Raphael van Lierop

Super cool to see this development ongoing! Kudos to the mod team. ❤️ No monetizing mods, please. Mods should be free. If you want to get paid to make content for TLD, join the dev team.

This is probably a weird question to ask, and may not get much response for obvious reasons, but I'm curious. The vast majority of the folks who visit these forums opt to just scan using a Guest account, vs. creating an account (like currently there are 90+ people in the forums but about 80 of them are guests). I assume it's because they are looking for info on the game (maybe they are stuck or want to know how a specific thing works), but I always wonder what prevents them from taking the leap and creating an account, then participating more actively. It's totally fine if people just want to look for info, etc., but obviously what we hope is that people will join this community and become active participants. For any of you who made that "leap" from maybe being habitual lurkers to active forum members -- what changed for you? What made you decide to jump in?

Here's a pretty good wiki that is (mostly) accurate to what's in the game to date; I would consider this background to be canonical: https://thelongdark.fandom.com/wiki/Will_Mackenzie

Me: What's your favourite thing we've added in TALES? You: [writes several paragraphs outlining pros/cons, design suggestions, etc. etc. Also ensures to get at least one comment in about things being slow/delayed.] Ah this community. I wouldn't have it any other way. 😅

Curious to hear from you all. What is your favourite addition to the game brought through TALES so far? Could be one of the things added for free to the base game, or one of the TALES-only features or bits of content. I'll go first: First-Person Hand Coverings Took so bloody long to get this working and we needed Unity to progress to a certain point that we could use some of the tech there to handle this properly given how our game data is handled, but when I first saw this working as a prototype I almost cried. No judgement for people's choices, and don't attack other people for their choices, please. And no complaining, ok? This is meant to be a fun share.

Yeah, and I really regret not being on there anymore because it was a very easy "low impact" way for me to update folks, and the news would eventually find its way in here and everywhere else. But that's not a good replacement for nurturing our own Official community better. My assumption is people come here vs. posting in Steam or Reddit or wherever (or maybe you post in all those places too) to get that special insider feeling, and if we don't provide that here there's not much point in spending your time here vs. those other platforms, especially when they are quite active. We get it.

We don't take anything for granted, and the industry is in shambles, but we're fine, and we're still on track to deliver on our long-term strategy for Hinterland and our projects. But of course we are impacted by the losses at other companies, as it creates a lot of angst in the general atmosphere, and it's also hard to see our colleagues at other studios suffering.

It never works out well if I promise "next week" because if something comes up that means I have to delay it for some reason, folks just get disappointed and throw it back at us "but you said...", so just keep your eyes open for it and know that news is coming. Re: Technical Lead -- nothing to worry about. If anything you should take this as a sign of continued commitment to the game.

We're still here. Working away on various things, as always. (I try not to say (anymore) "dev diary in X weeks" or whatever because if something comes up internally that delays it, folks just get salty about that.) One cool thing is that you don't have to be snide or a downer about stuff to show how much you love TLD!

Hey all, Thanks for bringing this thread back to life. Re: my posting on Twitter -- no, I don't use it anymore. I've not been too quiet on my reasons why. And "losing" a community there that I spent years building has made it hard to feel much like investing time in other replacement options like BlueSky, etc. I don't think I'm the only one who feels a bit burned out by social media. Honestly it's just been easier to bury myself in work. I've been trying to find a good way to be more active in the forums and be more available again. I hate to sound trite but we are just so *busy* right now, it's been hard to stick our heads up for air. So much going on here and we are slowly working our way towards being able to share more of it, but it's just taking time. Those of you who have been with us for a while know we can be slow about stuff. Yeah, I know. Understatement. 😅 I've not been super happy with our community engagement for a while now, and that's something else we've been strategizing around and have plans for. But, as much as you may feel forgotten at the moment, you really aren't. I do have a dev diary coming which will outline TALES Part Five and give you some other updates (ex. TALES on Switch status), and as I hinted we're working towards some other stuff we're pretty excited to share with you. Apart from that, things are just brutal in our industry right now so a lot of our thoughts are with our friends from fellow studios who are going through hard times with project cancellations, layoffs, closures, etc. Hinterland is fine!! But it's tough to see many of our close colleagues at other studios affected by these mass layoffs and all the industry turmoil. It gets really easy to just hunker down and focus on things you can control, like your work and the stuff that's right in front of you, but I appreciate you gently reminding us that we need to pop our heads up once in a while. Sorry that I've been quiet and that you felt we had forgotten about you. - Raph

I suggest you do some research into how Insulated Flasks work in real life, and what happens when the vacuum seal is damaged, or in the older models, when the glass vacuum flask is broken.

Confirmed that this is how it works.

re: Insulated Flask Condition loss -- will double/triple-check the implementation, but the design was for the Flask to only lose Condition from Falls and potentially Struggles. It should not decay naturally, or at least not noticeably.

This is very important. I can't really say how important this is, because it 100% informs our design decisions and also seems to be the source of a lot of confusion/upset in the player community, because the Survival side of the game is Permadeath. The premise is that you *will die*, often and frequently. The premise isn't that you will routinely survive 1000s of days or keep the same save going for years. In order to design for the "one save" players, we would have to remove Permadeath from the game, which would fundamentally change the game we have made. Death is part of the cycle of learning and experiencing the world anew. Embrace it!

It's simply that I sometimes need to step in and remind this community of some facts. I feel no personal offense as most of the comments are subjective and everyone is entitled to them. I merely wish to point out that the community is vast with varied tastes, so some amount of personal awareness of this fact by each player is useful in order to have a thoughtful and welcoming community. Beyond that, of course I feel protective of the team's hard work and will speak out in their support, which is part of my role and my remit. If you think this is unprofessional, I encourage you to spend your time playing many other games produced by faceless corporations who will happily spoon-feed you some kind of sanctioned PR messaging, as that might be your preference.