Anyone who has played THE LONG DARK over the past years knows that player-informed Early Access has been our main development approach and our guiding light since we first launched THE LONG DARK on Steam Early Access back in 2014. Even after we officially left Early Access with the 1.0 version of THE LONG DARK back in 2017, we continued to update the game, for free, with community feedback, to continue to refine the experience for our players. In December 2022, we launched TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, the first paid DLC for THE LONG DARK. This was released in 6-parts over 24 months, with a single upfront purchase. We also continued to update the base Survival Mode game with free updates along the way. We feel that Hinterland has proven our commitment to the Early Access development model, and while things have often taken us longer than we expected, we’ve always delivered on our promises.
All that said, we know some players may prefer to wait until the game is finished before they buy it, and that’s entirely ok. If you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy participating in the process of an often-updated game, or you don’t like to pay up front for games that aren’t yet complete, we’d prefer that you just wait until the Early Access campaign concludes. It’s not for everyone, and it’s important that you make a decision that you feel good about. It’s also important that the players who are happy to participate in Early Access feel good about their choice to support it.
Ultimately, the choice to bring IRON ROAD to Early Access is motivated by our desire to create it within an iterative development approach that will result in the best possible experience for our players. We appreciate that Valve has chosen us as one of the few studios permitted to release Early Access DLC, and we’re grateful to all our players who want to support Hinterland and the growth of IRON ROAD over the coming months. We know you’re putting your trust in us by purchasing DLC that isn’t complete, and we take that trust very seriously.
Console plans
Since we announced IRON ROAD a couple of weeks ago, we’ve had many questions about our plans for a console release. For now, the team on IRON ROAD is focused solely on the Steam version. This is primarily because it’s the best and easiest platform for us to update the game on for the Early Access approach to work well, which allows us to release updates and hotfixes as quickly as possible without having to wait on long certification timings or other platform-related delays. Focusing on a single platform at the beginning will also allow us to focus our internal testing and release resources to support frequent updates. It will also allow us to ensure the foundation of IRON ROAD systems and content is really solid before we release it onto the consoles, which tend to be harder for us to hotfix and update frequently.
We would like to bring IRON ROAD to our console players eventually, and we’ll be having that conversation with the console platforms to see how effectively they can support our Early Access approach. While we can’t commit to any timings at the moment, you should assume that our focus for IRON ROAD will be on Steam for at least the first half of next year, with the potential for us to release on console later in 2027. But that’s just a guess at this point; there are many discussions we’ll need to have before we can commit to a specific timeline.
Reporting feedback
Our main feedback channels for IRON ROAD will be the Official Hinterland Forums, and the Steam forums. We’ve set up separate subforums for Bugs, and for Feedback. Feedback is meant to simply be general notes about how you’re enjoying the current iteration, how you think it could be improved, what you’d like to see in the future, etc. Bugs are issues with the game where it isn’t working as intended.
We’re asking you to keep Bugs and Feedback separate to facilitate our work to fix bugs as quickly as possible, as our intake of information around Bugs is entirely manual -- we’ll read and process every post, and the Test team will document all bug reports and compare them against our internal database, ensuring the development team gets all the information they need to be able to fix the bugs as efficiently as possible.
