With harsh cold winds raging outside your window, do you have what it takes to survive a lonely and frozen apocalypse? The Long Dark is a game that has been labelled as “the pinnacle of an entire genre” by Wired and is an exploration survival experience of a winter apocalypse. No zombies or bombs, just the player and all the troubles that mother nature can cause.
Players were excited, as the third episode of The Long Dark was set to come out December of this year. But soon enough, Hinterland’s creative director, Ralph van Lierop, released this tweet announcing some changes for the upcoming third episode and the company’s direction:
The link leads to Lierop’s Dev Diary that goes into some extensive topics. It will be a bit of a trip, as it brings in workers from the recent Telltale Layoffs that happened a few months ago. Lierop describes that there are both good news and bad news, but overall, he hopes it’ll be seen as good in the long run.
The Dev Diary goes into beginning to talk about how Telltale suffered the layoffs, and how a local Capcom Vancouver Studios had suffered a complete shut-down causing 200 people to lose their jobs. In a rush to interview as many people as possible from the Capcom Vancouver Studios, Hinterland was able to expand their workforce by six new members which has been their most significant growth in the past five years.
Because of this, they have more resources for The Long Dark and will be being making a ‘Redux’ for episodes one and two. Having the resources now from the growth of the new workers, they have the increased strength in the animation department, as Lierop describes:
One area we were really able to bulk up was animation, which has always been a challenge on this project. Our current animation team of three has been able to do some truly incredible technical and creative work over the past 18 months, but we’ve always been limited on how much content we could produce and that’s held us back in some areas of the project. For example, the decision to ship unvoiced dialogue scenes in the original Episode One and Two.
He goes on to talk about how they’ll be able to rework the animation from the first two episodes and add back what they couldn’t before.
Along with that will be an added updated motion-capture kit that allows a 36-camera set up. Having the new set up grants Hinterland to do their motion capture scenes when they can without the hindrance of needing to rent the studio they had been using prior out.
With the work on the first two episodes/the first season of The Long Dark: WINTERMUTE, as well as a survival mode in progress, this leads to everything being delayed for Episode 3. Lierop describes that with the upcoming Redux of WINTERMUTE and Survival Mode update in December, all of the previous saves from the original version will be deleted. He warns players about either waiting for when the Redux is released or trying to finish up their current playthrough.
Redux of WINTERMUTE and Survival mode are set to come out in December of this year, but the release date on the delayed Episode 3 is still undetermined. The Long Dark is still currently available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One for purchase for $29.99 USD.