Raphael van Lierop

I suggest you do some research into how Insulated Flasks work in real life, and what happens when the vacuum seal is damaged, or in the older models, when the glass vacuum flask is broken.

Confirmed that this is how it works.

re: Insulated Flask Condition loss -- will double/triple-check the implementation, but the design was for the Flask to only lose Condition from Falls and potentially Struggles. It should not decay naturally, or at least not noticeably.

This is very important. I can't really say how important this is, because it 100% informs our design decisions and also seems to be the source of a lot of confusion/upset in the player community, because the Survival side of the game is Permadeath. The premise is that you *will die*, often and frequently. The premise isn't that you will routinely survive 1000s of days or keep the same save going for years. In order to design for the "one save" players, we would have to remove Permadeath from the game, which would fundamentally change the game we have made. Death is part of the cycle of learning and experiencing the world anew. Embrace it!

It's simply that I sometimes need to step in and remind this community of some facts. I feel no personal offense as most of the comments are subjective and everyone is entitled to them. I merely wish to point out that the community is vast with varied tastes, so some amount of personal awareness of this fact by each player is useful in order to have a thoughtful and welcoming community. Beyond that, of course I feel protective of the team's hard work and will speak out in their support, which is part of my role and my remit. If you think this is unprofessional, I encourage you to spend your time playing many other games produced by faceless corporations who will happily spoon-feed you some kind of sanctioned PR messaging, as that might be your preference.

Lot's of interesting comments and theorycrafting here. I don't want to spend too much time on it, because a lot of it is subjective feedback and opinions and everyone can believe what they believe, but just a couple of quick notes (for what it's worth): * This comes up a lot, with every update really, and it's kinda frustrating to always see it. It's just not possible to make everything in the game an option for you, just because you might not like it. Also, we are crafting a specific experience with intention behind it, and (apart from bugs which obviously do happen), limitations are purposeful. Even when we do make something optional, it doesn't happen without a bunch of work. So please stop saying "it'd be so easy to make this an option, they've done it before" etc. etc. It's just not the case. Every variation creates, at the very least, the need for significant additional testing, as well as dev work and often more UI, tuning, etc. Nothing comes for free. We make these choices and trade-offs all the time. The only easy thing here is posting in forums. * The world of GBI and the Far Territory is huge now. We try to give every region a theme. Some regions will be more interesting to certain types of players. We have 10M players and some of you have been playing the game for coming up to 10 years. We also get around an additional ~500k-1M players per year who are new to the game. And everyone in between. We're making a game for everyone, not just for one group or sub-group of players. The only way to do that is to add variety and to continue pushing ourselves to try new things. And, if you find you don't like a thing, that's ok because there are probably lots of other things for you to like, and I promise you some other player really loves the thing you dislike. It's 100% ok if not every region is to your specific tastes. I have favourites too and some I rarely go to. Pretty sure my list is probably different from yours. Re: Scurvy -- I mean this is our problem and not yours, but this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't sort of scenario, and, as per my first bullet above, making something optional isn't always that easy or the best solution for implementation. So it's fine -- if you want to play with Scurvy, start a new game. Easy. If you want to continue your long-standing save and not worry about ending up in a situation where you annoyingly have to do a bunch of stuff you didn't ask for because of a mechanic that was freshly introduced, or maybe it's super hard for you to continue surviving because you've already used up a ton of the existing resources that have Vit-C, great, you can do that. Nobody is forcing you to do one or the other, you can make that choice for yourself. So, like, stop complaining. 🤣

This is exactly what is meant. If the Carcass is already ravaged (i.e. partially eaten by something), you can Harvest it by hand as it's already been cut open essentially. If the Carcass has been partly harvested using a Tool, it's then "cut open" as well and can be harvested by hand afterwards. You just can't tear animals apart by hand anymore. Any cutting tool will do the trick -- Knife, Hatchet, Hacksaw, and the improvised versions of Knives and Hatchets. After cutting a bit, feel free to tear away if you like. Hope that helps clarify.

This is a silly thread. There's nothing 'going on' with our support tickets. Some people seem very desperate to make drama!

The notion of "realism" and how much is right for TLD has been a topic going on 10 years now, and I'm really not sure what to say about it other than...then entire premise of the game world is that a mysterious geomagnetic disaster has basically wiped out technology, but then again sometimes it operates based on inexplicable rules -- which gives you things like Buffer Memories, electrical hazards, Glimmer Fog, aurora-affected wildlife, and a host of things in WINTERMUTE that you have and have not seen yet. I understand that maybe you thought TLD was going to be this super realistic survival sim, but that's never been the goal or the premise. I think I've said that for 10 years now. Everything in the game is meant to be in the game. You can dislike it, but you can't say it doesn't belong. The IP has always had some sense of mystery and surreality to it and that's always been part of the tone of the game, and it's what keeps it interesting for me. And with TALES, we deliberately created some distance (metaphorically and physically) so that'd we'd have a palette to play with that's a bit different from the stuff you typically see in the rest of Great Bear. A sense of mystery, abandoned projects, the wrecked environment, etc. These are all ideas that exist in other aspects of TLD as well (not just WINTERMUTE, but Survival too). Beyond that, there's all the typical jumping to conclusions about how different mechanics might work (mainly all the ways in which people fear they might not work the way they hope), which I guess I will just respond with: I guess it's good you have something new to talk/argue about. 😅

You can know what you like, and you can dislike what you see, but I don't think you can claim to know what has made the game successful.

Re: Switch -- we haven't forgotten about it, we just don't have anything definite to share re: release dates for TALES on Switch. When we have certainty around the date, we'll share more info. To clarify a point above -- the delays in this case are not due to anything on the Nintendo side (well, apart from making a console that's more challenging to get content on 😅). When we have news to share, we'll post it either along with a Dev Diary or in its own stand-alone communication.

Hey! We communicate when we have something to say. As it happens, this year we've posted either a Release, a Dev Diary, or communications around Hotfixes or Quality of Life more than 20 times since January, including 10 major news items on thelongdark.com. The last major news item was posted before the Sept 13th communication was July 19th, less than 2 months before. I'm not quite sure what amount of transparency/frequency you are looking for or think is reasonable, but I don't think it's accurate to suggest that we "could have communicated better".

I disagree. This community belongs to Hinterland (the studio) as much as it belongs to the player community, we finance it and operate it as part of the functioning of our studio, and how people behave on it (and what we accept) also communicates something about our values as a company. So I think it's entirely appropriate for me to step in and make corrections or express my own dissatisfaction with how things are being framed about our work (ex. we don't work hard, we're money-grabbers, dishonest, etc.) We're the ones setting the tone for what is acceptable in this community, including moderation sure, but also just generally how people talk and feel about the game and how they interact with each other. I was very clear in saying that it's very fine to express your unhappiness with what we have made or how we make it, but then it's also reasonable to move on and not make a thing about it. Just because there is overwhelming support for the game, doesn't mean we should ignore this other stuff. That's a very simplistic way of thinking about community, and the work we do.

Yes, 100% -- the team is behind in updating these but they are working on it. I agree it's very important that the store pages and our site are an accurate source of truth for people who are about to buy the Expansion Pass. For players that already own it and are already brought into the update stream, we try to rely on other tools to supplement that in a more active way: dev diaries, mailing list, social posts, forum updates, and the in-game Messaging system (in the main menu).

Hey all, Those of you who are frustrated by our development progress -- it's duly noted. We hear it, have heard it, and I don't think it's that helpful or useful to continue to talk about it over and over. Make your complaint, then move on. For TALES specifically and the abandonment of the 10-12 week cycle: I outlined reasoning in this dev diary. It was forthcoming and honest and I'm not sure what else you want. Complaining about it more isn't going to bring the updates out any faster. In terms of TALES, Part Four. The full list of features and content is deeper than the few things I mentioned in the last dev diary, so the OP's frustration with what they felt is a short list of things, is misplaced. This is par for the course with us -- we never reveal the full list of features until we launch the update, because it's fun to surprise people. Wait until you see the update and then you can complain if you aren't happy. There's a lot in there. In terms of the sniping about the "No Crunch" disclaimer at the beginning of the game. It's super sad to me how some people have chosen to weaponize this. If you knew anything about the game industry, you would know how poorly it generally treats its employees. A lot of people come to Hinterland from triple-A after having been horribly mistreated by other studios -- we're talking work that scarred people with physical and mental health issues they are still dealing with. I did 12 years in triple-A before starting Hinterland, so I understand what crunch is. You throw it around like it's a good thing, "a bit of crunch is sometimes helpful". You don't know what you are talking about. My team's health is more important than your misplaced sense of entitlement. With our "no crunch" disclaimer, we're trying to set a precedent for saying that it's not healthy to crunch people, it should be possible to make good games without doing that, and I felt it was important to put our values right out there at the beginning of the game. You don't have to like our values, but don't feel we owe you "crunch" and harming our health just because you feel upset you won't get an update when you thought you were entitled to it. To me, it's no different from seeing a "free range" or "organic" or "union made" type label on a product you buy in a store. You then have some idea of the environment and philosophy that drove its creation, and how the people around it were treated. I think it's important to put our values into the world, which is why I added that statement. I hope more game studios choose to do that, and more players choose to specifically buy games from developers who prioritize the health and wellbeing of their employees, vs. the sickening crunch culture that is part of the industrial game development process that destroys people for better quarterly earnings. If you don't care about people or understand the importance of managing your health and resources, you really haven't learned anything from playing THE LONG DARK. The rest of you who continue to support our work, and give us the "benefit of the doubt" about deadlines and deliveries -- thank you for that. I'll be the first to say we haven't had a good track record of delivering things when we thought we would, and that's mostly my fault, but also the way things sometimes go, and ultimately we do deliver what we say we will deliver, we always have. That's what we're focused on. We appreciate you, because you have always understood that how we make things at Hinterland is a big part of what makes them special. - Raph