Let's talk plot holes


TWM

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So after finishing episode 1 and playing throug a fair bit of episode 2, it dawned on me that much of the central premises on why the places I was visiting were abandoned don't actually make much sense.

1.  How and why is Milton abandoned again?

Take the abandoned town of Milton for instance. After the electricity broke stopped working, people tried desparately to get out of town. But why would they, or rather, why would all of them? They're in a pretty remote place, I assume these people are part-time hunters and self reliance types anyway.

You'd expect people to huddle together in the case of a catastrophic event, have a town meeting, maybe send out a reconaissance party to find out if things are as bad in the outside world and perhaps get some help going, but people just haphazardly stealing goods and making a run for it separately: it doesn't actually make much sense. Where are you gonna go? How long do you expect to survive the winter?

Now, I get it from a standpoint of development feasibility, especially for a small studio: funds are tight, every NPC encounter requires many, many more man hours, plus extra expenses for the voice acting. But on the level of the world that the story is building, it makes no sense: even if people turned on each other (because they didn't agree, or because goods were running scare and people started to panick, you wouldn't expect a town to just run empty.

2. So how exactly did Astrid and the convicts manage to get out of Milton?

Grey Mother tells us there's only one way out of town (which is odd, since there's a road going the other direction, the way we came into town, but okay, whatever: let's say that road leads to nowhere): through the tunnel.

But the tunnel has collapsed and from the looks of it, right when a bus of convicts rode through.  Now, since the only regular way out of town was closed off, how did the convicts and Astrid manage to get out of Milton?

The only other way is go rope climbing through the mountains, so Grey Mother tells us. Did you see a rope hanging down that ravine we traveled through? That would make more narrative sense, but game-wise we need to be forced to be dependant on Grey Mother to disclose Lily's half a century old mountaineering kit to us.

But even if these convicts somehow managed to get the necessary equipment and figure out a way to get out of town, would you really expect them too, so soon? What's their plan? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to stick around, loot the gas station, bully the left-over townsfolk until things got so dire, they needed to move on or starve to death?

3. What were those convicts doing there anyway?

Why a bus of convicts would travel through a place in the middle of nowhere on some remote island beats me. Where were they coming from, and where were they headed? It doesn't exactly jibe with what Grey Mother is telling us about this place: it's pretty much abandoned from the mainland. So... is there some Alcatraz style prison somewhere on Great Bear?

It doesn't make sense, but we need convicts to generate a sense of urgency and danger to the story, so let's drop some convicts from the sky - no not literally from the sky, even though that would make somewhat more sense on the level of world building, since it would make it too obvious were taking a page from the movies Con Air and US Marshalls.

4. The trapper sure seems to like having people around!

This is a spacing issue. I've noticed while playing in Sandbox mode that the Mystery Lake map was pretty crowded (it's a nice starter map for a game, to learn the ropes so to speak, but it's got a lot of stuff happening) and it only's gotten more crowded when the Story Mode release neared. An extra watchtower near to the Camp Office and the Derailment (it's near the Logging Camp as well), now there's a yard in front of the Dam, some extra trailer cabins.

For someone who likes solitude, Jeremiah sure seems to have picked a place with a lot of people moving through. Imagine all the activity coming from Mystery Lake during the fishing and hunting season. There's a hunter's blind at the creek not far from Jeremiah's cabin, for crying out loud. I can just imagine him stumbling over all the tourist hunters nabbin' his game.

Oh, and while we're at it: if Mystery Lake is pretty much closed for the winter, why are there four ice fishing huts on the lake? Who put them there, and why? Well the devs put them there, so you wouldn't freeze your ass off while traversing the lake and to give you something to do, that's why - but then they forgot about them while figuring out a plausible reason why no-one was there. It's off season, yeah, that's the ticket! As a bonus it kind of helps to explain why a man hating trapper would stick around a well-visited tourist spot.

Not that it helps much, because there seems to be plenty of other activity going on in the area: there's a well used logging area in the vicinity, with frequent cargo trains coming through: imagine the noise! There are not one but two Watchtowers in the area, which seem to be in use.

It would have made more narrative sense to relocate the Trapper's homestead to the Muskeg, but development time constraints probably wouldn't allow for that. Ah, well...

5. Flushing money down the toilet on the Dam

We're told the Hydro Dam hasn't been in use since the earthquake ten years earlier, if I'm not mistaken. Which doesn't make much sense, because why would you put hundreds of millions of dollars into building a dam and then not repairing it after an earthquake. There doesn't seem to run a huge crack through the dam itself, in fact, the plot is going to require someone without any hydro-electrical engineering skills to get the Dam up and running again - but a huge corporation with all it's resources just thought it wouldn't be worth the effort and just pulled the plug on their multimillion dollar investment. Sure, sure...

******

And so this is why you hire professional writers to put the pieces of a story together. Other people have commented how the story seemed underwhelming, with cliche motifs and plot points to move the story along (the estranged couple meeting again after so many years, the loss of a child as cause of their separation, leading the male protagonist to isolate himself in the great outdoors - Firewatch, anyone?; the old crone/ testy wise woman guiding the protagonist on it's way) and implausible events and side characters (hunter-woodsmen ecoterrorists, really?).

For me it's not a deal breaker, I bought the game for the Sandbox/Survival experience and it hasn't let me down since, I've been getting free extra content for over two years now - the actual Story Mode was always a bonus for me and the stunning visuals and art direction help sell the story.

Still, if I'm honest though: I used to feel no hesitation in recommending this game to other people at it's former price of $20, but at $35 the story better be down-right engrossing, since that's the main dish buyers are going to look at. And I notice that I have to overcome a twinge of embarrassment when I want to recommend the game now.

For a game that has been rather dependent on word of mouth for it's pr so far, that's not a good thing.

 

 

 

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The story takes place in Canada an indeterminate time after a series of natural disasters have occurred. A small community, cut off via disasters with no help, an endless winter if you will closing in. More earthquakes and disasters, people loosing hope, the town fragments, everyone for him or herself.

And then later we come through.

The bus became a tunnel into the tunnel collapse...that isn't a plot hole. This is how the convicts and Astrid escaped Milton.

The bus was there because the prisoner transport happened to be at that point on it's route when the collapse happened, the collapse happened during a more recent earthquake.

The infrastructure was there before the collapse. Illegally apparently according toe Jeremiah...and then between the collapse and when the game is set less and lees people use it until it's just Jeremiah and the Forest Talkers.

The dam has been abandoned for quite some time now....or nearly abandoned.

When Will and Astrids plane went down was not the first time of the lights, it was by far the most powerful appearance though. And ruined everything the previous Earthquakes and other junk did not effect.

Will and Astrid's story takes time a long time after the earthquakes and other natural disasters that already happened prior to our introduction to the time line.

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Long Dark Timeline as I now see it:

  • Internet retail and industrial automation combine to drive prices for goods to near zero.  Wages and employment both shrink as a result.
  • Escalating fuel prices then drag everyone who can go into the cities.  Gas shortages abound.  Connecting infrastructure are left to decay.  Isolated rural communities revert to pre-industrial technology and are forgotten. 
  • With a need for energy surging, city interests turn to exploiting natural sources like forests and waterfalls.  Rural communities not pleased with the invasion but have no voice to protest.  
  • Dr. Astrid develops super wolves in secret government lab.  Tragedy ensues.  Will accidentally destabilizes Earth's core which contains outbreak/kills own son.
  • Earthquakes! (all of your houses are ruined)  Will feels a little guilty.
  • Wolf Attacks! (everyone hide in your houses)  Astrid feels a little guilty.
  • Dr. Astrid gets word that something has definitely survived.  Sets out to right her wrong.
  • Pretty-Lights-in-the-Sky-Now-Cause-Random-Electrocutions! (get out of your house before your toaster kills you)  Why?
  • AuroraWolves! (ahhhhhhhhhhh!)  Seriously...
  • Everyone dies of exhaustion from all the running in and out with the arms-waving-over-their-heads and screaming.
  • Will stumbles back into view and eats all the peaches before getting himself locked in a tower.
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3 hours ago, RossBondReturns said:

The bus was there because the prisoner transport happened to be at that point on it's route when the collapse happened, the collapse happened during a more recent earthquake.

What route exactly? According to Grey Mother, there's only one (!) way out of town, which is through the tunnel. So where did the bus came frome? And why would a bus full of convicts be on a remote island in the north of Canada anyway? It makes no sense.

Quote

The bus became a tunnel into the tunnel collapse...that isn't a plot hole. This is how the convicts and Astrid escaped Milton.

Okay, maybe I wasn't paying enought attention when this explanation came up. So why can't I use the same route then? Because the tunnel conveniently collapsed further onto the bus after Astrid used it, so that I, the player, now have to find another route...

It strains credulity as far as I'm concerned. o.O

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There was no earthquake, that's totally made up. We were there with Astrid on the same island, remember? Ofc you still can say that invisible aliens made a "mini-earthquake" only to collapse the tunnel :P. And ofc because it was a series of desasters that happened over time, the state decides to punish prisoners even more by sending them to the island :) oh boy

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12 minutes ago, MueckE said:

There was no earthquake, that's totally made up. We were there with Astrid on the same island, remember? Ofc you still can say that invisible aliens made a "mini-earthquake" only to collapse the tunnel :P. And ofc because it was a series of desasters that happened over time, the state decides to punish prisoners even more by sending them to the island :) oh boy

We've been out of the game for 5 days before we begin tracking Astrid.

The earthquakes have already happened. Then there was at least one further on when the prisioner transport was caught in the collapse.

The enviornmental collapse is well underway when the events of The Long Dark Happen.

We are caught in the the continued escalation of events.

I hope we become witness or perhaps experience some of the earthquakes other side effects of the collapse during gameplay in the remaning episodes.

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21 minutes ago, RossBondReturns said:

The earthquakes have already happened. Then there was at least one further on when the prisioner transport was caught in the collapse.

 

Okay, so the tunnel collapsed on the bus, which allowed for the convicts to overtake the prison guards. It conveniently left the bus intact enough so as to make a tunnel through which the convicts escaped...

After which they would have frozen to death in their skinny uniforms, but oh well, never mind that...

Also never mind that the bus doesn't seem nearly long enough to function as a tunnel, but okay...

So this bus-tunnel within a tunnel lasts long enough for Astrid to get through, but then conveniently caves in before Mackenzie to get there, because - o well, we need to force him to detour and meet the trapper.

Again, what were these convicts doing on a remote island again, and they were getting moved from where to where exactly? Is there a prison facility on the island? If so, how come nobody we encounter seems aware of this. I mean, Grey Mother seems half psychic, yet she has no idea who these inmates are?

Also, none of this is on the map of Great Bear. No air strip. No prison facility. The convicts just seem to have been placed there and driven around for no reason, without a starting point or destination.

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And how did they manage to drive through Milton to begin with, since the road seems blocked off - is that something that occurred after the bus with the convicts rode through?

But if so, then how come Grey Mother knows there's only one way out of Milton? What about the other road leading out of town, the way the convicts came in apparently - how does she know that side is blocked off?

Did people check it out and then went back? If so the time span seems awfully tight: where did these people go all of a sudden?

During my conversations with Grey Mother, I assumed that roadblock was due to the earlier earthquake she talks about, the one that cut Milton pretty much off from the rest of the island, let alone the main land. Although if that were correct, I don't see why people would use the road to go that way.

See, this is where things get confusing. The narrative challenges, even requires the player to put a puzzle together of what happened, but the picture itself doesn't seem to be congruent.

Now of course, you might maintain that's just my fault, that I'm misinterpreting things, or haven't been paying enough attention. But I have a sneaking suspicion it's because the writing itself wasn't designed to tell a congruent story, but to get the player from place A to place B, and from event I to event II - never mind consistency of the world and it's inhabitants the plot and it's background narrative conjure up.

And that's where I start having a problem with the suspension of disbelief.

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Yes the road collapsed after the convict bus went through.

Remember we were trapped in the valley for 5 days.

She probably heard that there was only one way out of Milton from other townsfolk before they left.

Heck maybe even Astrid running through town was calling out for help revealing that there was no way back.

As for there being no airport...that is not congruent with concept art for the game itself.

Which actually has art from and airfield.

Which means why not also have a prison facility on Bear Island.

The Ecological catastrophe is ongoing it is not something that has just begun...that has been implied by the sandbox...and by the the entire story line of both the first 2 Episodes.

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So here's my own time-line of how things went down:

  1. Economy collapses, which causes the rural communities on Great Bear Island to be cut-off from federal financial assistance and isolated from the rest of society.
  2. Lack of government funds forces federal facilities (try saying that five times fast 9_9) to be shut down, including prisons.
  3. Convicts need to be transferred to another prison on the mainland, so they are put on buses to be transported to the nearest airstrip / port.
  4. While passing through Milton, the Aurora Event occurs and fries the bus' motor, forcing it to come to a halt at the mouth of the tunnel.
  5.  An earthquake occur, causing landslides that one end of the road, leaving the tunnel as the only way out of Milton.
  6. The convicts eventually overwhelm the guards, allowing them to take control of the tunnel entrance and terrorize the townsfolk.
  7. The residences of Milton, confused and scared, attempt to flee Milton in hopes of finding refuge from the hostile wildlife and rampaging convicts, but with the road blocked by rumble and convicts, they all end up dead.
  8. Will and Astrid crash land the plane.
  9. Astrid, injured and unable to locate / recover Will and her suitcase, flees the crash site in search of shelter and aid.
  10. Astrid manages to hike down into Milton, but is found and held captive inside the bus by the convicts.
  11. Astrid writes the message "Perseverance" with her own blood on the floor of the bus.
  12. While Will is unconscious, another earthquake occurs, causing another landslide to occur, which buries the mouth of the tunnel and begins to crush the bus.
  13. Before the bus is crushed, she and most of the convicts flee into the tunnel.
13 hours ago, TWM said:

3. What were those convicts doing there anyway?

Why a bus of convicts would travel through a place in the middle of nowhere on some remote island beats me. Where were they coming from, and where were they headed? It doesn't exactly jibe with what Grey Mother is telling us about this place: it's pretty much abandoned from the mainland. So... is there some Alcatraz style prison somewhere on Great Bear?

If my memory is correct, I do believe that it was pseudo-confirmed that Great Bear Island is based-off of Vancouver Island (which is not such a random conclusion, given the fact that Hinterland studio is headquartered on the northern part of the island).  Should this assumption be true, then having a prison facility located on Great Bear Island would be highly plausible, as there is one such correctional facility on Vancouver Island: the William Head Institution.  It's a minimum security prison located on the southern-most tip of Vancouver Island, which would provide precedence for a fictional prison located on Great Bear Island, and thus, the likely origins of the escaped convicts.

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People expect so much more from 'The Long Dark' than any other video game out there. It's crazy though. Why? We all know that games and movies are chock full of plot holes. One of the biggest plot holes out there, for any fictional story like this is the fact that people never stick together like we would in real life. People in fictional stories always scatter and separate in the face of danger and try to get by on their own, and trust no one. They rarely band together. I don't know why this is, it just is. I guess it just makes for more drama and suspense.

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10 hours ago, RossBondReturns said:

We've been out of the game for 5 days before we begin tracking Astrid.

The earthquakes have already happened. Then there was at least one further on when the prisioner transport was caught in the collapse.

The enviornmental collapse is well underway when the events of The Long Dark Happen.

 

well that's the point. We haven't been out of the game. The first "tutorial-days" took place near the crashsite that is less than 5 miles away from Millton, on the same island. If there is the slightest earthquake, you will experience it too. You could say that the earthquake that damaged the tunnel happend before the crash and that it, against all physics, collapsed from the damage right at the moment astrid came through while we were doing the tutorial. But than it is also legit to say, that in reality characters of human storys became independent and the collapse was actually caused by the nights-watch that came over from game of thrones  to stop the wildlings from Millton entering Mystery Lake :)

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17 hours ago, TWM said:

So after finishing episode 1 and playing throug a fair bit of episode 2, it dawned on me that much of the central premises on why the places I was visiting were abandoned don't actually make much sense.

1.  How and why is Milton abandoned again?

Take the abandoned town of Milton for instance. After the electricity broke stopped working, people tried desparately to get out of town. But why would they, or rather, why would all of them? They're in a pretty remote place, I assume these people are part-time hunters and self reliance types anyway.

You'd expect people to huddle together in the case of a catastrophic event, have a town meeting, maybe send out a reconaissance party to find out if things are as bad in the outside world and perhaps get some help going, but people just haphazardly stealing goods and making a run for it separately: it doesn't actually make much sense. Where are you gonna go? How long do you expect to survive the winter?

Now, I get it from a standpoint of development feasibility, especially for a small studio: funds are tight, every NPC encounter requires many, many more man hours, plus extra expenses for the voice acting. But on the level of the world that the story is building, it makes no sense: even if people turned on each other (because they didn't agree, or because goods were running scare and people started to panick, you wouldn't expect a town to just run empty.

2. So how exactly did Astrid and the convicts manage to get out of Milton?

Grey Mother tells us there's only one way out of town (which is odd, since there's a road going the other direction, the way we came into town, but okay, whatever: let's say that road leads to nowhere): through the tunnel.

But the tunnel has collapsed and from the looks of it, right when a bus of convicts rode through.  Now, since the only regular way out of town was closed off, how did the convicts and Astrid manage to get out of Milton?

The only other way is go rope climbing through the mountains, so Grey Mother tells us. Did you see a rope hanging down that ravine we traveled through? That would make more narrative sense, but game-wise we need to be forced to be dependant on Grey Mother to disclose Lily's half a century old mountaineering kit to us.

But even if these convicts somehow managed to get the necessary equipment and figure out a way to get out of town, would you really expect them too, so soon? What's their plan? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to stick around, loot the gas station, bully the left-over townsfolk until things got so dire, they needed to move on or starve to death?

3. What were those convicts doing there anyway?

Why a bus of convicts would travel through a place in the middle of nowhere on some remote island beats me. Where were they coming from, and where were they headed? It doesn't exactly jibe with what Grey Mother is telling us about this place: it's pretty much abandoned from the mainland. So... is there some Alcatraz style prison somewhere on Great Bear?

It doesn't make sense, but we need convicts to generate a sense of urgency and danger to the story, so let's drop some convicts from the sky - no not literally from the sky, even though that would make somewhat more sense on the level of world building, since it would make it too obvious were taking a page from the movies Con Air and US Marshalls.

4. The trapper sure seems to like having people around!

This is a spacing issue. I've noticed while playing in Sandbox mode that the Mystery Lake map was pretty crowded (it's a nice starter map for a game, to learn the ropes so to speak, but it's got a lot of stuff happening) and it only's gotten more crowded when the Story Mode release neared. An extra watchtower near to the Camp Office and the Derailment (it's near the Logging Camp as well), now there's a yard in front of the Dam, some extra trailer cabins.

For someone who likes solitude, Jeremiah sure seems to have picked a place with a lot of people moving through. Imagine all the activity coming from Mystery Lake during the fishing and hunting season. There's a hunter's blind at the creek not far from Jeremiah's cabin, for crying out loud. I can just imagine him stumbling over all the tourist hunters nabbin' his game.

Oh, and while we're at it: if Mystery Lake is pretty much closed for the winter, why are there four ice fishing huts on the lake? Who put them there, and why? Well the devs put them there, so you wouldn't freeze your ass off while traversing the lake and to give you something to do, that's why - but then they forgot about them while figuring out a plausible reason why no-one was there. It's off season, yeah, that's the ticket! As a bonus it kind of helps to explain why a man hating trapper would stick around a well-visited tourist spot.

Not that it helps much, because there seems to be plenty of other activity going on in the area: there's a well used logging area in the vicinity, with frequent cargo trains coming through: imagine the noise! There are not one but two Watchtowers in the area, which seem to be in use.

It would have made more narrative sense to relocate the Trapper's homestead to the Muskeg, but development time constraints probably wouldn't allow for that. Ah, well...

5. Flushing money down the toilet on the Dam

We're told the Hydro Dam hasn't been in use since the earthquake ten years earlier, if I'm not mistaken. Which doesn't make much sense, because why would you put hundreds of millions of dollars into building a dam and then not repairing it after an earthquake. There doesn't seem to run a huge crack through the dam itself, in fact, the plot is going to require someone without any hydro-electrical engineering skills to get the Dam up and running again - but a huge corporation with all it's resources just thought it wouldn't be worth the effort and just pulled the plug on their multimillion dollar investment. Sure, sure...

******

And so this is why you hire professional writers to put the pieces of a story together. Other people have commented how the story seemed underwhelming, with cliche motifs and plot points to move the story along (the estranged couple meeting again after so many years, the loss of a child as cause of their separation, leading the male protagonist to isolate himself in the great outdoors - Firewatch, anyone?; the old crone/ testy wise woman guiding the protagonist on it's way) and implausible events and side characters (hunter-woodsmen ecoterrorists, really?).

For me it's not a deal breaker, I bought the game for the Sandbox/Survival experience and it hasn't let me down since, I've been getting free extra content for over two years now - the actual Story Mode was always a bonus for me and the stunning visuals and art direction help sell the story.

Still, if I'm honest though: I used to feel no hesitation in recommending this game to other people at it's former price of $20, but at $35 the story better be down-right engrossing, since that's the main dish buyers are going to look at. And I notice that I have to overcome a twinge of embarrassment when I want to recommend the game now.

For a game that has been rather dependent on word of mouth for it's pr so far, that's not a good thing.

Very good observations. I'm personally not that negative about the story, but it certainly has weaknesses, and one of those weaknesses is inconsistencies. Inconsistencies are distracting from the story itself, as they always invade our minds while the story is being told (unless we are gifted with a mind such as @RossBondReturns' who always seems to be able to make sense out of the most contradicting evidence ;)).

What highly irritated me, for example, was Grey Mother's relation of how Astrid and the 'bad guys' passed through town in a blizzard. Firstly, why would you pass through a town during a blizzard instead of seeking shelter? Even assuming that the scared inhabitants locked themselves in - what about going into one of the abandoned buildings or a barn? Huddle down somewhere, make a fire? Then confusion when I found the bus at the tunnel: Until then I was convinced that Astrid and the 'bad guys' had been following the same route as me. But if the bus stopped here... did they cross Milton the other way? Then Grey Mother says there is only one way to leave Milton - the tunnel. Now the bus becomes even more mysterious - from where to where was it going then? Through the tunnel to visit Milton and return back through the tunnel? When exactly was the other road destroyed again? 10 years ago or just a couple of days? I may have missed something here, maybe Grey Mother mentioned another earthquake five days ago or so. But there are inconsistencies which are distracting.

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2 hours ago, SnowWalker said:

One of the biggest plot holes out there, for any fictional story like this is the fact that people never stick together like we would in real life. People in fictional stories always scatter and separate in the face of danger and try to get by on their own, and trust no one. They rarely band together. I don't know why this is, it just is. I guess it just makes for more drama and suspense.

this is true as I just experienced myself. I live in a complex with about 100 tenants for 6 years now and I barely knew our neighbors left and right plus the parents of the kids our kids play with. Two months ago we had a serious flooding and all our cellars and garages were completely flooded, everything in it wasted including top-filled cars. This knotted the whole community together in such a way that it now deserves to be called a community, on Nation Day (August 1st :D)) we had a big come-together with 50 or 60 people attending and suddenly I know many more faces.

So yes, during times of crysis people tend to stick together - it's what I wanted to write, but....

Rethinking it again, that's not a crysis that is comparable to what's going on in Wintermute. We had a flooding but no one got hurt or anything and except for one day, we had power, running water and so on. But in TLD it's the freaking end of the world, like The Walking Dead end of the world. There's no documented incident in history which comes close to this. Sure we had major wars and millions of people dying but there was always a "us vs them", there were the good and there the bad guys and when the good guys win it will all be over again. Accountability remained, most people didn't turn into bandits because of WW2 and instead tried to help each other out where ever possible.

Who are the bad guys in TLD, who will safe us from what, who is left alive anyway? If this is a TWD scenario with 99.something % people dead and all goverments non-existend anymore then I am not so sure the remaining ones will be all kumbaya together. When the fight for basic resources like food and clean water begins I believe the "selfish One" who lives in everyone gains the upperhand and people will first think about themselfs and then about the others. A few will band together but outside their band everyone will be suspicious and there will be a lot of fighting without any sense left for accountability. Kill or be killed, that's what happens if there are only a few people left - or so I think... ;)

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18 minutes ago, ChillPlayer said:

A few will band together but outside their band everyone will be suspicious and there will be a lot of fighting without any sense left for accountability. Kill or be killed, that's what happens if there are only a few people left - or so I think... ;)

Makes me think of Alien: Isolation again, where the only ones who banded together were the bad guys and the authorities. Everyone else kept to themselves and tried to stay away from the bad guys who would shoot them on sight. It didn't make sense. Why kill innocent people and why try to kill Amanda, a woman trying to survive a terrifying creature all alone? That wouldn't happen in real life. Near the end, the bad guys wanted to kill everyone and take over Amanda's ship. That made no sense whatsoever. The ship was going to take survivors anyway, and there weren't that many of them left so why did the bad guys want to kill anyone that wasn't in their group? It's just the weird way they create drama, I guess.

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How Will Mackenzie doesn't have the bare minimum of survival equipment in his bushplane. Seriously, I leave my house more adequately prepared than he does

In Alaska, it is a law that bushpilots have to have a survival kit stashed in their planes, for the exact situation that happened in TLD. 

How much would the game balance be broken if, after surviving the escape from the Ravine, you get to the bushplane, and find a knife, some matches,  a few bits of food and water, and some first aid supplies, maybe some clothing.

"Good job making it this far. Now...... get to Milton"

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I haven't played alien but maybe it's a difference in perception. As an outside observer sitting on the couch we have an objectiv image of what would make sense in a certain situation and what not. But the protagonists in stories are usually written from a subjectiv point of view, what would make sense in their situation with the amount of information they have about what's going on and with all their personal backgrounds and experiences.

Having said that, I could follow the main story, it made sense to some extend and what is leaving us puzzled right now might be explained in a future episode. What I can't get my head around, subjectively or objectively, is the discrepancy between the urgent situation Will is in (to find Alice Astrid) and how much time he spends with not looking for her. I thought it was a joke when Jeremiah send Will across three maps to fix a rifle while he was in fear for the life of Alice. The reasons given why Will is willing (pun not intended :D) to do this are very weak and work only in video game quests.

"So you won't give me information about my lost wife unless I go fix a rifle at the other end of the island and hunt down a bear for you? Fine, then I take back those painkillers I brought you and leave you in your misery".  That's what would happen outside of a video game, the amount of time Will loses on the vague possibility to get some sort of information makes simply no sense no matter how I look at it. That's the biggest plot hole for me.

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Can I just say that I agree about the utterly obnoxious NPCs?

"I am dependent on this new guy for survival. He has to get me fire fuel, food, and other things...... I'm gonna disparage and harangue him the entire time. Until he gives me dripping chunks of rabbit hide. I love that."

Part of the tagline for The Long Dark is "what would you do to survive?". So far, it looks like it should be "Whatever the hell fetch-quest random NPC's want you to do."

 

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4 hours ago, ChillPlayer said:

But in TLD it's the freaking end of the world, like The Walking Dead end of the world.

Even in The Walking Dead, we see people banding together. Why? Because there's safety in numbers. Sure, there might be rifts within communities, people having different opinions on what to do or who's to blame; different factions will emerge - as they do when there's a major change affecting the future of a community.

I expect people to have town hall meetings, heated arguments - things might get out of hand. I assume people might start thinking of plundering the petrol station when push came to shove; but it's more likely the community leaders in town would take charge and form a committee to ration the available goods and organize a party looking for outside help (and to find out what's going on).

And if the town has been pretty much been forced to be self-reliant for ten years, as Grey Mother informs us, I doubt a powerout (even for a couple of weeks) would cause people to scatter and run for the hills by themselves. There are f***ing man-eating wolves prowling the land. You really want to leave your home and your community?

No, you would sit tight, band together and work out a plan to get some meat on the table (there's plenty of wild life, I'm assuming people in such a place would rely on hunting and the like anyway) and patrol the area together to keep the wolves at bay.

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As a screenwriter I see things from a different perspective absolutely.

Reading between the lines is something that every good screenwriter does.

That said the earthquakes could've easily happened while we were out.

You remember how tired we were the first night...barely get a fire started and boom down for 10-12 hours.

We get that 9 hour fire going and boom down for another 12 hours.

There is plenty of time for us to not be awake, I've slept through numerous earthquakes, and even the smallest earthquake can cause a destabilizing collapse in any situation.

Any fractured ground, or mountain, can be compromised by time and quakes...and these are not the first quakes, combined with rain or melting snow will cause even the mightiest mountains to collapse and form landslides in moments.

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13 hours ago, Boston123 said:

How Will Mackenzie doesn't have the bare minimum of survival equipment in his bushplane. Seriously, I leave my house more adequately prepared than he does

:D

"Part of the tagline for The Long Dark is "what would you do to survive?". So far, it looks like it should be "Whatever the hell fetch-quest random NPC's want you to do."

:D:D

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13 hours ago, ChillPlayer said:

Having said that, I could follow the main story, it made sense to some extend and what is leaving us puzzled right now might be explained in a future episode. What I can't get my head around, subjectively or objectively, is the discrepancy between the urgent situation Will is in (to find Alice) and how much time he spends with not looking for her. I thought it was a joke when Jeremiah send Will across three maps to fix a rifle while he was in fear for the life of Alice. The reasons given why Will is willing (pun not intended :D) to do this are very weak and work only in video game quests.

First of all, I can't tell you how much it cracked me up when you called Will's ex wife Alice :D Second you're right, he should've just told the guy to help him find 'Astrid' and then he'll come back and do stuff for him later and that he's not afraid of any old bear, lol. The funniest thing was at the end there when Will was leaving and Jeremiah says.... "This is why I was keeping you alive all this time' :D As though it wasn't the other way around.

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13 hours ago, TWM said:

Even in The Walking Dead, we see people banding together. Why? Because there's safety in numbers. Sure, there might be rifts within communities, people having different opinions on what to do or who's to blame; different factions will emerge - as they do when there's a major change affecting the future of a community.

Yep, it would, but in fiction those guys that are having rifts within the communities would sneak off together if their ideas were ignored, and they would do something outrageously malicious which would end up causing more problems, danger, harm and drama, lol.

13 hours ago, TWM said:

No, you would sit tight, band together and work out a plan to get some meat on the table (there's plenty of wild life, I'm assuming people in such a place would rely on hunting and the like anyway) and patrol the area together to keep the wolves at bay.

Yes and leaders would get things done. When the power went out for many days in my area a few years back, the town committees and helpful citizens did many things for us. Including taking over a school's gym to use to store and hand out hundreds of cases of water for us to come and take for free. Two cases per family every three days if needed, until the power came back on. I mean, Milton might not have that kind of resource available, but things like that would get organized. And then there's the large scale organizing and relief efforts that are amazing, like with Katrina and other disasters. People stick together and help each other. The elderly and disabled and sick are looked after. People don't run away alone in terror in these kinds of situations.

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1. They all left because they were afraid the storm would trap them there. And lookie, it did. The Tunnel Collapsed. Grey Mother says they all went to the Schoolhouse but the stove burned it down or something along those lines. So they did huddle together and tried to survive. They probably left after that.

2. The Tunnel didn't collapse. It was a mini-avalanche of sorts. It looks like it happened after the incident with Astrid and Mathis being a douchebag. 

3. I'm assuming that they we're being transported through the island back to the mainland. Astrid was headed to PM where Will was supposed to land his place. It would make sense for there to be an airstrip there. They could've been brought by air. In concept art for the game there's a few pics showing a crashed plane (not TWM) and an Airport looking place. And since we haven't seen the entirety of Great Bear it's possible there is an airstrip or even a prison there, or small detention centre or police station for them to be held there until brought to the mainland. Milton wasn't really involved with the mainland but who says other towns on the island weren't? 

4. He doesn't like people much but that doesn't mean he's a complete isolated freak. He goes to the Camp in the summer to fish and used to head down to Breyerhouse to trade tools. That's about it. Besides his friend in Perserverance Mills that he probably hasn't seen in months he's pretty damn lonely. As for the Fishing Huts, same thing with CH and Pensive Pond, there's gameplay restriction there. So I just retcon it and say that they are stationary. Some ice huts can be put on stilts that stay there all year round. 

5. The Dam had suffered previously and the Collapse hit it hard. It's not that there's a huge ass crack in it. But piping and other machinery would surely be damaged by an earthquake. Not to mention the Forest Talkers being dicks and the global economy crashing. 

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