Things are shifting around a bit over at The Long Dark developer Hinterland Studio. Earlier this year, The Long Dark’s story mode wrapped up with the release of Wintermute’s fifth and final episode. After that, you may have fairly assumed that focus would have been mostly placed on the sequel that was announced in 2024, Blackfrost. But according to Hinterland, while Blackfrost is still in the works, the main focus will actually be put on The Long Dark’s survival mode for a while.
“When we first announced Blackfrost, the sequel to The Long Dark, the game industry was in a very different place,” writes the developer in a Steam blog post. “In the short time since, entire business models have been thrown into chaos, the geopolitical situation has become extremely complicated, the picture of what the next generation of console hardware will be has become a lot less clear, and the amount of time and money players spend on new games has declined as everyone turns to the comfort and security of games they already know.”
So, as a result, there are two plans for The Long Dark and its survival mode, which will take place over the course of the next two years. The first is to continue updating it, working on bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and adding in items and maps from Wintermute’s fifth episode. To support this, the second aspect is paid DLC, of which details are slim, but “they probably aren’t quite what you are expecting. Both expand the TLD experience in novel ways. At least one of the DLCs will be structured along similar lines as our Tales From The Far Territory expansion pass, and the other will be…different from that.”
This then leaves Blackfrost. Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like any layoffs have taken place, but the studio has “shifted some internal folks off of [Blackfrost] to support the other Core [The Long Dark] and DLC work,” described above. At the very least, a gameplay reveal is promised to be shared before the end of the year for Blackfrost, so at the moment it does sound like Hinterland are committed to releasing it. No real bad news just yet! Fingers crossed it stays that way.