Oh shit, I guess I gotta move.
Launch trailer!
Looks like they put a lot of stuff in for story mode, if this is any guide.
I moved my camp from the Hydro Dam to the farmstead in the Valley. I have a video coming up later today of my journey!!
Ooh, great timing, looking forward to jumping back in.
My interested is piqued. I was playing “survival” mode in Fallout 4 and it just feels like a joke. You get all the respawning resources lying around (after 200 years of scavenging), so survival is pretty much guaranteed. Only in the first 10 or so hours was there really challenge (mainly because of illness and the lack of antibiotics). This looks to be more challenging and rewarding.
Yah the survival/sandbox mode in this is fantastic.
I’m kind of intrigued by what they’ve teased of story mode. I figured it was going to be this quick and dirty “OK, this is your name, and something something vaguely happened, go get 'em.”
Instead, they seem to have built a pretty detailed mythology/backstory here that they’re going to use to drive that part of the game for those who want it. Very intrigued by that.
I’ve been waiting for the v1 release and story mode to play! Over two and a half years…
Though I dabbled for two hours all up over that time, hopefully story mode acts as some kind of new player onboarding.
They are making a movie of The Long Dark. I didn’t have a lot of hope going in, but this short film (starring Christopher Plummer!!!@@!) is pretty great! It serves to set theme and tone
It’s easy to imagine a movie based on this game as it’s amazingly eerie and beautifully set. Looks pretty good.
I’ve been talking to Sonky about her first couple of hours. I guess this depends on your definition, but maybe spoilers?
Jason: how is?
Sarah: Rad
Jason: like super rad? how different is it?
Sarah: They tweaked some of the mechanics but gameplay is about the same
Jason: New areas?
Sarah: It’s just awesome to have missions and totally new areas.
Jason: what? like, not in survival?
Sarah: What I mean is it has like a whole new sorta linear story
And the areas I’ve seen are new, never saw them before
So far at least
And it’s pretty unforgiving and difficult
Like usual
Jason: Awesome. Are you still surviving? Or is it point a to point b?
Sarah: Yeah totally. No it’s all survival, you’re just looking for someone
Jason: Oh, OK, good. Was concerned.
Yes, I’m very intrigued to play the linear story mode. Sandbox has been excellent so far, and I’ve been curious to see how they adapt the freeform survival sandbox to a story.
As someone who wants more goals to lead me through a sandbox game, story mode has me really excited to play this. :D
Looking forward to the story mode, The way the graphics are I think this would be an awesome VR game, if they could get the movement right.
For 4 years or so, various game systems got tested and run through a de facto beta by the early access players. Systems were tweaked, gameplay changed, iterated upon, refined.
All good. The version of The Long Dark that is only challenges and survival mode works brilliantly. It’s an amazing sandbox survival game.
Story mode got no such rigorous testing. At all. And sadly, it shows. Story mode will lead you into paths of frustration that get you mortally wounded or killed. It takes you into death spirals you cannot get out of.
Most frustrating of all is how that combines with the game’s weird savegame features. You can end up 5 or 6 days deep in story mode and because the game saved on you when you fled into a building even though you were mortally wounded…there’s a pretty good chance that reloading and trying again will only bring you back in your current dying state, allowing you the experience of seeing your guy with 20% health bleed out all over again. Your choice then becomes restarting the game and playing the entire tutorial over again from the beginning…or not playing it at all.
Think of it like this: remember in the 1980s when it was possible to play hours into a point and click adventure game only to arrive at a fail state based on something you didn’t see or click on hours and hours earlier? And remember how game designers figured out how to not make that happen three decades ago? Yeah. The Long Dark’s Wintermute story mode still hasn’t solved that issue.
Until/if they patch fixes into story mode it’s hard to recommend playing this game in any other way than the survival/challenge modes that were already available. If this crappy story mode is what slowed development for 18 months…man that’s a shame.
Wow, that autosave feature bit me hard when I last played and I figured they’d have handled it by now.
Ugh. I think I’m not interested in the game until it has a strong story mode. This is disappointing.
The real shame is that this should be an easy fix: for story mode only, allow players to reload from the the start of any previously completed day within the current chapter.
It isn’t the dying that I mind. I’ve died plenty of times in TLD. It’s the having to restart from the very beginning tutorial again that absolutely ruins it.
@triggercut You actually get two saves and they are not quite the same. There is last Save, which is the last time you were in a bed, and last checkpoint, which is when you entered a new area, or hit a checkpoint in progress. Not terribly better then the image you describe, but a little bit better.
I like how story mode introduces you to the game mechanics slowly at first for new players. I hate how horrid the story is so far. It’s the sort of stale cliche mess that makes everyone at QT3 cringe…
But jesus I love the sandbox in this game. It is just incredibly fun and immersive. For someone trying to learn sandbox ropes, it may be worth going through the story to be introduced to all the mechanics.
Yeah, I’ve had the game for months now, waiting or it to reach 1.0. And now it has, except patches seem to keep flying in, so maybe it does need some more time in the oven.
Maybe I’ll wait a few months to play the game… kinda seems like a shame to play a winter simulator in the middle of summer, no?
This is a good counter-argument to Tom’s Only-Play-EA-Games-Once-Released position. How often do the first releases of long-playable EA games get better, more stable, better balanced? Usually drops with large new content is a time of tuning and churn and not stability and complete integration.
Better to play the long-iterated EA version before full release, or wait until several balance passes after full release. Never play 1.0 of anything.