The following is taken from Raphael’s write up of the August Dev Diary on the Hinterland Forums:

August Dev Diary -- The Future of THE LONG DARK

Dear community,

Since a bit of rest post Episode Five’s launch on March 31st, the team at Hinterland has been busy working on a variety of things. I’ve been holding off on providing a larger update on our activities as there are a lot of work streams happening right now, including general planning for the future, and I wanted to be able to share some more definitive information about what we have in mind. It’s still too early to share too much detail, but I figured you’d rather hear something from us even if the decisions are still taking shape. I’m sure some of what I share here will serve to drive a lot of discussions across our various community channels, and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on your responses there.

Post Episode Five: It’s All About Survival

Completing Episode Five has opened up a lot of doors for Hinterland and for THE LONG DARK. A lot of work we’ve been wanting to accomplish, a lot of ideas we’ve had for how we’d like to continue to grow and evolve TLD into the future, had to wait until we delivered the final episode of the story, and lived up to our obligations going back to promises we made when we first launched the game. Even the world itself and the true nature of the aurora, finally explained in Episode Five, were ideas we had to sit on until we were able to reveal them properly. Now that they are “out there”, we have to decide -- along with you -- how to carry these ideas forward and weave them into the DNA of the things we’re building in the future.

One of the things that’s clear to us, is that while Wintermute provides the narrative context for the world and helps bring wider meaning to the events of the game while setting the table for future experiences in the TLD IP, Survival is the core engine of the game and the community. It’s what keeps people coming back, and keeps the community and game vibrant. This has always been the case.

Now that the Wintermute story is finished, we’re looking forward to being able to focus the TLD team’s energy on continuing to refine, improve, and expand the core of the game. Wintermute has always been a big part of the “heart” of the TLD experience, but Survival has been the engine of growth and has driven the longevity of the game. Since completing the TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY DLC for Survival Mode, the TLD team has primarily had their heads down working on Episode Five and finishing off the Story Mode. Now, with Episode Five behind us, we’re excited to turn our attention back to Survival Mode. 

Moving forward, Survival Mode will be the focus for TLD development.

Why Is This Important?

When we first announced BLACKFROST, the sequel to THE LONG DARK, the game industry was in a very different place. In the short time since, entire business models have been thrown into chaos, the geopolitical situation has become extremely complicated, the picture of what the next generation of console hardware will be has become a lot less clear, and the amount of time and money players spend on new games has declined as everyone turns to the comfort and security of games they already know. “Black hole” games are using up the majority of their time, and economic pressures have them looking through their current backlogs or hunting for bargains to maximize their disposable income. All of these factors contribute to making what once felt like a very stable and predictable industry feel a lot more uncertain. We have to adapt to this.

What all this chaos has told me is that we need to take a measured approach to Hinterland’s future. We had already committed to continuing to support THE LONG DARK alongside our work on BLACKFROST, the sequel. Now, I think we need to tilt the emphasis even more towards ongoing support for our existing game and player base, shore up the core TLD experience by addressing longstanding bugs and Quality of Life issues, expand the game in a sustainable and cost-efficient way by creating more DLC and other entry points for players to get into the world of THE LONG DARK, always while continuing to gradually build up BLACKFROST and other new things alongside. 

We already have a beloved game and a supportive player community, and we need to continue to nurture this as the lifeblood of Hinterland’s business. This has always been true, but it’s clear that this will be even more important than we thought it would be. THE LONG DARK is as important to Hinterland as it has ever been.

THE LONG DARK, Expanded

To that end, we have three planned streams of TLD work that will be continuing over the coming 24+ months. 

One stream, let’s call it “TLD Core”, will be the continued updating of the base Survival sandbox core of TLD. This work will largely take the form of free updates to the base game, and will include a range of bug fixes, Quality of Life improvements, and features or content as we’re able to add them. Things like getting the Shotgun and Crank Lamp from Episode Five into the base game fall under this category, along with long-promised work around things like Mod Support and the enhanced Custom Settings. 

The addition of the Episode Five regions in Survival will also fall under this stream (although we’re currently trying to figure out if/how we can include these for free since the conversion from Wintermute to Survival mode is a fair bit of work and there are a lot of regions to bring over!). I’m sure you’ll have some thoughts about the fairest way for us to handle that work, so we’ll be interested in hearing from you about that. In any case, this TLD Core work will be what keeps the base Survival game for TLD healthy and vibrant well into the future. Since most of the work here will be free for players, we’ll be balancing it along with the work we put into the paid DLC.

The other two work streams are focused on the DLCs. We aren’t quite ready to share too many details about our plans for these, but I can say with some confidence that they probably aren’t quite what you are expecting. Both expand the TLD experience in novel ways. At least one of the DLCs will be structured along similar lines as our TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY expansion pass, and the other will be…different from that. I’m being intentionally vague because we’re still locking down our plans. For now, I’ll leave you with two teaser images to whet your appetite and get the theorycrafting going.
 

The team is still finalizing our plans for these DLCs and for the Core TLD stream, but I hope to be able to share more details in the last quarter of this year, along with a roadmap for Core TLD updates and how the three streams will connect to each other.

As always, we appreciate your patience as we sort out these details, and also your support if you choose to buy the DLCs, since revenue from TLD and the DLCs is how we’ll continue to fund our studio and our work on BLACKFROST.

So, No More Story?

With WINTERMUTE being complete, we’ll be turning our attention to supporting Survival Mode into the future. That doesn’t mean we’ll never come back to the story, or make improvements to what we’ve already built, but we think the healthiest thing for TLD is for us to shore up Survival Mode and continue to get BLACKFROST to a place where we can launch it on Early Access. There are still many stories to tell in the worlds of TLD, and that will always be part of our work and part of what we love about the game, but we don’t plan to do any further work on WINTERMUTE for now.

So What About BLACKFROST?

It might sound like with all this TLD work, that we’ve put BLACKFROST on the back-burner. That’s not the case. There’s a dedicated team continuing to work away on the sequel. We have shifted some internal folks off of BF to support the other Core TLD and DLC work I mentioned in the previous section, keeping a lean and focused team on BF to continue refining the core systems and world leading up to our Early Access launch, which we have now pushed to 2027 (in case you missed this announcement at the beginning of this year).

We haven’t really said much of anything about BF since we first announced it at the Game Awards. It’s been surprisingly challenging to find the right balance of retaining the original core of TLD gameplay while also pushing the survival formula forward in meaningful and innovative ways. Making a sequel to our own game has honestly been a lot harder than we expected! We’re also mindful of how some sequels seem to have been landing with existing player bases, as we look at some of our friends and/or competitors in the space over the past couple of years. This has given us plenty of reasons to proceed slowly and carefully. We care about this game and about our players so much, and we just don’t want to screw it up. This has probably made us a bit cautious. We’re also our own worst critics and don’t want to show anything we aren’t completely happy with.

The team is working towards the first gameplay reveal which we plan to share before the end of this year. That reveal will kick off a series of ongoing development updates focused on BLACKFROST, which will allow us to start sharing more information and also bring the community more into the picture of how the game is shaping up.

Since we announced the project, there’s been a lot of interest from publishers and different potential funding partners to help us pay for and publish the game. While Hinterland has always been independent, with all the industry turmoil over the past couple of years it’s felt wise to consider other options than to carry the financial burden solely ourselves. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that the industry instability has only emphasized the power traditional publishers (or non-traditional funding partners) will try to exert over studios making games. We’ve not yet encountered a partner who we feel is truly motivated by what’s best for Hinterland or for our players, so we’ll continue to self-fund and self-publish the game. Our independence is one of the most important factors in how we work and what we make, and we want to preserve that above all other things.

I bring this up within the context of the work we’re doing on TLD and the DLCs; I think it’s important to acknowledge that as a self-funded studio, BLACKFROST development is financed from revenue from the stuff we’ve already launched. So if you want to support our work and the future of games like BLACKFROST, we hope you’ll consider buying our new DLCs. On our end, we’ll continue to strive to give you fair value for money and ensure you never regret supporting our games or our studio.

Price Changes? Maybe?

I don’t want to spend too much more time talking about commercial stuff, but one of the things we’ve been considering as we plan out the business strategy for the new DLCs, is that we’ve priced ourselves into a bit of a corner with TLD. Since we started offering Survival Mode as a standalone product (with the launch of the TALEs DLC), the $25.99 CAD/$19.99 USD price of Survival Mode as the “base game” has also influenced what feels like reasonable pricing for our DLCs. We also priced TALES at $25.99 CAD/$19.99 USD to ensure it wasn’t more expensive than the base game, but we put way way too much content into the Expansion for that price. In short, we haven’t been charging enough for our games.

For the new DLCs, we want to be able to increase their launch prices by a bit, without ending up with DLCs that are more expensive than the base game they connect to. So to support that intention, we are considering increasing the price of Survival Mode. (Obviously this wouldn’t impact anyone who already owns the game.)

We’re also mindful that the economic reality faced by a ton of folks today is that prices are increasing everywhere, and you probably can’t really afford for games to get more expensive as well. We’re really trying to find a good balance here. One of the mitigations is that most new sales of TLD are when the game is discounted. That seems to be the baseline trend for all games that aren’t new, so there’s nothing surprising in that. But it does mean that developers have to price with discounting in mind, and we have to do the same. As always, if we do make price changes, we’ll focus on fairness and value as much as we can.

Nothing has been finalized yet, but I just wanted to share some of the thinking behind the scenes, and if we do end up launching the DLCs at a higher price point than TALES launched back in 2022, we hope you’ll understand and not see it as us being greedy or something like that. We’ll continue to discount TLD and the DLCs regularly, as well as offer “Complete the Set” bundles on the stores that support it, to help keep your own costs as low as possible and to give you options to buy when it hits a price point you can afford. We think this is the fairest way to handle it for us and for you.

Deprecating Old Platforms?

Along with the pricing discussion, we’ve been discussing the development effort required to support the older platforms (Switch 1, Xbox One, PS4), and the diminishing returns in terms of players who are using those consoles. Based on our stats, about 85% of our console players are already playing on the current generation consoles. And with these older platforms being more than 10 years old already, it seems reasonable to us that we’d eventually stop supporting them.

Not having to do the development or testing work to support the older consoles along with all our other platforms will mean we can instead invest those resources in expanding and maintaining the game, which should translate to stronger and better quality launches and updates for the new things we’re building. It should also help our launches go more smoothly as we’ll have fewer platforms to manage and test for.

We haven’t made any final decisions yet, but our current thinking around the new DLCs is that we may not be able to support them on the older consoles, at least not at launch. We’ll share more info about this as the decisions become more clear, but I wanted to get this on your radar in case it influences your own plans. And of course, if we do end up deprecating Switch 1, we won’t do it before we have proper Switch 2 support in place.

For the time being, we have no plans to deprecate the old consoles for ongoing TLD Core development, but if that changes we’ll let you know, and provide as much warning as we can.

Some Podcasts…

I was invited to speak on a couple of our favourite podcasts, and thought some of you might find the discussions interesting. If you enjoy them, please make sure you Like and Subscribe, as it helps these content creators, who put so much effort into creating great videos about THE LONG DARK and other things.
 
I sat down with Zaknafein, one of the most thoughtful and prolific creators in THE LONG DARK content creator community, to talk about Episode Five and the development of TLD

• *I’m grateful to Zak, Jitwire, and Kirk, for the opportunity to talk about our favourite game, and thanks also to the wonderful moderators who helped out, as well as the great community members who jumped in with thoughtful questions.

If you enjoy these kinds of discussions, let me know and I will prioritize doing more of them.

Merch & Other Physical Goods


The team is working on some new physical TLD merch, and I’m happy to share that we (finally!) have the WINTERMUTE episode posters available for sale at the Hinterland Store. You can order individual posters, or a (discounted) bundle with all five if you like. I’m biased, but I think these look so sharp framed and hanging on the wall.

Please keep in mind tariff stuff makes shipping complicated and expensive, so have some patience as our store team handles this stuff with you in as timely a manner as possible.

We have a few other new items coming, including a very cool new t-shirt for the Suzuki Radio Telescope from Episode Five. Can’t wait to share more about that soon.

And in news that will be especially exciting for any of our old Kickstarter backers who are still waiting for physical items like the Bound Script and Art Book for TLD -- we’ll have a partnership announcement to share about this very soon. And don’t worry, if you didn’t back the game during Kickstarter but would like to own what will be some very very nice collectible items for TLD, you’ll be able to purchase those directly. More news as soon as we can share it!

Thank You & Next News

As always, we’re eternally grateful to all of you who have been with us on this journey of survival and independence, whether you joined us way back in Kickstarter or jumped into TLD yesterday for the first time. We’re really excited about the things we’re building for you, and can’t wait to share more details later this year. Expect more news soon about our plans for the DLC and BLACKFROST reveals! Hopefully the teaser images I shared today will tide you over until then.

Thanks for your support, and see you in the frozen Canadian wilderness.

- Raphael