language of cinema is an honor for me. "

The first presentation of the film will help to compose a five-minute short film "Elegy" (Elegy). The screenplay was written by van Leerope and directed by Canadian award-winning Jared Pelletier for his short film In the Hearts of Men. Voiceover belongs to 87-year-old Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, winner of the Academy Awards and Golden Globes for his role in Beginners, also starring in A Beautiful Mind.

“I would describe Elegy as a visual poem,- said Lyrop. - Obviously, Jared is very passionate about the original. He really likes the artistry of The Long Dark, he feels its uniqueness. I would like the level of quality and general mood of the film to be the same as in the case of Elegy. "

Dear friends,

Today I'm here to tell you that THE LONG DARK will be out of Early Access on August 1st, 2017. On this day, we will release the first two episodes of WINTERMUTE, our five-episode "story mode" for THE LONG DARK.

Here's a teaser of what's going to happen in WINTERMUTE:

The first two episodes of WINTERMUTE are about pilot Will Mackenzie and Dr. Astrid Greenwood, and what happens when they break up after a mysterious geomagnetic event that causes them to wreck in the middle of the northern Canadian wilderness. In the first episode: “Don't Go Humbly,” Mackenzie tries to survive in the wild wasteland long enough to find shelter, hoping for the help that civilization can provide. He quickly realizes that the world around him is not at all what he expected to be. In the second episode: "Fugue Glow," Mackenzie begins to understand the true nature of the disaster, he is constantly looking for traces of Astrid. He also begins to answer the question, “how far will you go to survive?” By building relationships with other survivors he meets along the way.

The overall gameplay for the two episodes depends on open world and nature in the game, but we find it quite stable at 6-10 hours for the passage of two episodes. Episodes 3 through 5 will be released before the end of 2017, and in 2018.

I can't tell you how glad I am to finally be able to give you the exact launch date for the game.

Another thing that turned out to be surprising for our studio and team is that we will release version 1.0 of THE LONG DARK on three platforms: Steam (Windows / Mac / Linux), Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Since the early access programs on There is no PlayStation, before we could not bring the gaming experience to the audience of this console, and now that the expansion of THE LONG DARK communities will affect PlayStation players, this is a huge step for us. This means more players and more resources that we can redirect back to the game itself, so that its development proceeds in new and interesting ways that may even go beyond our current plans.

As many of you know, THE LONG DARK has always been a passion of ours, and the first season of the game - winter - should always be just the first part of the gaming experience. Expanding our audience gives us a better chance of being able to continue investing resources in THE LONG DARK world, as well as preserving intellectual property rights, and also the independence of Hinterland as a studio. Unlike many indies in this space, Hinterland is 100% independent and self-funded. This independence is the foundation of our development philosophy and the culture of our team, and in many ways it is for this reason that we were able to go so far down the path of creative risk.

I know the PS4 announcement might not seem like a big deal if you're already playing THE LONG DARK on Steam or Xbox, but I hope you'll see how monumental this step is for us towards expanding the diversity of the world and the gameplay that is fundamental. that we can continue to develop THE LONG DARK the way we dreamed of doing it.

It's hard to remember, at times, that our entire approach to developing Story Mode - and the reason we've talked so little about it to date - is based on anticipation. It's also easy to forget that much of our community is waiting to get back into the game - waiting to wake up and feel the excitement again. And the PlayStation community has never had a chance to experience the thrill of acquiring THE LONG DARK. As a small studio that is completely engaged in marketing itself, we need to use all our tools to get people to play with our game, and often these people are not the ones who seek our posts on social media every day. These are expectant and hesitant people, journalists, people who have yet to discover this game. This is why we haven't talked a lot about development in recent months, and why we will be doing so in the next three months, before launching the campaign. We will do our best to meet the agreed time. Most early access games don't have a chance to re-release, and we're doing our best to make it through. We hope you will support us in this because it is essential to our success.

Let's talk about what's ahead of us in the next three months so you can better understand what the lead time will be for. We have to complete the final artwork of the game, the Polish translation, and playtesting to make the first two episodes as compelling as they can be. This is until the end of this month. Then we'll fix any bugs we find in the first two episodes - which happens over the rest of May and most of June. We have to work on some performance improvements (optimizations) and do the whole new translation and integrate it into the game. This will mainly take place in June. And then in July we'll go through an intensive certification process on Xbox and PlayStation to make sure everything is ready and to go by August 1st.

Fuh. Much work remains to be done!

Also, I promised another sandbox update before the story mode launch. Later this month, we will open a test version with an update for a game called FAITHFUL CARTOGRAPHER.

Here's a list of what you can expect in this update:

Complete system modernization
As you can imagine, maintaining backward compatibility for save over the past 3 years has caused our save system to get a little confused over time. We think this may be part of why there has been some instability, especially on Xbox One, with lost saves and some corruption at times. This new system should improve stability as well as prepare us to handle the new preservation requirements for WINTERMUTE episodes. Please be aware that all of your current profile data will continue to work - this means that existing progress on Feats or Survival Journals that you have saved will still be valid after the update.

Completely new interface
We've done a complete aesthetic overhaul of our interface and HUD and added many new functionalities - too many to list here. Each screen is completely rebuilt. In some cases, for example with Radial, we have simplified usability (for example, you can now eat or drink directly from Radial). We have improved the Pack, Clothing and Status screens and updated the HUD with a number of improvements. Indeed, there are 100 improvements in this overhaul. The FAITHFUL CARTOGRAPHER update will complete about 80% of this process and the rest will be done in time for our full launch.

Gameplay cartography
Mapping has never been part of the LONG DARK sandbox experience, but as we see growing interest in using external cards community, we thought we would add fully “fault-tolerant” cartography to the gameplay. You will have to use the charcoal from the campfires to update your own world map that you are viewing in parts, and the value of this card will depend on how well you update it. The goal of this system is to provide a useful tool for players who would like to map their world without making the game easier or punishing players who choose to continue playing the way they do now, without maps!

Throwing stones
You will now be able to throw rocks into the wild. They make a good tool of last resort against wolves - you may be lucky enough to scare off one - and you can hunt rabbits with them. Stun the bunny and then see if you have a heart to complete it. This tool provides a good tool " early game»To protect and purchase food, and this is what we plan to develop in the future.

Throwing flares and torches
Some of you may remember the game before we added swing. This mechanic never achieved its goals, so we removed it and brought torch and fire throws back. This gives you a useful, reusable wildlife scaring tool.

Quartering of carcasses
A welcome request from the community is the ability to harvest animal carcasses from shelter / safety / comfort ... somewhere other than outside. We've added a system where you can Quarterly Carcasses and move "chunks" around them. But keep in mind that, like everything in LONG DARK, there is a risk / reward scenario to consider. Quartering mascaras are less effective and also makes you much more fun to roam in the wild, both on the Quartering site and when you carry heavy pieces of mascara around with you.

The choice of weapons to fight
You can now select the tool / weapon you wish to use before engaging in the fight with the wolf. We think this will work to address some of the long-standing claims to the wrestling system, and we will build on that in the future.

First person
You will see that we have added first person presence to the Rifle, Bow, Distress Pistol and improved the presentation of Lights such as Flare, Torch, etc. As always, we plan to continue to improve the game as the game progresses.

Tons of new art
In addition to customizing the user interface, you will notice that a lot of the game world looks better. We are slowly updating all the labels and signs of the old item to create a more cohesive world.

New graphics settings
We've added more display variety and quality options so you can find the best balance of performance and beauty based on your particular system. (Note, this is for PC / Mac / Linux players only.)

Tons of bug fixes and optimizations
We have fixed many bugs over the past few months. TONS.

See you in a quiet apocalypse.

Officially announced the release of the story game The long dark, the main elements of which are survival in a world that has plunged into pitch darkness after the final energetic apocalypse. The first footage of the scenario was also shown in the release trailer.

The main concept of The Long Dark is to survive in a snowy environment in the complete absence of electricity and energy. The player needs to monitor the indicator of satiety, it is also necessary to throw firewood into the fire in time in order to survive the harsh nights in pitch darkness. As it became known to the site, the player can be attacked by dangerous animals like wolves and bears. Moreover, the former can attack with a whole flock.

The full version of The Long Dark has a full storyline that will be presented in two episodes (the remaining three will appear in 2018). The first two episodes will tell about a pair of characters who are separated by the will of fate. In the first episode, the pilot of the crashed flying vehicle will try to hold out as long as possible, trying to find shelter in snowy conditions.
In the second episode, the pilot will begin to uncover the mystery of the electrical anomaly that led to the collapse and plunge of the world into darkness. At the same time, he will look for a teammate and interact with other survivors, trying to determine if they can be trusted.

Also it became known about the film based on the game, which will be dealt with the permanent producer of the series "Resident Evil" named Jeremy Bolt (Jeremy Bolt). According to the developers, Jeremy himself approached them with a proposal to make a film based on. According to Jeremy, recently he has become very interested in gaming horror games with elements of survival. To whet the public's interest, the authors have prepared a new trailer for The Long Dark with live actors.

The Long Dark invites the player to keep track of calories, fatigue, hunger, thirst and temperature. The weaker the player, the more likely it is to die. As part of survival, you have to hunt rabbits and deer, as well as be wary of wolves and bears. Ravens will tell you about the presence of carrion, which you can use for your own good. Dynamic weather is also a distinctive feature of the project. The player has access to a vast territory of 30 sq. km.

According to the site, the project is being developed by the Hinterland Studio team, this is the first from this studio. However, the studio employs veterans who have put their hands to the series Far cry, Mass effect, God of War and Saints Row.

So, first we suggest you read an extensive message from the head of The Long Dark developers - Rafael Van Leerope:

« Community Update: Progress on Story Mode.

Dear community,

Spring has come and many of you are wondering: "Where is the Story Mode?" We get this question every day! MANY times a day. We love that you are looking forward to the story mode of the game. We are also anxiously waiting for him. But it seems that we have come to the point where the waiting for the Story Mode is the waiting for which we are incredibly grateful to you! - does not leave us the opportunity to talk about other things that we are working on.

So instead of asking you to wait again while we work hard on new material for the game, I'm going to explain something about our work on the story mode, which will hopefully answer some of your backlog of questions.

Let's take a step back to the beginning of this project. Sit back and make yourself comfortable as this will take a while.

CAUTION: Text contains spoilers.

When I founded Hinterland in June 2012, my vision was to create a game set in the wilderness of Canada, based on gameplay there will be exploration and survival in the world after some global catastrophe. Then I still had no idea what kind of disaster it would be, but I knew for sure that it should not have anything to do with a zombie. I wanted to avoid the clichés of second-rate films and try to take a more “literary” approach to the subject, inspired by books such as The Earth Abides (George R. Stewart, 1949), The Dog Starts ( The Dog Stars, Peter Heller, 2012) and, of course, The Road (The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 2006); in general, fantastic literature describing how humanity is trying to survive in a global catastrophe.

Then I got some money, enough to hire a tiny development team and make a prototype for an iPad game. We soon realized that the iPad was too limiting for us, forcing us to find a compromise in our vision of the scale of the world and the player's sense of immersion in this world, so we abandoned the iPad in favor of the PC. But after several months of working on a new prototype, we weren't quite sure about the interest in our "art house indie survival game in Canada". We realized that we needed outside feedback on our ideas.

So in September 2013, we reached out to Kickstarter. We looked at it as a testing ground for our idea, to see if we were able to do something unique, something that would resonate with the players, and also as a way to build a community for the game. Keep in mind that there was no established survival genre at the time, DayZ was still in its infancy, and games like Rust and Forest didn't even exist. So we had no reason to feel confident about how compelling our concept would be, in part because we were going against the understandable concept of big, multi-budget games (which many of us have been developing for years) by creating something that, as it seemed to us, it is not massive and simply has no right to be popular or successful.

After the success on Kickstarter, we realized that our idea is interesting to people. We created the first part of our game world and experimented with game mechanics what we continue to do to this day: systems of "states", when the player must track various aspects of health in order to stay strong; Wildlife spawn system; system of destruction of objects; system of dynamic weather and time of day, and so on. In June 2014, about 8 months after the end of the Kickstarter campaign, an exciting moment came: we had the first version of Mysterious Lake and a set of key game mechanics ready. We were ready for the first tests of the game.

But we realized that there are two problems. First, we realized that our test audience was too small. Even if we distributed the assembly of the game to all our sponsors (which we refused to do then, since we were still in captivity of the methodology of developing multi-budget games, which forced us to hide the game until it was finished), we would not be able to get enough information to customize game mechanics, which were already becoming quite difficult for a small team to develop and test. Therefore, we needed more testers! At this point, we learned about Early Access on Steam and decided that this would be a partial solution to the problem. But here we had a second problem. Our game was supposed to be like a story, but hardly anyone would want to play a story game that is not finished yet. We wanted to make sure that the first time people plunge into our story, it will have a full impact on them. How can we get valuable player feedback on game mechanics without ruining the first impression of the story?

It's simple. It is necessary to separate game mechanics and plot. Right? But no one has done this before.

This is how the idea of ​​the Sandbox mode was born.

We created a "Sandbox" in which there was no story other than the story implied by the world itself. We deliberately made the implementation of many things easier than we ultimately wanted to see at the start, so as not to give spoilers about our world. We included Mysterious Lake in the Early Access build, published the game and waited with bated breath.

And you liked it. You really liked her. We had 95% positive reviews (and still so many - thank you for that). During our first Winter Steam Sale, three months after launch, we sold over 250,000 copies of the game. We were jubilant! We rushed to work on this momentum. We've added game mechanics, more cards, more items, more stuff. We have built our Sandbox, complementing it with numerous game mechanics and content that we could only dream of. We continued to improve our world, improve mechanics, improve the interface, in general, clean up every piece of the game, removing all the roughness that we could find.

And the "Sandbox" took on a life of its own. What began as a testing ground for game mechanics has become an independent element of the game, independent of the plot. What started out as low budget and not ambitious has become something much, much more than we could ever dream of.

What interested me the most was what it would mean for our story. The humble story of Will McKenzie, the crashed Canadian pilot, was too small for our ambitions. I wanted a bigger world, more locations, more characters. I've always wanted to tell a big story about The Long Dark: about days, months and years in the aftermath of a great catastrophe that was supposed to bring humanity to its knees. I worked on the story with my co-author, Marianna Kravchuk, with whom we rewrote the plot again. And then we rewrote it again. We left the main themes and plot twists unchanged, but the world has evolved, the narrative has become stronger, and the intention is clearer.

What are some of the decisions I made to expand the scale of the game that resulted in increased development time and cost?

First, the length of the story that we planned at the beginning has changed. The original plan was to launch with a two hour episode and then continue to expand on it. But you can't run a 2-hour game with this kind of competition, the possibility of returning the game on Steam, and the Youtube-focused marketplace. So instead, we're launching Story Mode with 2 of the 5 episodes of our first season, lasting 4 to 6 hours of story-driven play.

We originally planned to tell the story on behalf of Will McKenzie. Instead, you'll play the story from two perspectives: McKenzie and Dr. Astrid Greenwood. Why add another playable character? For two reasons. The first reason is that it will allow us to tell the best story, the story we really want to tell. The second reason is that it's 2016 and I have a daughter, and she should have the opportunity to grow up in a world where there are strong female characters that she can play as and follow their example. (I also have a son and he should also be able to play as a strong female character if he wants to. And not in the Mass Effect-like way of "be a man or a woman Shepard", but by playing as two different characters with two different points of view .)

Initially, we planned that all character interactions and plot moments would take place in interactive 2D graphics, divorced from the game world. Instead, we will connect all of our plot points to the game world, make them in the first person, with full 3D characters, animation and facial expressions performed using motion capture, and with all the things that help bring characters to life.

Initially, the story was supposed to take place in the same world as when playing Sandbox. But as our audience grew up playing Sandbox, we felt that if she played the story in the same conditions that she had already played in some cases for 100 hours, it might feel like the game fell short. Instead, most of the first and second episodes take place in completely new regions, which will be shown for the first time along with Story Mode, so no one will see them before.

On top of all this, we've added new game mechanics to the game that are unique to Story Mode, things that you won't even see in the Sandbox until we actually launch the game. Without giving too many spoilers, these mechanics relate to how you will survive in a world with other survivors in it, how you navigate this world, what knowledge did you gain in it, and how the northern lights are changing the world around you?

So these were busy years for us.

And keep in mind that you are getting all these new features and all these new materials for the money you have already given us. When we launch Story Mode, you will receive Episode One and Episode Two, as well as Sandbox, for the Early Access price. You will also receive all the remaining episodes from Season One when they are released. As such, we think it's a fairly fair refund if things like length of play and scale of in-game content matter to you.

I sometimes reflect on those first months of the project, what we had, or what we thought we had. And then I look at where we are today, I look back at the team of 20 full-time employees who live by passing their passion on to the game. I look at the 750,000+ people who bought the game on Steam, or Xbox One, and the future opportunities for this game and studio. I look at all the times we've been approached by studios looking to make a film, TV series, novel, or anything really creative out of this fictional world we're building. And I'm looking at a list of the latest highly anticipated "indie" games that came out with less applause and commercial success than expected. And my old “scars” from developing big-budget games are making themselves felt again, and I think to myself: “Don't release it until it's finished. Wait until she is ready. There is too much at stake. You can only release it once. This is your future. People are counting on you. "

I'm not sure if any of this information matters to you. I just think it's important to get a better understanding of the reasons why things are the way they are now. When we went to Kickstarter and Early Access, we said that Story Mode would come out in early 2014. Then we said that it would come out before the end of 2015. Then it turned into spring 2016. And each time you gave us a credit of confidence and accepted these delays. And now spring 2016 has come, and you are still waiting for the Story Mode. Where is he? You were promised it. You paid your money. Where is your Story Mode?

But he's not ready. And I will not release it until it is ready. Like this. I'm sorry, but you'll just have to wait.

And I believe, I believe with all my heart, once you receive it, you will agree that the wait was worth it.

And you won't get any more promises from me about when it comes out. Until we are close enough to completion, when I can say it with 100% certainty, and give you a final date that will not force us to publish something that will not satisfy us 100%.

But we also understand that it is no longer fair to keep asking you to believe in all of this without being informed of progress on our part. So going forward, we'll do a couple of things to keep you updated, including:

– Regular updates on the progress of Story Mode development. Some of them will contain "spoilers", but we will do our best to warn you so that you can avoid them if you wish.

– We will return to the usual Sandbox update cycle. While we thought we could forget about the Sandbox for a while until we're done with Story Mode, we also understand that the longer there are no updates to the Sandbox, the more momentum and reputation we will lose in the eyes of the community. It also means that we are losing valuable test feedback. A smart approach to Sandbox is key to our success, so we'll be reviving it with a new update over the next few weeks.

– We will launch a public experimental thread for all our players giving you the opportunity to test and give us feedback on features that are still “in development” and that will eventually end up in the Sandbox. This is partly necessary because you guys love the game as it is, it has become difficult for us to experiment with things without turning a part of our community against us. The experimental branch will allow us to release more regular phased updates and collect information that will help us improve or abandon game mechanics if we decide they don't work.

– A long-term plan for new opportunities. We will also publish a timeline for new game features and game content, covering the period before and after the launch of Story Mode. So you can find out more about our current plans and ambitions for Plot and Sandbox in The Long Dark. You can see the first option here:

We've also edited the video so you can see some more new in-game content we've added to launch Story Mode, including a complete overhaul of the environment in order to fill in the details and convey a full sense of the atmosphere of what happened before the player appeared; We'll also show you the epic Northern Lights, lots of visual improvements, and one of the Story Mode NPCs.

Uuuf. There was a lot of information, and I apologize for my verbosity, but there has been too much talk about it and I hope that after all of the above, you will have a better understanding of what we are working on and what to expect.

Thanks for your continued support. We wouldn't have come this far without her. All we want to do is do something that’s going to be great, something that we can be proud of all our lives, and the only way we know is to go to any lengths to do it. We do not leave any energy for the return journey.

We'll go all the way. Come with us.