Why The Long Dark is one of the best games ever made

[Guest jeffpeng]

Dear fellow survivors,
Dear, beautiful people at Hinterland,

as you know I often am one of those people that always have something to criticize. And, if you are honest with yourselves: Everyone's a critic, all the time, some just keep it more to themselves, while others are more open about it, like I am, and while some just want to see the world burn, most, me included, do it out of a sense of goodwill, wanting to help improve what they are fundamentally fond of.

I witness this phenomenon at work myself (I do web based application development, nothing fancy) where our applications have become measurably better over the last decade, in fact so good that we went from doing "somewhat working and not so dated we need to be openly ashamed" web software to "industry leading and envelope pushing" web software - at least in our rather narrow niche. And this is something I am very proud of.

Yet the number of helpful suggestions, firm requests and outright insolent complaints has not become less but more as our product improved and our customer base subsequently grew. Where we once had a semi-open forum where our customers could add and discuss their wishes freely, and we took the time to respond to these, sometimes even by phone, or on rare occasion in person, today we have a ticket system where those things more often than not die the death of the low-priority-issue-removal-cron. So, in short: despite us doing the objectively best work we’ve ever done, we are facing more criticism than we ever did, so much we can hardly keep up with it.

But, as it is this time of year, a customer of ours that we do value highly as we've been on the road together all this time, last week set a zoom meeting with the only and singular reason to point out how happy they are with us, and how many things we do get right. Truth be told: that was really damn nice of them.

So, I thought this morning, maybe we can do this here, because there really is a reason why you and I are sticking with this game so long after its release, return to it time and again, and why the community around it is still growing, not shrinking. And maybe, I thought, the team at Hinterland for once wants to hear a few extensively articulated (since I can't do short, I ... just can't) reasons from me of all people why their game freezing rocks and I even feel I can make the audacious claim that it is one of the best ever made, period. So, in no particular order, and without further ado:

The soundtrack

One of the things I usually do when playing games is turning off the music relatively soon, or outright from the get go. Not only does it distract me, but it also often times grows to annoy me. Not so with The Long Dark. The pieces of music in this game not only range from gripping over masterful to outright beautiful, they also tell a story, as a good soundtrack should. But that's not even what makes The Long Dark's music stand out.

What makes me praise it so highly is how well it is integrated with the game. The music doesn't play in the background to keep your ears entertained, instead it is part of the world, it lives in the world and the world lives through it, makes it seem alive, conveying feelings like awe, fear, loneliness and desperation all at the same time - and it does so when appropriate. The fact that it's sparsely used, but just when it matters, accentuates the experience even further, and I know no game that does it so well with a soundtrack this good.

The artistic visual design

In a time when photo realism in 3D graphics is mostly a question of texture resolution, well-written shaders and raw graphics processing horsepower the designers of The Long Dark have chosen to go a different route, one that is arguably much harder than trying to emulate reality as closely as possible: creating a reality of their own.

The Long Dark immerses you in an abstract art piece where every brush is carefully crafted, every stroke mindfully considered, every shade conveys meaning. It overwhelms you with the most stunning sunsets, drowns you in depressing darkness and makes you stand in awe on a hilltop, gazing in astonishment at a world so desolate yet beautiful. If all you could do in The Long Dark was to walk around and look at things it would be enough to warrant a purchase. And there is even a game mode where you can do just that.

The sheer scale and detail of the world

Despite its age The Elder Scrolls VI: Skyrim is still one of the hallmarks of hand crafted open world type game maps, and so is Grand Theft Auto V. Also did Red Dead Redemption 2 amaze players with its vast yet richly detailed playable area. All of these games, however, have something in common, despite their triple-A development budget: they are smaller than Great Bear Island. I have no exact measures, but the world of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt might be a bit bigger. Yet Great Bear Island is probably the single largest not procedurally generated virtual game world you can only traverse by foot - even more emphasizing how extensive it really is.

And it’s not just big - it is packed. Every square meter is handcrafted, every stick and stone is hand placed. And there are no empty spaces that just endlessly repeat themselves. No square meter looks the same. With enough training you can easily learn to differentiate every possible spawn point in the world from any other at a glance, and being traveled well enough, and when the game offers you a clear view, taking a look around you will probably discover some landmark that gives you a bearing on where you are, without ever opening the map. This topic also transitions well into the next:

The level design

Great Bear isn’t just big and rich in detail, it has also some of the most creative and well thought-out ways ever employed in a game to use topology to provide challenges. And it does so in many different ways. Whether it is the frozen wasteland of the Forlorn Muskeg, that is deceptively hard to navigate despite providing a clear view over almost the entire map, the secluded Timberwolf Mountain, that forces you to endure ever increasingly hard climbs with no obvious way to reach the riches at the Summit, the convoluted topology of the Hushed River Valley, connected by maze-like caves, playing tricks on your sense of direction, or the menacing Ash Canyon, that puts five levels of narrow and sparsely lit ravines, harrowing bridges, isolated terraces and mountain islands on top of each other:

All of this is done with masterful precision and a clear goal in mind, while still retaining the feeling that all of this could actually really exist somewhere in the real world. Mastering the topology of these regions is just as important as - if not more important than - mastering your other survival skills, and provides a challenge every time, no matter how often you traverse them. But even the less complex regions in the game aren’t flat, but are distinct from one another and all provide well placed challenges, points of interest and ample opportunity to get lost - literally.

The near endless replayability

You know that feeling when you play a game that absolutely gripped you the first time you played it, but it’s just not the same the second time, and gets outright boring the third time you try it? Yeah, The Long Dark isn’t that game. Yes, you will not recreate your early days once you’ve learned the ropes, but your experience evolves with new goals, new ideas, new strategies and new things to discover. Every game of survival sandbox is fresh, every game is different and challenging.

I’ve logged over 3000 hours on Steam, and I probably have at least half as much playing offline. I still discover new things, new places, new mechanics and new challenges. I’ve yet to “complete” the game with all the things you can collect in each play through, and I still get hopelessly lost in the fog, I still hold out in a corner in a blizzard, I still miss an arrow and have to fight for my life after having had an unfortunate encounter with a wolf. I can’t think of any other game that achieves this to this degree, not even procedurally generated games like Minecraft or Factorio with all their mods.

The cohesive vision

The Long Dark is one of the rare examples of what happens when a creator has a vision, and, for better or for worse, stubbornly sticks to it. The game has gone through many iterations, changing core concepts more than once, and reiterating on itself countless times. Yet, and that is something you can’t but admire: you always see a cohesive idea, a strong, distinct handwriting behind everything that gets added to game.

All of this is despite the game being around for almost a decade now. If you don’t believe it go and play some of the old versions available on Steam. The UI may look different, and things work and behave in slightly unfamiliar ways, but you’ll always instantly know what game you are playing, and recognize the same handwriting. And through all of these changes Hinterland has managed a feat not easily achieved: they improved on the game, they made it objectively better, without damaging its core identity or watering down what made it stand out in the first place. And this also segues neatly into the following point:

The commitment

When the game was first released out of early access in 2017 it had been in development for 5 years already. Almost 5 years later there is no sign this is going to stop anytime soon. Yes, the story campaign is not finished yet, but, even if I don’t particularly agree with the direction it took, is nearing completion. But what actually impresses me is that despite not charging a single extra buck there are still new things added to the survival sandbox, and not just neat little tidbits and quality of life improvements, but actually full blown regions that add whole new concepts to the game alongside the masterfully crafted environments mentioned earlier.

Yes, there has been the recent notion that the developers will eventually start to offer paid content, but this comes after an almost unrivaled period of free updates, additions, fixes and improvements. And it’s actually the community asking the developers to shut up and take their money, simply because one can only be ashamed of the outstanding value one has received for their measly pennies, often spent many years ago.

The conceptual wisdom

Everything in The Long Dark comes at a cost, and has limits and drawbacks attached to it. The rifle, for example, is a superb weapon at medium to long range, but is cumbersome to use as a close quarters defensive option, and it is very heavy, limiting the range of action of the player. The iconic hatchet is a true jack of all trades, your does-it-all-everyday-utility, but it’s also a master of hardly anything. However bringing the perfect tool for every job all the time again comes at the cost reducing your capacity to bring other gear and collect valuable resources.

The same is true for almost every other aspect of the game: choices are forced onto the player, rather than giving them a clear upgrade path that eventually maxes out, with nothing left to achieve. Hunting prey animals requires other gear than hunting a bear, exploring a new region, or hauling precious loot to your base. Also you constantly weight being prepared for unforeseen incidents against their probability, balancing what you bring with how fast you want to move. There simply is no “best” approach to anything, and even after a thousand days of roaming the frozen wastes of Great Bear you will ask yourself if wearing that second bearskin coat will actually help you - or just slow you down.

The constant requirement of attention

The Long Dark isn’t a game you just play while watching a video or listening to heavy metal. There is no HUD that marks where north is, no minimap, or a radar with the current position of all potential threats. The game very much tells you all those things, but it does so in a subtle manner that requires you to pay attention. And it punishes you if you fail to do that.

Most players will probably recall a moment when they had an unfortunate encounter, and after patching themselves up with bandages salvaged from socks, or worse, drink their final coffee while fading silently into The Long Dark, realize that they missed a crucial clue: A wolf howling just too close, that deer being suspiciously bulky, or the huffing and puffing of a bear stoically patrolling the lake, covered in fog. Or just that they misread the weather pattern being to occupied stalking their wounded prey, and ended up hunkered down behind a rock, with no firewood left, and no obvious way how to get home before they freeze to death.

The customizability

There are four settings to play The Long Dark in. One lets you explore the frozen wastes mostly unhindered by hostile wildlife and in favorable environmental conditions, another puts you in a fierce battle with both parties, and for many the ultimate challenge lies in a world that is outstandingly hostile all by itself, with scarce resources, harshly limited available loot, sparse but deadly predators, and the ever increasing cold and desolation as the ultimate opponents.

But if that is not enough for you you can customize virtually every single setting, turn every knob to your liking, playing just the game you envision, at just the amount of challenge you feel right for you. Want to wage outright war against overgrown monster wolves while being armed to the teeth? No problem. You’re annoyed by rapidly changing weather, but think that your mistakes should weigh more severely? Here’s a setting for you. Just want to delve into a desolate frozen wasteland, trying your best to beat the cold at its own game, without having to worry about bears making your day even more miserable? We’ve got just the thing for you.

The stakes

Dying in The Long Dark means dying for good. No matter if your survivor just popped into their misery, or is a year into mastering the wilderness: if they die they are lost forever. You do not respawn. You do not get to load the game and try again. If you fail, you fail, and you have to bear the consequences, even if it means paying the ultimate price.

This makes the game one of the few that imposes actual stakes on you. You invest time, real life time, into your survivor. You might become accustomed to improving them after a long day of work, bit by bit, a piece of better clothing here, mastering a new level of archery there, or taking on a new adventures to places you haven’t visited yet. You might actually form sort of a bond with them, as much as that is possible with a virtual avatar in a game. And then it’s all over, all of a sudden. This is heart wrenching, this is outright cruel, and this makes you lament and shout in anger, mourning your lost friend. And then you load up the next game - making it better this time. Or so you hope.

The setting

The Long Dark takes place in a fictional but feasible world, one that is sufficiently alien to you to let you escape into a fantasy, but also close enough to reality to make it matter. It does not dictate to you what to do, what to think, or who you are supposed to be. The idea of a Quiet Apocalypse, a period of history when mankind just ends - or at least undergoes a subdued yet deadly struggle against the one opponent it will never defeat: nature itself - is not completely new, but still genuine in the way it is set up and executed outstandingly well, with a veil of mystery shrouding what is truly going on, leaving you to fend for yourself, without hope of rescue, and it is a wonderful, refreshingly quiet contrast to all the zombie apocalypses, war torn dystopian wastelands and high octane asteroid catastrophes fiction is so overly full of.

There is something sadly romantic and also deeply philosophic about being, for all intends and purposes, the last human on earth, struggling against the inevitable until it manifests in one way or another, and that the world will go on after we are gone, with little to remain of us. The idea humbles you, and it makes you appreciate the life you have, and the time you do get to spend with those you cherish, despite all the hardships you might face in life, all the times you got upset about something deeply meaningless, or that you still have to come to terms with the fact that you are just one soul out of billions, and probably not a particular special one, struggling to matter.

Conclusion

This post is probably not exhaustive when it comes to mentioning everything great about The Long Dark. Please, do feel encouraged to add things you think I missed, or, if you feel so inclined, point out things you think I got totally upside down wrong. Also, if you think this post reflects how you feel about the game, and you know someone only remotely interested in the survival and/or open world genre, feel free to share it with them, and if you are that person I highly suggest you give The Long Dark an earnest try. It will hurt a bit, like all the great things in life, but it will turn out worthwhile, I promise.

The Long Dark is not perfect, and there are many things I would like to see yet improved about it. I’m vocal about a lot of concepts I feel could and should be implemented differently, and I believe they would work better that way. But in all that criticism I aim at the game - strongly believing I do rightfully so, with the sole intention of making it better - there is no way around admitting that it is a masterpiece that has captivated me for half a decade now and continues to do so time and time again, and I am very much humble enough a person to know that my opinion is just that.

If it is possible to feel an emotion as strong as love for a “computer game”, The Long Dark would be it for me, and, being on these forums for a few years now, I see this reflected in the time, dedication and sheer enthusiasm invested by many, many other players. So, I think a sincere

Thank You, dear, beautiful people at Hinterland

is in order. It’s not often something special comes along, something so special the creators feel dedication for so strong that they just keep at it until it is done. Which it might never will be, but then again: when is art ever done?

I hope I made a good case why I do believe that The Long Dark is one of the best games ever created, or at least that I was able to convey why I think that it is. And with that all that is left for me to do is to wish everyone, but especially @Raphael van Lierop and his team, a wonderful, healthy and heartfelt holiday.

See you on the Island.

Sincerely
JeffPeng aka Sven

Edited December 20, 2021 by jeffpeng
Typos

[PiterZ]

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

Dear fellow survivors,
Dear, beautiful people at Hinterland,

as you know I often am one of those people that always have something to criticize. And, if you are honest with yourselves: Everyone's a critic, all the time, some just keep it more to themselves, while others are more open about it, like I am, and while some just want to see the world burn, most, me included, do it out of a sense of goodwill, wanting to help improve what they are fundamentally fond of.

I witness this phenomenon at work myself (I do web based application development, nothing fancy) where our applications have become measurably better over the last decade, in fact so good that we went from doing "somewhat working and not so dated we need to be openly ashamed" web software to "industry leading and envelope pushing" web software - at least in our rather narrow niche. And this is something I am very proud of.

Yet the number of helpful suggestions, firm requests and outright insolent complaints has not become less but more as our product improved and our customer base subsequently grew. Where we once had a semi-open forum where our customers could add and discuss their wishes freely, and we took the time to respond to these, sometimes even by phone, or on rare occasion in person, today we have a ticket system where those things more often than not die the death of the low-priority-issue-removal-cron. So, in short: despite us doing the objectively best work we’ve ever done, we are facing more criticism than we ever did, so much we can hardly keep up with it.

But, as it is this time of year, a customer of ours that we do value highly as we've been on the road together all this time, last week set a zoom meeting with the only and singular reason to point out how happy they are with us, and how many things we do get right. Truth be told: that was really damn nice of them.

So, I thought this morning, maybe we can do this here, because there really is a reason why you and I are sticking with this game so long after its release, return to it time and again, and why the community around it is still growing, not shrinking. And maybe, I thought, the team at Hinterland for once wants to hear a few extensively articulated (since I can't do short, I ... just can't) reasons from me of all people why their game freezing rocks and I even feel I can make the audacious claim that it is one of the best ever made, period. So, in no particular order, and without further ado:

The soundtrack

One of the things I usually do when playing games is turning off the music relatively soon, or outright from the get go. Not only does it distract me, but it also often times grows to annoy me. Not so with The Long Dark. The pieces of music in this game not only range from gripping over masterful to outright beautiful, they also tell a story, as a good soundtrack should. But that's not even what makes The Long Dark's music stand out.

What makes me praise it so highly is how well it is integrated with the game. The music doesn't play in the background to keep your ears entertained, instead it is part of the world, it lives in the world and the world lives through it, makes it seem alive, conveying feelings like awe, fear, loneliness and desperation all at the same time - and it does so when appropriate. The fact that it's sparsely used, but just when it matters, accentuates the experience even further, and I know no game that does it so well with a soundtrack this good.

The artistic visual design

In a time when photo realism in 3D graphics is mostly a question of texture resolution, well-written shaders and raw graphics processing horsepower the designers of The Long Dark have chosen to go a different route, one that is arguably much harder than trying to emulate reality as closely as possible: creating a reality of their own.

The Long Dark immerses you in an abstract art piece where every brush is carefully crafted, every stroke mindfully considered, every shade conveys meaning. It overwhelms you with the most stunning sunsets, drowns you in depressing darkness and makes you stand in awe on a hilltop, gazing in astonishment at a world so desolate yet beautiful. If all you could do in The Long Dark was to walk around and look at things it would be enough to warrant a purchase. And there is even a game mode where you can do just that.

The sheer scale and detail of the world

Despite its age The Elder Scrolls VI: Skyrim is still one of the hallmarks of hand crafted open world type game maps, and so is Grand Theft Auto V. Also did Red Dead Redemption 2 amaze players with its vast yet richly detailed playable area. All of these games, however, have something in common, despite their triple-A development budget: they are smaller than Great Bear Island. I have no exact measures, but the world of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt might be a bit bigger. Yet Great Bear Island is probably the single largest not procedurally generated virtual game world you can only traverse by foot - even more emphasizing how extensive it really is.

And it’s not just big - it is packed. Every square meter is handcrafted, every stick and stone is hand placed. And there are no empty spaces that just endlessly repeat themselves. No square meter looks the same. With enough training you can easily learn to differentiate every possible spawn point in the world from any other at a glance, and being traveled well enough, and when the game offers you a clear view, taking a look around you will probably discover some landmark that gives you a bearing on where you are, without ever opening the map. This topic also transitions well into the next:

The level design

Great Bear isn’t just big and rich in detail, it has also some of the most creative and well thought-out ways ever employed in a game to use topology to provide challenges. And it does so in many different ways. Whether it is the frozen wasteland of the Forlorn Muskeg, that is deceptively hard to navigate despite providing a clear view over almost the entire map, the secluded Timberwolf Mountain, that forces you to endure ever increasingly hard climbs with no obvious way to reach the riches at the Summit, the convoluted topology of the Hushed River Valley, connected by maze-like caves, playing tricks on your sense of direction, or the menacing Ash Canyon, that puts five levels of narrow and sparsely lit ravines, harrowing bridges, isolated terraces and mountain islands on top of each other:

All of this is done with masterful precision and a clear goal in mind, while still retaining the feeling that all of this could actually really exist somewhere in the real world. Mastering the topology of these regions is just as important as - if not more important than - mastering your other survival skills, and provides a challenge every time, no matter how often you traverse them. But even the less complex regions in the game aren’t flat, but are distinct from one another and all provide well placed challenges, points of interest and ample opportunity to get lost - literally.

The near endless replayability

You know that feeling when you play a game that absolutely gripped you the first time you played it, but it’s just not the same the second time, and gets outright boring the third time you try it? Yeah, The Long Dark isn’t that game. Yes, you will not recreate your early days once you’ve learned the ropes, but your experience evolves with new goals, new ideas, new strategies and new things to discover. Every game of survival sandbox is fresh, every game is different and challenging.

I’ve logged over 3000 hours on Steam, and I probably have at least half as much playing offline. I still discover new things, new places, new mechanics and new challenges. I’ve yet to “complete” the game with all the things you can collect in each play through, and I still get hopelessly lost in the fog, I still hold out in a corner in a blizzard, I still miss an arrow and have to fight for my life after having had an unfortunate encounter with a wolf. I can’t think of any other game that achieves this to this degree, not even procedurally generated games like Minecraft or Factorio with all their mods.

The cohesive vision

The Long Dark is one of the rare examples of what happens when a creator has a vision, and, for better or for worse, stubbornly sticks to it. The game has gone through many iterations, changing core concepts more than once, and reiterating on itself countless times. Yet, and that is something you can’t but admire: you always see a cohesive idea, a strong, distinct handwriting behind everything that gets added to game.

All of this is despite the game being around for almost a decade now. If you don’t believe it go and play some of the old versions available on Steam. The UI may look different, and things work and behave in slightly unfamiliar ways, but you’ll always instantly know what game you are playing, and recognize the same handwriting. And through all of these changes Hinterland has managed a feat not easily achieved: they improved on the game, they made it objectively better, without damaging its core identity or watering down what made it stand out in the first place. And this also segues neatly into the following point:

The commitment

When the game was first released out of early access in 2017 it had been in development for 5 years already. Almost 5 years later there is no sign this is going to stop anytime soon. Yes, the story campaign is not finished yet, but, even if I don’t particularly agree with the direction it took, is nearing completion. But what actually impresses me is that despite not charging a single extra buck there are still new things added to the survival sandbox, and not just neat little tidbits and quality of life improvements, but actually full blown regions that add whole new concepts to the game alongside the masterfully crafted environments mentioned earlier.

Yes, there has been the recent notion that the developers will eventually start to offer paid content, but this comes after an almost unrivaled period of free updates, additions, fixes and improvements. And it’s actually the community asking the developers to shut up and take their money, simply because one can only be ashamed of the outstanding value one has received for their measly pennies, often spent many years ago.

The conceptual wisdom

Everything in The Long Dark comes at a cost, and has limits and drawbacks attached to it. The rifle, for example, is a superb weapon at medium to long range, but is cumbersome to use as a close quarters defensive option, and it is very heavy, limiting the range of action of the player. The iconic hatchet is a true jack of all trades, your does-it-all-everyday-utility, but it’s also a master of hardly anything. However bringing the perfect tool for every job all the time again comes at the cost reducing your capacity to bring other gear and collect valuable resources.

The same is true for almost every other aspect of the game: choices are forced onto the player, rather than giving them a clear upgrade path that eventually maxes out, with nothing left to achieve. Hunting prey animals requires other gear than hunting a bear, exploring a new region, or hauling precious loot to your base. Also you constantly weight being prepared for unforeseen incidents against their probability, balancing what you bring with how fast you want to move. There simply is no “best” approach to anything, and even after a thousand days of roaming the frozen wastes of Great Bear you will ask yourself if wearing that second bearskin coat will actually help you - or just slow you down.

The constant requirement of attention

The Long Dark isn’t a game you just play while watching a video or listening to heavy metal. There is no HUD that marks where north is, no minimap, or a radar with the current position of all potential threats. The game very much tells you all those things, but it does so in a subtle manner that requires you to pay attention. And it punishes you if you fail to do that.

Most players will probably recall a moment when they had an unfortunate encounter, and after patching themselves up with bandages salvaged from socks, or worse, drink their final coffee while fading silently into The Long Dark, realize that they missed a crucial clue: A wolf howling just too close, that deer being suspiciously bulky, or the huffing and puffing of a bear stoically patrolling the lake, covered in fog. Or just that they misread the weather pattern being to occupied stalking their wounded prey, and ended up hunkered down behind a rock, with no firewood left, and no obvious way how to get home before they freeze to death.

The customizability

There are four settings to play The Long Dark in. One lets you explore the frozen wastes mostly unhindered by hostile wildlife and in favorable environmental conditions, another puts you in a fierce battle with both parties, and for many the ultimate challenge lies in a world that is outstandingly hostile all by itself, with scarce resources, harshly limited available loot, sparse but deadly predators, and the ever increasing cold and desolation as the ultimate opponents.

But if that is not enough for you you can customize virtually every single setting, turn every knob to your liking, playing just the game you envision, at just the amount of challenge you feel right for you. Want to wage outright war against overgrown monster wolves while being armed to the teeth? No problem. You’re annoyed by rapidly changing weather, but think that your mistakes should weigh more severely? Here’s a setting for you. Just want to delve into a desolate frozen wasteland, trying your best to beat the cold at its own game, without having to worry about bears making your day even more miserable? We’ve got just the thing for you.

The stakes

Dying in The Long Dark means dying for good. No matter if your survivor just popped into their misery, or is a year into mastering the wilderness: if they die they are lost forever. You do not respawn. You do not get to load the game and try again. If you fail, you fail, and you have to bear the consequences, even if it means paying the ultimate price.

This makes the game one of the few that imposes actual stakes on you. You invest time, real life time, into your survivor. You might become accustomed to improving them after a long day of work, bit by bit, a piece of better clothing here, mastering a new level of archery there, or taking on a new adventures to places you haven’t visited yet. You might actually form sort of a bond with them, as much as that is possible with a virtual avatar in a game. And then it’s all over, all of a sudden. This is heart wrenching, this is outright cruel, and this makes you lament and shout in anger, mourning your lost friend. And then you load up the next game - making it better this time. Or so you hope.

The setting

The Long Dark takes place in a fictional but feasible world, one that is sufficiently alien to you to let you escape into a fantasy, but also close enough to reality to make it matter. It does not dictate to you what to do, what to think, or who you are supposed to be. The idea of a Quiet Apocalypse, a period of history when mankind just ends - or at least undergoes a subdued yet deadly struggle against the one opponent it will never defeat: nature itself - is not completely new, but still genuine in the way it is set up and executed outstandingly well, with a veil of mystery shrouding what is truly going on, leaving you to fend for yourself, without hope of rescue, and it is a wonderful, refreshingly quiet contrast to all the zombie apocalypses, war torn dystopian wastelands and high octane asteroid catastrophes fiction is so overly full of.

There is something sadly romantic and also deeply philosophic about being, for all intends and purposes, the last human on earth, struggling against the inevitable until it manifests in one way or another, and that the world will go on after we are gone, with little to remain of us. The idea humbles you, and it makes you appreciate the life you have, and the time you do get to spend with those you cherish, despite all the hardships you might face in life, all the times you got upset about something deeply meaningless, or that you still have to come to terms with the fact that you are just one soul out of billions, and probably not a particular special one, struggling to matter.

Conclusion

This post is probably not exhaustive when it comes to mentioning everything great about The Long Dark. Please, do feel encouraged to add things you think I missed, or, if you feel so inclined, point out things you think I got totally upside down wrong. Also, if you think this post reflects how you feel about the game, and you know someone only remotely interested in the survival and/or open world genre, feel free to share it with them, and if you are that person I highly suggest you give The Long Dark an earnest try. It will hurt a bit, like all the great things in life, but it will turn out worthwhile, I promise.

The Long Dark is not perfect, and there are many things I would like to see yet improved about it. I’m vocal about a lot of concepts I feel could and should be implemented differently, and I believe they would work better that way. But in all that criticism I aim at the game - strongly believing I do rightfully so, with the sole intention of making it better - there is no way around admitting that it is a masterpiece that has captivated me for half a decade now and continues to do so time and time again, and I am very much humble enough a person to know that my opinion is just that.

If it is possible to feel an emotion as strong as love for a “computer game”, The Long Dark would be it for me, and, being on these forums for a few years now, I see this reflected in the time, dedication and sheer enthusiasm invested by many, many other players. So, I think a sincere

Thank You, dear, beautiful people at Hinterland

is in order. It’s not often something special comes along, something so special the creators feel dedication for so strong that they just keep at it until it is done. Which it might never will be, but then again: when is art ever done?

I hope I made a good case why I do believe that The Long Dark is one of the best games ever created, or at least that I was able to convey why I think that it is. And with that all that is left for me to do is wish everyone, but especially @Raphael van Lierop and his team, a wonderful, healthy and heartfelt holiday.

See you on the Island.

Sincerely
JeffPeng aka Sven

You have said it beautifully. I feel very much like you. And I fully join these words. The Long Dark is also a masterpiece among computer games for me. I love all the dilemmas it presents to me every day. Hope it never changes. I also hope that the resulting mods will not destroy this balance in the game. Personally, I have never used any mods and probably never will. I love this game as it is and I really respect the work of its makers. I warmly greet you 👍🌡

[Morrick]

3 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

So, I thought this morning, maybe we can do this here, because there really is a reason why you and I are sticking with this game so long after its release, return to it time and again, and why the community around it is still growing, not shrinking. And maybe, I thought, the team at Hinterland for once wants to hear a few extensively articulated (since I can't do short, I ... just can't) reasons from me of all people why their game freezing rocks and I even feel I can make the audacious claim that it is one of the best ever made, period.

Bravo.

After such amazing contribution, I don't think I can add much, but one important thing that makes me routinely return to this game is that I find it quite therapeutic. It has truly helped me manage my stress levels, which have been steadily rising for the past 3 years or so. A long session in Survival Mode is a great way of unwinding for me at the end of the day. And that's not trivial. So many games are designed to be 'entertaining' but end up making me annoyed or frustrated. I don't want to be annoyed or frustrated — there's everyday life for that, sadly. In a game I seek wonder and escapism, and that's what I find in The Long Dark, together with all the things already mentioned by @jeffpengin beautiful detail.

Cheers! 

[Kranium]

I still wanna be able to step over a limb or ice floe though.

 

Best game I've played in many years. ❤️

[Glflegolas]

@jeffpengI can give you a rough guess to the size of Great Bear Island. I have estimated it to be about 27.85 km^2.

broken railroad 0.45
bleak inlet 3
ash canyon 1.87
blackrock 2.57
coastal highway 3.70
desolation point 0.58
forlorn muskeg 2.75
hushed river valley 1.32
mountain town 1.50
mystery lake 2.57
pleasant valley 5.46
timberwolf mountain 1.62
old island connector 0.11
the ravine 0.10
keeper's pass north 0.13
keeper's pass south 0.12

The biggest in-game map that I know of is the Lord of the Rings Minecraft Mod, which is semi-procedurally generated (terrain/structures are random, regions pattern is fixed). It measures about 200,000 km^2 (about the size of Great Britain). Still, Great Bear is a very large map, especially considering it's all hand-designed.

[Guest jeffpeng]

@GlflegolasThanks for those numbers. That's a bit less than what I came up with, which was roughly 30.

And yeah.... that map doesn't count 😄 I mean, it's still impressive. I remember how Daggerfall pulled the same trick (fixed seed random generation) and ended up with a similarly gigantic world. But no matter how much finesse you breathe into the algorithm .... it's never quite the same as when human creativity was part of the equation. I literally tried to make the Minecraft world generator generate more natural, less repetitive maps, several times. And while I actually got somewhere, there always is something missing. Maybe Neural Networks can solve that if properly trained, but I'm skeptical. I don't think there will be a substitute for the "human touch" - ever.

[Glflegolas]

The most complicated randomly generated map ever has to be that of Dwarf Fortress. Quoting the wiki page:

Quote

World generation can take a long time and may seem like a nuisance, but it is the actual heart of the game. This is where Toady invests most of his time, this is the piece of art that makes Dwarf Fortress unique enough for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. While you wait for the counter to finish, an entire fantasy world with unique geography, history, and even language is created. Entire civilizations rise, wage war, fall, rise again, and fall. Countless characters, each with a unique appearance and personality, live their lives, some of them calmly, while others go out and influence history. The world's complexity could rival the works of Tolkien himself. Dwarf Fortress is not only a game, it is a gigantic fantasy world simulator. Fortress and Adventurer modes allow you to influence a tiny part of that tale and write your own chapter; one chapter in an enormous bookshelf.

Terrain generation works as follows (quoting Tarn Adams):

Quote

It allocates the memory for the map. Then it chooses what sort of pole (e.g. north, south) it is going to have (or respects the parameters fed by the player, throughout.) The basic map field values (elevation, rainfall, temperature, drainage, volcanism, wildness) are seeded along a grid of variable size, respecting various settings (oceans, island sizes, other variances, etc.), and then filled in fractally. The poles vary the temperature, and it selects some points for the highest peaks. Here it does a first pass to see how it is doing, and attempts to adjust some altitudes to fit the map within the desired parameters if it missed. The world can be rejected at this point if it is unfixable, and it tries again.

The first derived field, vegetation, is then set based on elevation, rainfall, temperature, etc., and it tests for biome rejections if the map's biomes don't satisfy the ranges set in the parameters. The mid-level elevations are smoothed at this point to make more plains areas, and volcanoes are placed respecting the hot spots in the volcanism field.

Then we enter the erosion and river stage. Small oceans are dried out, and it locates edges of mountain sides where it can run test rivers. It also places the camera on one of these so the player can watch the process. Many fake rivers flow downward from these points, carving channels in the elevation field if they can't find a path to the sea. Extreme elevations differences are often smoothed here so that everything isn't canyons. Ideally we'd use mineral types for that, but we don't yet. Lakes are grown out at several points along the rivers.

Elevations are smoothed again from the mountains down to the sea, and the peaks and volcanoes do some local adjustments. Now that the elevations are finalized, it makes adjustments to rainfall based on rain shadows and orographic precipitation. Temperatures are reset based on elevation and rainfall and the dampening effects of forests, and it uses the new values to set the vegetation level one final time. Salinity values are set for the ocean and tiles neighboring the ocean.

Now that everything has settled down, we can detect the limits of the final biome regions and give them names and their own identity. We also add the geological layers and the underground layers here, though the geological stuff should really be earlier, as previously mentioned. There's a final verification process against the parameters here, to make sure it hasn't drifted too far afield from what the player wanted. Once that's done, it generates the initial wildlife populations in each region, and sets some weather variables.

The map's history is generated as follows (quoting Tarn Adams):

Quote

History itself can begin at this point. Civilizations and caves are placed. It's a bit complicated to go into what happens after that, but the basic idea is that there's a giant zero-player strategy game going on with somewhat loose turn rules and bad AI (but thousands of agents), and history is just a record of that. Procedurally generating stories by recording a log of a simulation is a valid enough approach, though it has drawbacks, of course. It's a lot of work, you need to do post-processing or investigation to find any good moments you'd like to highlight, and if you don't have enough dynamics and mechanisms, the output can be boring (in any number of ways.)

This process can take over half an hour (even on a modern PC) but you do get a world that is far more impressive than most procedurally generated game worlds out there.

[Kranium]

The biggest game "map" would be No Man's Sky. Not. Even. Close.

 

 

[ChillPlayer]

9 hours ago, Kranium said:

The biggest game "map" would be No Man's Sky. Not. Even. Close.

No Man's Sky is voxel generated - @jeffpeng was comparing hand crafted worlds.

[Guest jeffpeng]

Interesting that this specific topic gains so much attention.

But yes, as @ChillPlayerpointed out: No Man's Sky is procedurally generated. Not that this is bad or less of a feat, but you can't really compare it with maps that have been actually drawn by a human being. Also: It doesn't really makes any sense to compare the size of such worlds, as the limitations are usually a design choice (NMS could easily have 2^16 Galaxies instead of 2^8), a constraint of implementation (if Minecraft would use double width data structures for the world generator, the would could be 2^32 [that's roughly 4,3 billion] times as big before becoming a garbled mess), or a constraint of time and memory (as with Dwarf Fortress).

Two other approaches come to mind: random tiling and human guided AI. The first is something most prominently used in the old Diablo games, where a  generator would stitch together hand crafted tiles mostly randomly, and hence make every game look different, yet have said "human touch", since the tiles where actually predefined. This, especially with the first game, produced some interesting oddities (such as doors in a wall that you can just walk around two meters from there), but it was, afaik, the first time this was used on a larger scale, and it worked surprisingly well at the time. Human guided AI is a trend that just starts to develop, mostly in art and especially music, and it works basically like this: you let an AI extrapolate a work of music, using pattern recognition and a library of other works as references, then pick those parts generated you deem "good", and repeat the process. I guess it's feasible to do the same with game terrain generation. The human influence here would be basically "curating" suggestions made by AI, and then cleaning up "the mess".

However I don't see how something like Hushed River Valley would ever be the result of any of the above mentioned processes. We have not yet learned how to convey an "idea" or a "concept" to silicon (or how to make silicon understand the concept of a concept in the first place), and then let it iterate on that. The most sophisticated thing AI can basically do throw a lot of random numbers at a problem, run that through an algorithm, applying boundary parameters, and then use pattern recognition to sort out what it thinks is what. The results are impressive, especially with DF as @Glflegolasmentioned, no doubt, but there is a place for such technology, and a game like TLD isn't it. Maybe random tiling would work to some degree, given a large enough set of predefined tiles and an algorithm sophisticated enough to stitch them together mostly seamless, but still I can't see HRV or AC just "emerge" out of that without human guidance. But maybe I simply lack the imagination something like this demands. 😉 Or maybe we just need to iterate long enough, because somewhere in Pi ... there is the Hushed River Valley map.

Edited December 22, 2021 by jeffpeng
Typos, nonsensical grammar

[ChillPlayer]

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

Or maybe we just need to iterate long enough, because somewhere in Pi ... there is the Hushed River Valley map.

that reminds me of an old truth from physics: given an infinite amount of time, a monkey would eventually type out Shakespear's Hamlet on a typwriter

[peteloud]

Because there are  an infinite number of interesting personal challenges in the game.

[stratvox]

I'll chime in and echo the general agreement about the game. It's a great game, and a real gem. I'd like to put in a special word for the team that makes the weather; this is hands down the best implementation of winter weather I've ever seen in a game. It's not even close. There are so many little things about how it works that the team really gets right. Superb work.

[Strelok]

On 12/20/2021 at 9:30 PM, Kranium said:

I still wanna be able to step over a limb or ice floe though.

 

Best game I've played in many years. ❤️

I want to be able to step over all little obstacles like the big tree trunks on the ice in Coastal Highway.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Strelok

[Guest jeffpeng]

8 hours ago, stratvox said:

I'd like to put in a special word for the team that makes the weather; this is hands down the best implementation of winter weather I've ever seen in a game.

You should see the code for that thing. It's the single most complex part of the entire game algorithm-wise.

Edited December 22, 2021 by jeffpeng

[ChillPlayer]

2 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

You should see the code for that thing.

wait, you have the code to TLD?

[stratvox]

On 12/22/2021 at 4:43 PM, jeffpeng said:

You should see the code for that thing. It's the single most complex part of the entire game algorithm-wise.

I can sort of see how that would be. For one, the paths of the snowflakes... there's a lot of complexity happening there depending on wind conditions. Also the multi-layered nature of the snow renders with different cutouts depending on what's closer vs further away than the layer from the camera (i.e. the shape of the layer is occluded by objects closer to you than the layer, whether that be a pillar on a porch or a narrowing of a gorge). This last is really the one that really makes it imho; all of us who live in winter countries have seen how complex snow movement in air can be and the simulation of that in the game is really good.

Do you have access to the sources? Or are you running it in a debugger without the benefit of symbols?

[xavyer]

You said it all, there is nothing to add.

_{Appvalley TutuApp Tweakbox}

Edited January 6, 2022 by xavyer

[Admin]

Thank you for the time and care you put into this post. Your words are appreciated -- wishing you and yours a happy new year, and looking forward to sharing Great Bear Island with you this year. 

[Catlover]

@jeffpeng I am unfortunately late to this thread, so everything has already been said, but I want to say I completely agree with every word you said in your beautifully crafted praise. In a forum with so many arguments, critics, etc, it is nice to see how much love others have for the game 

@AdminHope you had a great christmas break, you and the Hinterland team definitely deserved it. Happy new year and I can't wait to see what you have planned for TLD this year

 

[conanjaguar]

@jeffpeng

The Shakespeare of the Forums.