Didi

Just registered to share my two cents. I'm the one who made the reddit post this thread links to right at the start FWIW. Anyway, i have been suffering from major depression for the better part of my life and it has not gotten any better. I'm saying this to try to illustrate my point, not to seek "compassion" or whatever... i have a roof, food, a bed and a job so i certainly shouldn't be complaining. But there's this thing that comes with depression... no matter what you do, everything feels like a chore. Even entertaiment feels like a chore, to the point that i can spend a whole day staring at my library while playing nothing. And it may seem an exaggeration but it is not, some people will know exactly how that feels. Well, this is where The Long Dark comes into play. I discovered it in late 2015 / early 2016 and was instantly blown away. Here it was, the survival game i had always wanted. No zombies, no FPS, no nonsense... just you, the cold and your wits. Granted, it was still pretty bare-bones compared to what it is today but there was absolutely nothing that could compare to it so i got hooked instantly, to the point that i actually WANTED to have time for myself so i could play as opposed to FLEEING from it. And i enjoyed every bit of it, i watched every "Let's Play" i could find and rejoiced when i found out what Stacy's Soda was all about. I didn't engage very much with the community though, but i followed all progress intently. Now, i'll spare all the drama surrounding reddit, the "countdown to the countdown", the first clash with the modding community... but by then, i already had done pretty much all what the vanilla game had to offer and was looking for new challenges. Nothing major, just that little extra something that could provide me with a new experience, and this is where i discovered the Relentless Night Mod. If The Long Dark had been the game i had been waiting for all of those years, said mod was the icing on the cake. You could look at it as a "custom sandbox challenge" within the vanilla TLD experience and you wouldn't be far off, but all of a sudden i was freezing indoors and exhausting my resources faster than i could replenish them. I was having a hard time surviving again, at over a thousand hours logged and who knows how many more while offline. For me, it was 2015 all over again in the sense that i had a "new" favorite game that actually sparked my interest enough to play it - and enjoy doing so. And here we are now. I am extremely grateful to Hinterland for making possible this fantastic experience and i supported the studio the way it's supposed to be, by paying for the game and spreading the word. But there are other players who also happen to be modders that provided a lot of tools to those who wanted something extra, for free and out of LOVE for your work (otherwise why even bother) so if i was game developer i think i'd feel honored but i am not so i won't pretend i know better. I've composed music in the past though and i do know how it feels when people genuinely like your work yet there's always a "but what if...?", but that's another story for another day. What i'm trying to say is that i understand Hinterland wanting to protect their vision of the game by keeping "unauthorized" mods at bay, yet all the modders are trying to do is NOT to "improve", "change" or "destroy" your vision of the game, but rather broaden it (when it's not just bugfixing). Because they love what Hinterland has created and want more of it. And sure, there will be people who will take "advantage" and go all OP but guess what, let them be. This is single player after all. I think i've ranted enough for now but in closing, i just want to stress that what makes a game truly a classic in The Long Run is mod support. Even if it's not official. I won't be citing specific examples but you can find them all over the place. It's what keeps veterans (and newcomers) invested and coming back for more even when official support has long since ended. Thank you Hinterland, and thank you modding community. I really hope you all can collaborate with an open mind in a not so distant future, i really do. Peace. *typos