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The Long Dark

Hinterland on survival and storytelling in The Long Dark

"It's my personal story of how I managed to survive."

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Fresh from their big announcement at E3, Hinterland Studio's Raphael van Lierop talks us through the trials of surviving early access on both PC and Xbox One.

During the interview we discuss the game's setting, and what it's going to be like for players to survive in the barren wilderness where the game is set.

"Every minute that passes, you're closer to death in our game," Hinterland's cofounder told us. "Death is an inevitability in our game, everyone will eventually die....

"But I think what is interesting in The Long Dark is the contrast we have with the sense of the world and the feeling of beauty that's in the world, contrasted with the danger in nature. And that is true to what nature is; nature is incredibly beautiful, but nature doesn't care if you survive or not. It's really neutral in that sense."

The Long Dark

The setting is a compelling one, with players battling the elements and trying to survive and relearn the basic skills forgotten by a society grown reliant on technology. We wondered whether the narrative was about those wider themes, or if it was a more personal journey.

"I think what we're trying to do, because sandbox is really purely about the player's story, it's the minute to minute decisions that I make and my personal story of how I managed to survive.

"With the story mode we really wanted to deliver like an actual authored story, so we have characters that we're creating, we have a world that we're creating, because we want to bring our players into that."

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The narrative that the studio want to convey is being supported by some big names from the world of VO:

"We really believe strongly in storytelling. We have a lot of pretty big ambitions for what we want to do in story mode. We have some amazing talent that we've attached to project, I don't know if you remember hearing of this before but we have Mark Meer, Jennifer Hale, Elias Toufexis, and David Hayter, who are four of probably the most known voice actors.

"So that's the level of talent that we can attract to the project and the story because people are very, for some reason they're very connected emotionally to the idea of the game, and all themes I mentioned; isolation, and whatnot.

"It's both a personal story because the mechanics of the game are a part of the story of how I survive from day to day, but you will take on the role of a character in the story mode, there is a plot that you're going to follow through, so hopefully it'll have a little bit of both, and in the end players will feel that sense of connection to the world.

"We really want people to fall in love with the characters that we've created for them. That's really important to us," van Lierop concluded.

The game is still in early access on PC and Xbox One, and will remain there until probably later this year, as van Lierop reveals, when the studio are ready to release the story (it's currently the sandbox part of the game that's in early access, not the narrative element) they'll come out of Early Access on Steam and Game Preview on Xbox One.

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