Things are changing a bit at Hinterland Studio, developer of The Long Dark. Earlier this year, The Long Dark’s story mode concluded with the release of the fifth and final episode of Wintermute. After that, you might have assumed that the main focus would have been on the announced 2024 sequel, Blackfrost. But according to Hinterland, even though Blackfrost is still in the works, the focus will be on The Long Dark’s survival mode for a while.
“When we first announced Blackfrost, the sequel to The Long Dark, the video game industry was in a very different place,” the developer wrote in a statement. Steam blog post. “In recent times, entire business models have been thrown into chaos, the geopolitical situation has become extremely complicated, the picture of what the next generation of consoles will be has become much less clear, and the time and money gamers spend on new games has diminished as everyone turns to the comfort and security of the games they already know.”
As a result, there are two plans for The Long Dark and its survival mode, which will take place over the next two years. The first is to continue updating it, working on bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and adding items and maps from the fifth episode of Wintermute. To support this, the second aspect is paid DLC, details of which are slim, but “they’re probably not quite what you’d expect. Both expand the TLD experience in new ways. At least one of the DLCs will be structured along similar lines to our Tales From The Far Territory expansion pass, and the other will be… different from that.”
This then leaves Blackfrost. Fortunately, there don’t appear to have been any layoffs, but the studio has “moved some internal people from (Blackfrost) to support other Core (The Long Dark) and DLC work,” described above. At the very least, a gameplay reveal should be shared before the end of the year for Blackfrost, so for now it looks like Hinterland is committed to releasing it. No real bad news yet! Fingers crossed that it stays that way.
