peteloud

I wish he'd give us the news of the December's Survival Mode update here. This is HTL's News & Updates forum.

Since playing TLD about 4 years ago I have become a bit of a reclusive, one-game player. Since then I have played TLD well over 4,500 hours. No, I'm not a procrastinating student, nor an up-my-ass nut-case nerd, I am an old, retired, ex-IT professional, living alone, so I have no wifely pressures to redecorate the house or trim the lawn and with plenty of time to do what I enjoy, . I find the gaps between new regions coming out boring. In these gaps I try other games, anything other than redecorating or washing the dishes. I find other games interesting for a while, but soon tire of them. I like games that are a mentally challenging, rather than blindly spraying bullets at endless hoardes of monsterous attackers, be they zombies or iron-clad, giant stormtroopers. What I like is the attempted logical realism on TLD. It can only bettered by Microsoft Flight Simiulator. Are there others who put a high priority on realism and intellectual challenge? The reason I am writing this message is because I have got something completely wrong about TLD and HTL. I was sure that that HTL would bring out the latest 'Survival' update about now. Being Ist Dec. I wanted to watch the News & Updates Forum, for an announcement of the release date. Alas I got this as wrong as when I think I can kill a bear with one shot, and if I miss, run to a save location. Back to playing FreeCell.

I hope that HTL report any TLD update here in the News and Updates forum on their own TDL website, as well as on Twitter.

I didn't have any particular games in mind but there are games which far outsell TLD. Far Cry 5 sold 25 million, there must be others in that league. With that number of players TLD will be lucky to compete. I am not sure what each of the Steam competition classes are nor of the year of publishing of games. The most recent game that I have been playing is Far Cry, New Eden. It had some good points but when it became spraying machine gun bullets at endless hoards of attackers, I gave up, wanting something that required more thought and planning than action.

Coal is the answer to surviving in very cold temperatures. Immediately your fire is burning, before you load on any wood, add a couple of bits of coal. The coal will boost the temperature by around 50 degrees. Then when you add wood that high temperature will be maintained, even increased. I think that the most difficult to survive, very cold night that I have experienced, (playing Stalker), was in that fishing hut at Pensive Pond. As soon as I get to PV I build up a stock of wood, and a couple of bits of coal, in the hut so that if storm suddenly breaks when I am there, I am prepared for it. PV can be a very cold place. One time I was stuck in the cave from Winding River, (it was Stalker, 500+ days), for three nights and two days. I was probably well equipped etc. but I did not dare venture out of the cave into PV as the storm was so bad and went on and on and on. Oh When, Oh When ! is the Blackrock region going to come out in Survival. I have been driven to play a variety of games that are highly regarded by many, games that are recent, 50GB, and cost a fortune. The games have beautiful scenery and lots of characters with faces that are more detailed than in real life, but the games are so unrealistic. I survive battles in which I should have been chopped into little pieces. I can never find arrow that I fire that miss their target, then a few minutes later a bonus batch of arrows appears in front of me. Same with food and so and so on. TLD is the only game that I can think of that tries to be realistice, (by game standards). It has the most discerning players, or at least contributors to this forum, (or is that the most complaining 😉). Playing these other games makes me realise how good TLD is.

There are some superb bits of music in TLD. The cello music in Episode 1 was great and bits in more recent episodes sound just like the stuff that Shostakovich wrote in his 12th Symphony to create an atmosphere of a cold, bleak environment. I recently gave up playing Far Cry, New Eden because the music was so awful and couldn't be turned off.

TLD got my vote, but I can't see how TLD can out vote the big-name high-selling games.

I have recently been playing AC Valhalla. In that there are a great many phrases and mannerisms that are repeated again and again and again and are extremely irritating. It is little things like that make TLD so good, such issues are very minor. I often think, when playing other games, that if this game had the same level detailed player criticism and response from its developer as did TLD it would be a much better game.

My guess, and it is just a guess, is that the release date will be determined by marketing reasons, not technical. HTL will be wanting to maximise attention to TLD to boost Xmas sales. For that I think that 1st December would be a goood day for the update to come out. That is turn would require an announcement around 20th Nov. However, Ash Canyon came out on 7th Dec last year so perhaps HTL prefers 7th rather than the 1st December. Releasing on the 1st gives HTL a bit more time to remove any easy to fix bugs and keep players talking about the game. I would still like to see a Special Xmas edition with a Santa's Grotto, but I have no reason to think that will happen, other than it is a great idea.

There are so many loose ends relating to people to clear up I have a feeling the Episode 5 is going to be more about people than survival in harsh conditions. I hope I am wrong.

I suspect that many people who complain that the game is too easy are people who have used those excellent maps by Whiteberry & others, used the Fandom spoiler website to find out where everything is or used mods to make the game very easy. Play the game as HTL designed it to be played and the challenges are varied and very reasonable.

Almost every time I visit AC I make an anti-clockwise circuit of the region. I use the cave from the TWM Deer Clearing then head east(?), right, to that cave along the bottom which is shown on my map but not yours. On the way I pass that plastic box. I check it evey time in spite of knowing that I will have emptied it on my first time passing it. It was only on my first trip to AC, when it had just been released, I found ther Polaroid. Maybe HTL made a few changes. In today's visit to that small area I had very few bits of charcoal so I could not make a more thorough job of mapping the details.

Seeing your map of this area made me realise that I had not mapped the area above that plastic container. So today I went to another old game and remapped that area. Once again I am having the same problem as yesterday when my F8 screen dump did not appear on my desktop. Yesterday the F8 screen dumps appeared a couple of hours later. I have exited TLD but the screen dump has still not appeared. I have not had this problem in the past. When it turns up I'll edit the message to include my map. I put the computer to sleep and the map was there when I restarted it.

A couple of times I have suggested that instead of a Halloween special game a better idea would be to turn a cave into Santa's Grotto, for a few days at Xmas. There could be a special weapon, item of clothing, or whatever, that can be retrieved and afterwards can be used in the normal survival game. To prevent the Fandom fans giving away which cave and where, the grotto placement should be randomised so that players find it in differnt caves, if that is possible.

"Are you sure it was in that location . . .". I am sure. I went out there just to check the map and take a screen dump of the box. Ahhh! the F8 screen dumps have appeared, a long time afterwards.

". . . has anyone ever found a polaroid NOT in one of the places" I have. But the F8 or F9 screen save in my TLD does not seem to be saving the screens. (at least not on the Desktop where I would usually find them). This is particularly irritating as I have made a long STALKER trip from the Camp Office to Ash Camyon to make a couple of screen saves. On my first trip to Ash Canyon, just after it was released, I found a plastic box in which was a Polaroid, I think, of Wolf 's Jaw Overlook. The box was very easy to find. I have maked it with a red cross on a copy of your map. I have checked this box many times on other runs and have never found a Polarioid there again.

What is DRM ? @peteloud, are you on Steam? Yes.

Recently, while waiting for the next new region in Survival, I have been playing a few other computer games. Some of these games are brillant in many respects. The detailed countryside of Red Dead Redemption 2 and This Land is My Land is beautiful, if you have an expensive graphics card. But I don't want to pay $500 for a graphics card to play a $50 game. The social history of Assassin's Creed, Unity and Syndicate, with hundreds of people in the streets of revolutionary Paris or Victorian London is fascinating and very educational too. AC Valhalla is very good too. They even play well on my AMD R7 360 graphics. But after a while the games become just more and more of the same old thing. I checked out a few other survival games too, but they were disappointing. In spite of its dated graphics, which is easily bettered in recent games, TLD is still my favourite game by a long, long way. I think that HTL has been very wise in its production of TLD. By not having high res. imagery and lots of characters with life-like moving faces, a relatively small, emerging game company has been able to produce a top-ranking game on a much lower budget. Full marks to HTL for keeping the graphics simple. It was a smart business-like move. I think that the success of TLD has been in HTL's attention to detail in the gameplay. Throughout TLD players must pay great attention to keeping warm, food, health, weaponry. If you don't, you die. In so many of these other games food, clothing & warmth and even retrieving lost arrows is a mess and is done very badly. Playing TLD needs serious thinking about planning to cope with the harsh, pseudo-real conditions. Alternatively, investigating and using spoiler websites, of which I diasapprove, presents an interesting but different challenge. I suspect that these challenges appeal to particular types of people, especially IT oriented people. What now fascinates me is what will HTL do next. If/when HTL apply their skills to a new game with the latest graphics they could produce something unbelievably good. I'd even buy a new graphics card for it. What will HTL do next ?

Even after a great many hours pf playing TLD, I did not know this. I had given up the flasjlight as a useless bit of equipment.

I can't remember encountering any of the bugs described above. So Well Done HTL, for attention to detail. I'm now looking forward to the Survival update.

It is not that simple. I know a place where the bear seems to re-spawn after around 14-16 days. My guess is that it is dependent upon level of play and/or place.

". . . but the team just doesn’t have the bandwidth to produce the Hotfix, release an updated Darkwalker, and also produce a Survival Mode update for the end of the year." It would be better for everyone if HTL spread new releases throughout the year instead everything coming out in a 2 month period before Xmas. New releases keep players active for a few months then player interest and activity drops off for several months.

I think that Mathis was the best portrayal of a character that I have seen in a computer game. He really did seem like a scary, psycopathic killer. I don't know how such a character is created for a game, but it was agreat bit of work.

That makes sense. The lamp needs oxygen to burn so will go out in low oxygen, suffocating, atmosphere. Flares and matches have an oxidant in the chemicals so they continue to burn.

"Spoilers" What is admin up to? There are hardly any references regarding gameply in any of the posts in this thread. Contributors' views on how the regions inter-relate could hardly be called Spoilers.