It’s time for another exclusive interview! Today we have Raphael Van Lierop, Creative Director of Hinterland Games, who’ll be talking with us about their first project, The Long Dark, currently on a Kickstarter campaign.
First of all, thank you for being here. Can you describe briefly The Long Dark for our fans?
Thanks for your interest in our project. The Long Dark is a first-person survival simulation set in the Northern Wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. You play Will Mackenzie, a bush pilot who crashes in the remote wilderness and has to quickly learn how to survive. As the player explores the world, they learn more about the survival sandbox and also about what has happened to the world as they encounter other survivors. It’s not an action game, but a slower-paced, more exploration-focused experience. Fans of open-world exploration games like Fallout 3 or STALKER will like The Long Dark.
Out of curiosity - did you settle in Vancouver Island and then opted to make a game about the wilderness, or the reverse? Canada is home to many different studios in the industry, but most of them are placed in cities. Are you actually developing the game while based in the countryside as shown in the Kickstarter video?
The origins of the studio and project are definitely intertwined. My wife and I decided to move our family from Vancouver to a more quiet, remote part of Vancouver Island. We were also tired of moving for my work. But I didn’t want to give up on making great games with great teams, despite the fact there’s no real game development community where I live. So I founded Hinterland with the intention of recruiting the best talent I could find, with the understanding that nobody would have to move their families to make this game. So, the studio is headquartered in Northern Vancouver Island and the development team is distributed across several hubs. When we get together face-to-face, we like to meet in environments that will be inspirational for the project. The Kickstarter video was shot on Mount Washington, a ski hill about 30 minutes from where I live. But that’s pretty much the environment I see every day, and it’s certainly had a big influence on the tone and atmosphere of the game.
You seem to have a bit of an “All-Stars” team at Hinterland. It’s quite rare to see all this previous AAA experience in an indie developer, so how did the team get together in the first place?
We all have a common background working on big triple-A productions, and all of us now want to put our talents together to work on something more personal, more creative, and something that wouldn’t survive the development process of working with a traditional, risk-averse publisher who wants to make a “product.” We’re making an experience. Also, talented people want to work with other talented people, so as the team came online it became even easier to hire more great people. Everyone fell in love with the game concept, the studio concept, and everyone is motivated to make something great that will have meaning, hopefully for years to come.
I’m curious about the notion of “post-digital” world. You mentioned “mysterious aurorae” disabling technology, so I’m wondering if there is any kind of supernatural element to the game, and if you plan to unveil more of what happened during the game itself or perhaps it will be more of an underlying mystery.
Supernatural is an interesting word to describe it, because I think what happens in the game is supernatural but only in the literal sense of the word. There are no ghosts, spirits, zombies, vampires, etc. Our in-game aesthetics may be highly stylized but our world and narrative are very much grounded in reality. We may take certain artistic liberties at times, but generally there shouldn’t be anything in the game’s background that is completely out of the realm of possibility. We might make the situation extreme, but we’re trying not to take any easy shortcuts and rely on “magic science” to make the scenario work. The truth is that real life, real nature, and human nature, give us everything we need to present a haunting yet beautiful point of view on the end of the world (as we know it).
How much “North” is the wildness featured in The Long Dark, and are you going to use fictional or real names regarding places, points of interest etc.? Also, approximately how big will the game world be, and is it free roaming from the start or will the areas be unlocked gradually?
We’re taking a page out of Rockstar’s book and creating a fictional world that is very closely based on the real world, to the degree that for most people it should feel like a real place. For place names, we’ll have a mix of real names and fictional names, partly because we are inviting our backers to help name locations and other things in the game. It’s a little too early for us to nail down exactly how big the world will be, but it will feel large and free-flowing. We will have certain regions that unlock based on progress, to facilitate storytelling, but this is in our Story mode. In our Sandbox mode, which dispenses with narrative in favour of setting up survival scenarios (large areas with certain preconditions around weather, wildlife density, resource density, etc.), players will have the freedom to move around the in-game world as they wish. It’s important to keep in mind that in the end, we are a relatively small project — both in terms of budget and team size. The Long Dark is inspired by games like Fallout 3, STALKER, and even Red Dead Redemption, but our scope will be smaller than those games which had budgets 50-100 times larger than ours.
Can you tell us how much a day of game time corresponds to real playing time, approximately? Also, you mentioned “completely dynamic wildlife behaviour“. Does that mean that they will potentially attack each other as well as the player?
We’re still working on tuning the right ratio of in-game time to real time. It certainly won’t be real-time. We want time to pass in such a way that players are conscious of it and are doing what they need to do to avoid being outside after dark when it gets much colder, wildlife are more active, etc. In terms of wildlife, our intention is for wildlife to be able to interact in realistic ways. So yes, they could prey on each other.
From what I could gather, it seems like encountering Survivors might be risky. Am I right in guessing that by killing a survivor, you could then loot his/her belongings? If so, what will be the incentive for players NOT to kill every survivor they encounter?
One of the key resources in the game is Knowledge. Knowledge could be about the location of a supply cache, some knowledge that might help the player understand something about how to navigate the world better or more safely, information about the general state of the world, where the hazards are, etc. The best way to get knowledge is from other Survivors. If you kill everyone you see, you’ll certainly be able to take their stuff, but at some point you’ll just have “stuff” and be completely ignorant about the world around you. This will make it harder for you to progress, because you’ll simply have to spend resources wandering aimlessly versus exploring with clear, direct purpose. Also, Knowledge has a decay factor, which means it won’t be valid forever. This puts pressure on the player to act on it when they have it, and potentially prioritize between multiple points of Knowledge that may be decaying and disappear before they can get to them…
There are a great number of parameters such as warmth, thirst, condition, fatigue, calorie etc. that we are used to check in the real world, but almost never in a game world. Are you worried that this could be a burden for some players? Will you have “Easy, Medium, Hard” etc. difficulty settings with different thresholds for these parameters to be met?
Since The Long Dark is a simulation, we’re expecting more from our players than perhaps they are used to having to keep track of. We started out with the belief that in many cases games have become far too easy — there’s too much hand holding, and too much fear around presenting challenges to the player and losing the mainstream audience. Our solution is to not go after a mainstream audience, and not “dumb down” the game for our players. We think they are ready to be challenged by The Long Dark, and we think they’ll connect with the game in a more compelling way due to feeling that they have genuinely overcome challenges, versus being spoon-fed content while they sat their passively.
What can you tell us about the progression system for survival skills? Is it RPG-like, and do you expect players to make choices in terms of which skills they will advance or maybe they are supposed to eventually maximize them all?
We’re still working out those details, but basically we want to balance a mixture of player skills and character skills. I used to play a lot of simulators when I was a kid, and one of the things I loved about them — that you don’t find in a lot of games today — was that your skill as a player, how good you were at reading the information was giving you and making good decisions, was what distinguished the good players from the bad. The game didn’t do all the thinking for you. I’ve worked on a few strategy games so I understand something about the balance between what the game does for the player and what the player does themselves. So with The Long Dark, we’re pushing more in the direction of expecting our players to invest some time in learning how the world works and mastering the survival sandbox. And of course, their character will also have certain skills, or have to learn certain skills, and where appropriate we’ll use those skills to support interesting gameplay choices.
How long are you planning the main story to last?
Well, our hope is that we’ll continue being able to make more games in the world of The Long Dark, continuing the story, in future installments, sequels, seasons, whatever you want to call them. But for this first release, we are aiming for 5-6 hours of Story mode, and dozens of hours of Sandbox mode.
I know that in the KS FAQ, you specified that The Long Dark will be a single player game. However, I must say that these simulation elements make it a potentially interesting game even in a multiplayer mode, in a similar way to DayZ (minus the zombies). If the game is successful and the community asks for it, would you consider developing a multiplayer expansion or DLC as well?
We see a lot of the same potential. Our decision to focus on single-player right now, has to do with our passion for creating worlds and building interesting stories within them. It also has to do with managing scope, and not trying to bite off more than we can chew. The project is already very ambitious for a small team and budget! But, we have built our careers on risky projects.
All that said, we would love to expand the game experience, across more games, more platforms, and even online if that makes sense for the game and is something players want. Games that people love have to be able to evolve too, so they don’t get stale. This is one of the things that is challenging in the mainstream game industry today, and one of the reasons why each of the members of the Hinterland team are dedicated to making this game happen. We want to make something meaningful that lasts and stays with people even after they have stopped playing. And to do that, you have to be ready to take risks, and let the game grow into what it wants or needs to be.
Thank you for your time, and good luck with the campaign!
