greatwisebob

It's copying the visible-breath mechanic over the butt that makes it art.

My brain inflicted this on me and now you all have to suffer too.

Me using Starfield's ship modification interface, which dictates limitations on character exploration, inventory and combat features; includes a dynamic and fully interactive internal environment; and also creates a seamless setting for NPC/character interaction: Neat Me, Now With Mittens: How is this possible

Also, shout out to the guy up there complaining that a small studio's resources are being leeched away by other projects as if our fragile minds are not going to be completely annihilated by the sequel announcement

I dunno man, I don't need an update every eight weeks. Sounded awesome, turns out it was a little ambitious, that's fine. Look, one of these days I'll open Steam and there'll be a trailer or an update or something. Sweet. That's pretty much the thought process on my end. I think there's probably quite a population of us out there that put roughly that much thought into it even though TLD is our favourite game. The folks chirping the studio online aren't going to be a super reliable statistical sample of consumer sentiment. Hope you're all getting some fresh air for the May Two-Four.

I just made an account to come drop some more feedback from the survey -- thanks for starting a thread. I love the ideas you've laid out here! A couple of notes up front: first, I've lurked here from time to time but even though I've been playing since Early Access, I haven't been an active contributor to the community. There's a very good chance that a lot of what I'm going to say has already been said and maybe dismissed. Sorry if there's any duplication. Second, The Long Dark is my favourite game of all time. I've been playing steadily for years and years. I always sign up to the Steam awards specifically to vote TLD up for the Labour of Love award, because I actually feel bad every time new content comes out and I've still only ever given Hinterland some pocket change almost a decade ago. I'm the weirdo that's refreshing the merch page until the coffee mugs come back in the store. (Seriously, start a kickstarter for sweeping the floor, whatever -- I easily owe you a few hundred bucks at this point!) So although I have a couple of critical things to say here, I hope it's all taken in the right context. I love this game and have immense respect for the development team. I ranked my choices (1) The Long Dark 2; (2) Co-Op TLD; (3) Remastered TLD; (4) TLD VR; (5) Merch; (6) Everything else. So I guess I'll ramble a bit about why I went that way, and hopefully there's a thought or two in here that's of some use. 1) The Long Dark 2 Easy enough, I want more of my favourite game. I'd absolutely love to see where Raph and the team feel they've learned fundamental lessons and what kind of experience that would translate into. Shut all the way up and take all of my money. I'd also ranked the personalization of the base and the placement of new structures (drying racks, storage, etc.) highly. Considering how well the game conveys raw human needs and psychological effects --- hunger, pain, cabin fever --- it remains strange (but completely understandable on a technical level) that other basic human instincts have been entirely skipped. I wouldn't normally live next to a corpse. If I was living in a farmhouse I'd pick up an overturned chair. I love base-building games and have hundreds of hours in them, but I don't think that would be a productive path forward for TLD. The snow shelters are the right idea; realistically there's no reason not to just convert a properly insulated shelter, but you could certainly make that process a lot more engaging. Hinterland could save a lot of time and energy sorting out architectural structures that everyone else has to devise and just focus on internal decor. If there was to be any kind of base-building mechanism in TLD2, it should be punishing, taking days to put together something even moderately windproof. I'd also like to echo the post above, I love the idea of a hybrid procedurally generated/planned landscape. The game communicates so much of its story through its landscape and regulates its challenges through space that I would still want the majority of the landscape to be fixed; but there's no reason why, say, everything north of the Logging Camp in Mystery Lake couldn't be procedurally generated, maybe with a rare cave spawn or a randomly placed ranger corpse -- kind of the same way the prepper caches work. The fixed elements enable ambient storytelling and allows us to improve as players and communicate as a community, while the procedurally generated elements would also keep each game a bit fresh while increasing challenge and replay value. 2) Untitled Co-Op Game I think the Long Dark 2 and Co-Op The Long Dark have to be separate games. The Co-Op game might need to be a separate franchise just to underscore that very little about the two games will be the same other than the underlying survival themes. I think it's fairly resolved now that you can't just port TLD over into a co-op game. It's not just the time mechanics; a game that is invested so heavily in ambience and environment, in non-verbal storytelling and individual risk assessment just isn't amenable to playing online with Boobman144 squatting up and down on your roof and dropping off a bag of 40 rifles to get you started, or chatting with your friends on a private server, ice fishing and complaining about work on Discord. I might be a casual gamer now -- I've had a couple of kids since early access -- but TLD isn't a casual game. It's a mood and a challenge, and both will be compromised if its envelope is pierced. That said, I really really want to play this game cooperatively, knowing that it won't and shouldn't be the same kind of experience. I've tried every survival and base-building game out there -- I've got 200 hours into Conan: Exiles just for the architecture, ugh, I know, please pray for me -- and no one is doing what TLD is doing. There's always a catch ruining the prospects of a multiplayer game. How often have you been on Steam looking through the Survival tag and just muttering to yourself, "ugh, zombies... zombies... PvP... rocketships... zombies... zombies..." No one seems to have learned from the success of TLD that there's an appetite for a pure PvE survival experience that embraces the difficulty and pacing of actual wilderness experiences. Life is actually hard. There don't need to be pterodactyls. I think Hinterland is best-placed in the market to put together a truly challenging, artistically compelling co-op wilderness survival game. Something with experiences and scenarios that could range from trying to make it as the three badly injured survivors of an arctic plane crash (imagine manipulating microphone audio to reflect distance and weather effects!) to setting up a homestead, to just virtual camping online. I'd absolutely buy that as a separate game. But I just don't think there's any way to reconcile that game, which I extremely want to play, with any of the mechanics that make The Long Dark what it is. 3) Remastered TLD I hesitated on this one. I would love to see a remastered game, but the brilliant art direction is the heart and soul of The Long Dark. Hinterland seems to have learned the lesson Blizzard learned ages ago when it overthrew Everquest to create the biggest MMO of all time. Realism is a red herring; there's always going to be a more beautiful game as technology advances, but there's an uncanny valley to master, you're never going to be seamless and there's no point in trying. There are dozens of survival games out their doing their best to provide the most "realistic" experience, and none of them feels as true to life as TLD, the least "realistic" of all, because you get distracted by lousy shadows, pixellated blowing grass or square tree leaves. Your axe never quite makes "correct" contact with a tree; there are 20 animations for breaking stones and eventually you've seen all of them. Realism shouldn't be the goal; a coherent and beautiful environment should be. This game is eight years old and it looks better and is more enjoyable to explore than any new entry on the market. I don't think Hinterland is about to fall into that trap, so I ranked this fairly high. I'd like to see what they come up with as "improvements" in the context of their own established motif and artistic vision. 4) TLD VR If anything ever makes me buy a VR setup, I guess this would be it! 5) Merch I'd love to see the merch options extended. In-world clothing and kitchen items are great. I want an atlas! 6) Everything Else This is where the tough love might have to come in. As much as I love the game, I'm not planning to take in any other TLD media: novels, TV shows, audiobooks, comic books. Not that I wouldn't be interested; I'm a huge reader. But I'm sorry, guys, the writing is not good. It was atrocious, now it's been upgraded to okay. And it kills me to say it -- it's my favourite game and the direction and cinematography are solid and the casting and voice acting are both phenomenal -- but although the atmosphere is dead-on, writing is a craft and you need to hire professionals to put a compelling product together. I love RPGs and I'm the kind of guy that exhausts every dialogue option, but every time I try to play Wintermute I just ask myself why I'm not back in Survival Mode. Until that part of the game is internally compelling, I'm not going to look to get into more of it. I think the root of the problem is predominantly stylistic. The allusive, elliptical, mid-90s Vertigo comic style dialogue is just fundamentally unsuited to the kind of game The Long Dark is. No one seems to be able to package a subject and predicate in the same utterance, let alone convey a full and productive declarative thought. People have secrets when they shouldn't. They don't connect with each other when the plot compels them to do so, for reasons that are often left unclear. Conversations take three times longer than they should so that the characters can sound cool; and no one develops effectively as a character because the depth of their interiority is sacrificed for ambience. It's the kind of dialogue you see in a grad school creative writing class -- being vague and mysterious isn't eerie and auteur-like; it's annoying and unrealistic. There's a great analogy to Lovecraftian fiction here; the plot and environment might be so compelling that you gain a mortally dedicated cult following, but the fact is no one talks like that and it starts to grate on an audience that correctly assesses that if they really were this character they could be moving the plot along much more efficiently. As a player, you feel held back by the script. A vague allusion to something menacing is an accent pillow. It can't be the bricks and mortar of a story. There's a reason why Hemingway did so well with plots involving man versus nature. The prose is bare and direct. Sentences are short. Look, he just needs to get that fish in the boat and the fish isn't getting in the boat. You can build a deeply compelling, historically brilliant story about that without adding anything more, as long as you tell that story as effectively as you can. Struggling against nature is a journey into oneself. There's a reason why we all eventually end up shutting up and just staring into the campfire. Hinterland is the only studio positioned to tell that story in this medium. There's no artifice in The Long Dark. That wolf is going to bite you and you're going to bleed to death. You are lost. There is no water and you cannot get any. Those imperatives are so elegantly expressed in every other aspect of the game, and communicated with such clarity and immediacy that layering on multiple levels of human subterfuge is incongruous. Both sides of the story pull away from each other. The contemplative survival experience feels like wasting time in the context of Story Mode; there's suddenly a clock on it. And the story mode draws away from the narrative that develops naturally as an infection stands between you and the survival objectives you have in mind. (That's also why I voted against a blended story/survival game. The story survives to the extent it does because the survival mode is a masterpiece. Blending the two would just sully your competitive advantage in being the sole studio on top of a growing genre.) There's certainly room for a Story Mode to add a lot to the game as a separate experience, but Hinterland should look to where your storytelling has been overwhelmingly successful -- in the visuals, in the art direction, in the natural plot elements of hardship and in the delicate balance of the mechanics of need versus capacity. The party decorations at Mystery Lake, the animal behaviour during the aurora, the placement of bodies and the fact that the post office has been picked through. The fact that you'll never make it to the lodge if it's noon and you're already half-frozen. That's your story. In the right hands, with the right story editor, there could be a spare, subtle narrative like nothing else in the medium. If you're going to go on with a Story Mode and look into more narrative outlets, I respectfully suggest you're going to want to bring on new writing talent because absolutely everything else is there. You'll always have business from us, but I don't know if you're going to grow your audience with similar narratives. 40% of your proposed future projects are really not playing to your considerable strengths, and we all want to see you guys succeed. New TLD Content I don't have any rational basis for saying this, but I'd prefer the yearly pass option or one-off DLC options for new content because I'm sick of monthly subscriptions to things. I like getting excited for something substantial and dropping a reasonable amount of cash to get into it. I think Hinterland might have left a bunch of money on the table over the last few years -- who wouldn't have paid $5 per new map? -- so I think there's a lot of residual goodwill out there from players that would be happy to chip in for new content after receiving the kind of value we have so far. That said, I wouldn't be a big fan of the in-game store; it really distracts from the game experience. I put a bunch of time into Fallout 76 and not only is the ambience basically shot, in order to drive profitability there's a strong incentive to just keep dumping junk for us to keep up with until it begins to dwarf the actual game content. No, thanks. You guys are great at meaningful updates -- just let us pay you for them more often! We can see the connection between we pay, you hire more staff, more stuff comes out for our favourite game faster. We want to help that along! Hopefully there's something useful in there -- the idea of a sequel would be incredibly exciting news!