Dev Diary - November 2018


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  • Hinterland
6 hours ago, Le Petit Prince said:

Yeah, with amazing developement speed of HS let's wait around 10 years maybe? And who's going to remember the game then? No Thanks.

Like others said above, i am not interested in Sandbox. You should understand that there are 3 group of players, some only want the story mode, some only interested in sandbox, some interested in both. As a customer, people have right to demand something, and as a developer you have to provide something for all groups of players. The only reason i buy this game is the story mode and i don't care about others. Like he said above:

For our group of player, there is no playable game for 2 years.

For some of us it goes like this: you hear about this game from a friend, or read it somewhere, they critisize it and say it has a great story, game is pretty good. So you check it on Steam, look at rates. You know that there are 2 episodes for now, but you see devs said other episodes will come like 4-5 months later. So you trust them, you think you can wait those time intervals between episodes and you buy the game. Only to play and enjoy the story mode.

And then the devs -for some reason idk why- start to think they have all the time of the earth, they don't have to provide you anything anymore, anything that they give you is extra, they don't need to have a deadline. NO! IT IS NOT LIKE THIS! You are a company and we are the customers. You give us a deadline and you keep postponding it over and over again. Nothing that you give us is extra. I'm not asking for free DLC or something here. I am asking for what i've been promised before i buy this game. If you will not succee to make it happen ON TIME, then remove the story mode trailers and advertisements on websites and on steam! Because you are cheating people. Stop ignoring the people who bought the game only for story and waiting to continue to play it. Imagine they sell Half-Life 3 but only half of the game is able to be played. Other half will come in god knows when. It is not forgivable. You are paying for this in the first place with the opinion that they will continue it soon.

Your frustration is duly noted.

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  • Hinterland
1 hour ago, MueckE said:

Because it looks like, the thread is becoming somewhat toxic, i want to add that my post was an expression of frustration - not because i hate Hinterland or TlD, but because i like it. I follow the progress since 2014, play the game on and off and have seen it all. If you hear over the years over and over again the same things about the progress and over and over again you get delays, at some point you just resignate. So many chances have been missed that it became a sad story and now even the update in December can not and will not satisfy in any way anymore. It's too little, too late.

Very sorry you feel this way.

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On 11/11/2018 at 10:40 AM, Hotzn said:

Congratulations on scooping up the animation team & equipment. However, I personally never thought TLD was lacking in or missing animations. If I remember correctly, the game was originally not designed with animated 3D cutscenes - instead bits of the story were to be told with hand-drawn paintings/pictures.

New talented animators can do a lot more than just cut scenes. New animals that need animations will be able to be added easier, and the player-character can have a lot of their white circle completion bar activities replaced with animations. There's a host of exciting improvements that new animators will be able to make a reality and I am very excited.

Honestly though... I'm most excited for the UI designer new-hire. This game has suffered from sub-optimal UI since the beginning, and the most recent update cause everyone to eat raw meat on accident because of un-intuitive controls and radial menus highlights just how far Hinterland still needed to go from a UI design standpoint. The little and invisible tweaks that this new person is going to provide is going to make the experience better for everyone in a lot of small and fantastic ways.

I never care about delays to story mode. Episodes 1+2 were unpolished and released too early. It's a shame that they still weren't ready after so many delays, but the experience was unenjoyable nonetheless. I am overjoyed that Hinterlands decided to redo episodes 1 and 2 so they wouldn't be a permanent stain. I'm sure this was a costly decision and it is one that companies rarely make, but I think it will be so worth it. Delayed episode 3? I've already been waiting years for a good story mode. A few more months doesn't matter if the end product is excellent.

Also... as someone who ended up with 12x worthless rabit pelts. I WANT THAT HAT!

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On 11/23/2018 at 1:43 PM, NardoLoopa said:

You could always just wait until all 5 are released.

We could. But that would almost entirely defeat the purpose of having an episodic release structure.

It's a truly great idea to have the story mode come out in episodes over time, I think. It puts content in players' hands sooner; it allows the developers to get feedback on the gameplay and story structure between episodes and make adjustments as they see fit; it also allows for community discussion and engagement in where the story is going - who is Astrid looking for? Why is she so cold with Will? What happened to their son? Etc. - allowing us to speculate and bounce ideas around, creating more of a sense of shared experience within the playerbase. It's really, really great.

But: it does need to have a reasonably regular (and frequent) schedule of episode release, I think. Otherwise it doesn't work as a concept. Wintermute is one story split into five, not 5 standalone stories along a common theme. In order to keep the audience engaged it needs to keep coming at regular intervals, otherwise it loses that engagement - people will simply forget what was going on last time, and struggle to pick it up again. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it's something to be aware of, I think.

The August 2017 release was essentially a false-start, as it's turned out. That's fine. December 2018 is now the 'real' start of the story. It doesn't matter to me that Episode 3 won't ship at the same time, because we've got 1 & 2, and they're new. But now that they are (nearly) ready to come out, it starts again from here. And I do think it's fairly important that Episode 3 comes out relatively soon into 2019, and that 4 & 5 follow at reasonably regular intervals, so that they remain relevant to the concept of being part of the same "Season". And to be honest, I'm optimistic about that - it seems that until recently the studio was expecting to ship #3 in December along with the Redux, which means it's probably mostly done anyway.

It just a real shame that this discussion seems to have made @Raphael van Lierop to go onto the defensive again about release timings, when he was being more open about it before - earlier this year he'd tentatively set out his ambition to hopefully get Season 1 finished by the end of 2019. That may be pushed back by the delay to Ep.3; but then again it may not, because they're now able to dedicate more resources specifically to Wintermute because of their Studio expansion. The 2019 endpoint wasn't a firm promise, which is fine, but that kind of information was still really valuable to people following the game closely; and if they're not going to risk being so forthcoming about saying that such things from now on as a result of a handful of disgruntled people on the official forum misrepresenting what's actually happened using terrible analogies, that would be pretty disappointing from my point of view.

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Yeah, I think it's no surprise to anyone who has an empathetic bone in their head to figure out the cycle:

  •  Developers, not being able to predict the future (and knowing full well the 70+ year history of engineers under-estimating software), are shy about revealing what their time-line goals are
  • Having received some good will from the player community, Developers are encouraged to test the waters and trust the playerbase by throwing out some notional dates for targets
  • Missing their targets, a (small) number of the playerbase feel entitled to call them out, and freely take a disrespectful or angry tone claiming they've been lied to
  • Developers, who already feel bad about missing their deadline, take this player frustration to heart and decide maybe it's best not to share time-lines, if a missed-deadline is compounded in this sort of negativity

In my mind, if you want HL to continue to share notional goals, people should be more understanding when the goals are missed, rather than punishing them for it.

You see the above pattern played over and over again in the gaming community.  I'd say it has a lot to do with the maturity of the target audience, but I see the same thing in my profession.

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I understand the frustrations being vented here but I'd like to add a point and an observation.

My observation is that people would not be frustrated if delays etc were associated with something that they don't care about. People are only this concerned over something that they love; so Hinterland, take notice!

My point is that people are starting to recognize a trend that they have seen with other publishers and I get it. In my case Hinterland has earned my trust and respect and my disappointment is tempered by the fact that I trust that the quality of the finished product will be worth the wait. Tis far far better a thing for it to be done will than done quickly.

It would have been nice for ep 3 to drop in the winter time here but I trust Raph and his merry band of Dev-geeks to deliver the groceries. :)

Keep up t he GR8 work, -Luca

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12 hours ago, NardoLoopa said:

In my mind, if you want HL to continue to share notional goals, people should be more understanding when the goals are missed, rather than punishing them for it.

It was okay for once, and then for the second time... But it's been more than 1 and a half year and they're doing it over and over again. Only clapping a company and accept all their wrongs will not help them. You should always put wrongs and mistakes into words, you should criticize, that's the way to make them better and demand for your own rights. It's not right to expect all customers to accept missed-deadlines all the time. If everyone keep accepting it, they will start to see this as a no problem. Ofcourse these kind of things are forgivible but not for forever, it has limits. It must have.

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Guest jeffpeng
14 hours ago, NardoLoopa said:
  •  Developers, not being able to predict the future (and knowing full well the 70+ year history of engineers under-estimating software), are shy about revealing what their time-line goals are
  • Having received some good will from the player community, Developers are encouraged to test the waters and trust the playerbase by throwing out some notional dates for targets
  • Missing their targets, a (small) number of the playerbase feel entitled to call them out, and freely take a disrespectful or angry tone claiming they've been lied to
  • Developers, who already feel bad about missing their deadline, take this player frustration to heart and decide maybe it's best not to share time-lines, if a missed-deadline is compounded in this sort of negativity

This. Replace "player base" with "customers" and you have the general developers life in a nutshell right there.

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19 hours ago, Le Petit Prince said:

It was okay for once, and then for the second time... But it's been more than 1 and a half year and they're doing it over and over again. Only clapping a company and accept all their wrongs will not help them. You should always put wrongs and mistakes into words, you should criticize, that's the way to make them better and demand for your own rights. It's not right to expect all customers to accept missed-deadlines all the time. If everyone keep accepting it, they will start to see this as a no problem. Ofcourse these kind of things are forgivible but not for forever, it has limits. It must have.

To be fair, though, they have been very upfront about why the delays have happened.

The Wintermute that came out in Aug 2017 wasn't very favourably received, and clearly didn't meet the team's own intended vision. So they decided to do it all again. And that took a year-and-a-bit. That's not a 'normal' delay or one that's likely to be repeated. The delay to Episode 3 is different, and shouldn't be nearly so lengthy.

Originally, Episode 3 was supposed to follow the initial release about 4 months later. That seems fine to me, but I'd expect the new Episode 3 to arrive sooner because it's likely that most of the work on it has already been done - if we assume the decision to delay it due to recent acquisitions was quite recent. Those acquisitions should also speed up development progress from now on, so it's still possible that Season 1 will be completed by the end of 2019. And even if does run into 2020 by a little, that would still be a similar timeline to the original one. That is, taking the Redux Episodes 1 & 2 release in December to be a new starting point.

If Episode 3 gets seriously delayed, and then #4 and #5 as well, and it all ends up running into another 2-3 years to complete, then that will break up the concept of an episodic "Season" and, to me, will show that the concept hasn't worked. But so far, I think it's still fine.

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I fell in love with the game at first sight and can not safely play games in which there is no way to warm up and eat, sleep and drink water.
I bought the game when episode two came out. Passed the story mode a few times and still looking forward to continuing. I understand why it's taking so long. I would love to wait as long as I need to.
I barely played survival mode. But in the last month I got carried away with it. I'm playing wanderer mode. 130 days behind and I like it more and more.  And enjoy reading the developer diaries, and mailbag. Thank you very much for your work. 

P.S. I also dream of a mug with a logo....

 

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This game is amazing. I took off work for the August release and I'm taking off work again this month solely for the redux and survival mode update. Yet another postpone is irritating, yes. That's a given. But we have to assume hinterland is working as hard as they can to get this game out to us. Let's look at it from their point of view. We all rushed them to release it, and we're disappointed with the finished product. So much so that they had to go back and remake it. This time around they are more focused on releasing a finished product to us than a half assed in demand one. And that's still not good enough for the majority of the community? Look at what gaming is, y'all. Most games released these days by triple A devs aren't finished at all. You have to commend hinterland for taking their time and putting care into their work. I for one fully support this game and company and hope y'all have a long career and go on to work on many new projects after this one.

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On 11/28/2018 at 4:45 AM, jeffpeng said:

This. Replace "player base" with "customers" and you have the general developers life in a nutshell right there.

Most definitely.  At work I'm somewhere between SharePoint administrator and business analyst, so I find myself in situations where I have to work with the software developers to build something for my department.  It's frustrating when my BLI's are not included in a sprint release, but I mean the developers can only work through so many story points per sprint.  Gotta step back, look at the big picture, and realize that the goal is not to screw me over, it's to make the best use of their time to meet the goals of the company.

Translating that to game design, HL too has a finite amount of resources to devote to building the game.  So it would make perfect sense to allocate those resources in a way that makes the game as a whole better, even if it means not giving a subset of players something they've been looking forward to.  It's not necessarily "no", it's just "not now".  I just wish more people could see it that way.

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On 11/22/2018 at 6:23 PM, Raphael van Lierop said:

I can't do anything about delays apart from apologize. I won't crunch my team to hit them. I won't compromise on quality or vision as long as I have money in the bank to pay for ongoing development. Despite unhappiness around Episode delays, The Long Dark continues to sell very well, and frankly, a lot of that comes down to people understanding that their purchase comes with a lot of future value, in the form of free updates. If you don't like the way I've updated The Long Dark you probably wont' like how I make future games either. But, from my perspective, what we are doing is no different from most other games out there today that launch something and then continue to update it post-launch with new content. In most of those cases, however, they are asking you to pay for those additional updates.

In a field where crunching is rampant, I'm so glad to hear this. I'm glad you're not pressured to push your team to that extent. You're all people with lives, and "angry customers" are just going to have to understand that.

I am also glad to hear the game continues to sell well. I've bought several copies in the past and have handed them out to friends, and have bought artwork (which, unfortunately, has yet to grace my office wall, because I'm waiting to frame it). I think as long as Ralphael has the incoming revenue and the management skill to run the studio to perfect what is very obviously the primary game being made by the studio right now, why the hell shouldn't the studio make the game according to the vision he and the team the team have laid out? I would imagine other upcoming Hinterland games might be developed a little differently, on more of a formalized timeline, but who knows. This one though, I'm glad it's being so finely honed. This game is so special that it deserves that. I haven't played it in about a year - have been purposefully resisting - just because I want to fall in love all over again with the WINTERMUTE update. I can't wait.

...but I will...  ;)

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12 hours ago, MindFog2287 said:

In a field where crunching is rampant, I'm so glad to hear this. I'm glad you're not pressured to push your team to that extent. You're all people with lives, and "angry customers" are just going to have to understand that.

I don't understand why poeple don't want to understand it but okay, i'm going to say it one more time. We all aware of that they are human being like us. But they also are a company with customers. They are gaining money out of this game we are the payers. So again: The problem is not waiting but waiting too much.

Why can't you admit that around 2 years time is too much for a single episode? If it goes like this and nobody complains we will see the end of the story in 6 years. Are they doing a good work? Yes. Don't think that i don't like Hinterland Studio. I really do like them and love their game. I also like how Raph answers our questions and does not prevent to talk to us clearly. But it doesn't mean that i will not talk about their wrongs here. In fact, we should! Because bad criticizes is what will improve them. People started to forget the point of story and characters. Yes they're creating something good, but they cannot do it on time, on promised deadline. Perfection will mean nothing after most of forgot the game. It is something like second or third delay, it's been more than 1,5 years. And it is not cool anymore. It is something that has to be put into words. 

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With early access (even with a good studio like Hinterland) - you have to buy the game assuming that you're buying the finished project.  I bought TLD when it was just Mystery Lake - and I feel like I got my money's worth of stumbling around in the cold and getting mauled by Fluffy.  It was worth the $15 or whatever.  All the content since then is a bonus IMO.

Disappointment is the rule not the exception with early access titles...

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At this point, we are circling around the same points and while everyone has made good points and expressed themselves well the conversation is stalled. 

Please move onto other topics from the Dev Diary or we will lock the thread.

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46 minutes ago, admin said:

At this point, we are circling around the same points and while everyone has made good points and expressed themselves well the conversation is stalled. 

Please move onto other topics from the Dev Diary or we will lock the thread.

So... Who else is really exited to be able to kill Bunny FooFoo and make a hat? Or 2 o 3 or 4? Who doesn't end up with bunny pelts carpeting their floors in their bases, or left to rot in the snow, because you have so darn many of them? I don't regularly play Interloper, and I am THRILLED to have a craftable hat in the game.  I can't wait to see what the recipe is for it (I am thinking 2 pelts, 1 cured guts, and either fishing tackle or a sewing kit, maybe a piece of cloth to line it?) Whatever it is, I am sure many of us will be in a crafting frenzy, making hats galore.

 

And... I am still really, really, REALLY curious about the image of the plane, in the hangar. Is this on the mainland, before we leave for the island? Is this an airstrip tucked into a new region on the map of Great Bear? Though... that hangar looks far too orderly and clean to be on the island, considering the state of pretty much every other building on Great Bear, in Survival Mode and Wintermute. And I must admit, the first time I saw it, the opening for Fantasy Island ran through my head, with Tattoo yelling "Look, Boss! The Plane, the Plane!", though with snow, and Tattoo dressed in a wolf coat and Balaclava...

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What it really comes down to is Redux. It needs to show that some serious work has been done to bring the story mode into a new caliber and justify the recent delay of episode 3. Not to justify everything else and years past but just this single delay. I think everyone will be pretty damn happy if they improve the quality of the story telling, elements of play and are able to roughly stick with a 6 months window per episode. Also episode 3 will have to continue this momentum. Overall I totally get the frustration and Hinterland clearly does. Question is are they ramping up and fixing these issues? I think they honestly are. I also think we should wait and see what Redux really is before we get too frustrated. One of the big problems is other game studios, loot boxes, half finished crapware and everything else that is going on that is assaulting awesome games and their futures along with a most clear money grubbing business models. I'm out $60 because of StarCitizen. Annoyed, but I let it go because that is never getting finished and I'm over it. Best way to get someone angry is to create something they love and then have issues with content. This is Hinterland at the moment, and I fully believe they are trying, because money grubbing practices are not being put in place. I bought 2 copies for friends on steam for around $7 each. As I said I really do get the frustration and it is warranted, but I don't really think there is an argument that is worth having about that anymore. Its now all about will they deliver on Redux, Episode 3 and finish this whole race with a good schedule for episodes 4 and 5.  Anything else at this point, in my opinion, in just beating a dead moose, that we have gone back to scavenge from time after time again. On that note, Hinterland you should contact endnightgames, If I'm correct I believe they created "The Forest" in 5 years with 3 people. Maybe they are looking to do some awesome work. My selfish dream that my two favorite developers work on a project together :x

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Sorry totally missed the "Move on or the Thread will be Locked". I will say that I am excited for updates to survival mode as I've only really started to get my feet wet and barely manage to survive. I would be excited for a Bunny FooFoo but I have not been able to craft anything yet. Not to mention last time I played a wolf attacked me and apparently tore my pants off/to shreds so I was forced to freeball it in the in the middle of the blizzard :P so yeah I got some problems atm.

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2 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

And... I am still really, really, REALLY curious about the image of the plane, in the hangar. Is this on the mainland, before we leave for the island? Is this an airstrip tucked into a new region on the map of Great Bear? Though... that hangar looks far too orderly and clean to be on the island, considering the state of pretty much every other building on Great Bear, in Survival Mode and Wintermute.

I immediately assumed that was Will's hangar at his courier business (was it called "Jack rabbit Transport"?) at the start of Wintermute. It's the same plane, isn't it? 

I guess that would mean it's not part of a new map that's going to be available in survival mode. But it does look like it could be a playable level, as opposed to a backdrop for a cutscene. Which leads me towards thinking that maybe the cutscenes in the redux are going to be more  interactive  - maybe we'll be able to move and look around from a first person perspective while the NPC speaks to us? Like in Half Life. Maybe we'll be able to 'play' in the hangar level around the cinematic sequence? 

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