ToAsT

I acknowledge that plans can change over time and that certain players will always find fault in whatever decision Hinterland chooses to make with the game. That's unavoidable. It seems to me like some of the anger / disappointment from Interloper players was that they weren't informed when the DLC was released that they wouldn't be able to play or interact with the various tales on that difficulty, or find the item variants, with their existing saves.

This was also a very swift change compared to previous issues which were in the game for a long time. I recall a time when it was extremely easy to accidentally eat raw meat, but HL pushed back for a long time until eventually modifying the in-game behavior.

Thank you. Should I open a ticket on your support portal, or is there another way to do this?

I'm not so sure, since this is a paid add-on and the feedback on this particular feature (albeit from a small and very vocal set of interloper players) has been largely negative. If you pay extra for something up front and the developer tells you that you're only getting some of what was promised then I'd be pretty pissed, too. There was no mention at all about Interloper players not being able to play the Tales when the DLC was announced or before this set was released. But you're probably right in that it's best not to dwell on it assumingit never ends up eventually happening.

I'm not an interloper player (I haven't even done 1 day on that difficulty) but I often watch streamers who only play that mode so it would've been nice to watch them experience the Tales. Not being able to play through the Tales on that difficulty probably should've been something that was explained up-front in the original roadmap and description of the DLC. It feels like Hinterland originally intended on enabling it for loper but later realized that they didn't have enough time to make it fit. I hope they find a way to make it work, maybe later in the dev cycle.

Throughout the TLD development lifecycle, Hinterland has changed some of the sounds in the game, as well as updated the main menu background and sounds. I like most of the newer updates, but I'd also like the option of showing the older menu screen and music of trapper's cabin. Are those assets still in the game? It would be nice to be given the option of selecting which main menu background and music you'd like to be shown rather than be forced into whatever the latest choice is. Another thing that threw me off was when they changed the crow sounds to match that of Wintermute after Season 3/4. I can't say that I'm a fan of the newer crow sounds - they sound like some other bird to me. It doesn't look like I'm the only one with that opinion either: Perhaps it's just a minor quip but having the option of restoring those crow sounds to the older version would be nice. If not, then I might have to wait for modding support...

Are the newly updated bunkers / prepper caches available in Survival mode if you created a new save during Part 1, or do we have to restart in order to find them? Same goes for the oak trees, I suppose.

I experienced this on PC as well after the DLC update, and noted that several other people experienced the same problem. I think I posted in either these forums or those on Steam. In any case, because my old saves aren't usable after the update, I can't go back to them to quickly finish the episode and update the game state. Is there a way I can "trick" the game status into showing Episode 4 as completed?

Tweaking or fixing stuff is fine (and most people were encouraging it), but like you said the change should've been part of the release notes or at least mentioned under a "known issues" section since it sounds like they've been aware of it for a while. Many other things that were mentioned to be part of the expansion were implied to exist in this first update, like acorns and cougars, so people were actively looking for them and were confused by their absence (I know because I was watching highly active TLD streamers from the expansion's release and they had the same questions). Clear communication and managing expectations are part of any update/software release, especially a large one like Tales from the Far Territory. I think this goes back to Hinterland apparently not having proper external beta testing of their product, since many of these changes would've been spotted by seasoned players and ironed out before the eventual release date. There's a balance between the wonder of a new update and feeling like you're experiencing TLD for the first time again, and the sense like you're being kept in the figurative dark. The needle has swung too far in the latter direction, in my opinion, and we've seen the poor results before in previous releases such as the rapidly disappearing corpses/items that came with Episode 4 (which took 4+ months to properly resolve). Tweaks/changes that aren't adequately tracked in software development lead me to believe that their QA dept isn't adequately testing the changes and we're likely to have more "oversights" in the future. I was hoping the separation between story-mode and survival would lead to additional quality in the final product. I really think Hinterland should consider releasing these updates to major streamers or dedicated external QA to assist with testing at least 1-2 weeks prior to their eventual release. With streamers you can make it time-limited or a feature "spotlight" into the eventual release, build up some hype, and track down major oversights before releasing the update to the masses.

With the upcoming update and being unable to transfer / migrate saves, I've been attempting to complete some of the challenges, get badges/feats, and so on that typically take a long time (for example, surviving 500 days). Chances are that I'm not going to have the real-world hours necessary to do this before the update comes out. Hinterland has said that we can use the Time Capsule function to load a previous version of the game and continue with our saved games, etc, but what I'm wondering is... if we complete achievements, get badges from challenges, get new feats in the previous "Time Capsule" version of the game, will those accomplishments transfer back to the current version of the game post-update? For example, on Dec 5th, I decide to use Time Capsule and I complete Escape the Darkwalker on the pre-update version of the game, Later in December, I decide to use the updated version of TLD. Will Escape the Darkwalker (and the associated feats / badges) be completed as well in the current version of the game?

This + expanding the size of the journal. With the number of regions and amount of notes I put in one of my longer games, it's been frustrating to continually come up against the max # of characters.

Thanks for the feedback. I suppose it might be fun to tromp around through the different regions, if only to get a fresh perspective and refresh my memory of the game world. I haven't found all of the polaroids either, so maybe that will give me some incentive to retrace my steps. I know it's not "in-line" with the game world and the red lost & found boxes, but it'd be nice if they provided a list on the map of which items were transported to a red box or make it so that the items within, even if ruined, would not be removed from the game world. After all, you aren't able to add items in there anyway, so it's not like it would be abused as some kind of weird tactic for endless loot.

I have a saved game that I've been running through steadily for a few years now (300+ in-game days) and that's gone through several major game updates. I used this particular run to get most of the achievements, and so I've explored almost every nook and cranny, plus I've picked up pretty much all the useful loot I could find. As a result, there are red boxes everywhere - the kind that Hinterland shunts items into when they make a region change - and they're loaded with hundreds of items each. I was wondering what would happen to those items if, given enough time, they become ruined? Do they disappear from the red boxes the same way they do for other in-game containers? I have a ton of meat and other resources that I'd rather not lose, even if they reach 0% quality. After all, many of the items placed into those boxes weren't in any containers beforehand, and that was on purpose to avoid them disappearing from the game.

Sounds like from their original post that carcasses already existing in the region were fixed so as to not disappear, but they're still trying to sort out the player-killed ones. Kinda disappointing because that *should* be common-enough that they can troubleshoot and diagnose the issue but alas... we'll have to wait for another update it seems.

Thanks for the update, Hinterland. I'm hoping you can fully sort out the animal carcass bug soon because that's the primary reason I stopped playing for the last 4-5 months.