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The Long Dark has a huge Survival Mode update

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Surviving in The Long Dark is not easy, this quiet apocalypse with you stuck out in the cold will challenge anyone but now the team at Hinterland are giving you some new stuff to help.

Refresher time! The Long Dark is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies -- only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.

With the latest update, Fearless Navigator, you can now find paint spray cans in the world, which is one of the new major quality of life improvements. Allowing you to mark an area to remember it, which makes it show up on your map. That is something I was sorely missing from it. I often got quite lost in The Long Dark, as they purposefully went for a different approach to other games. It still doesn't make it at all easy but it's a nice and welcome change.

You can also now setup emergency supply caches along travel routes, giving you a few set places to store and grab supplies when you're in a pickle. There's also a nice new auto-walk accessibility feature, which might make it more playable for certain people.

Improvements in multiple other places too. The map itself, for example, can now have layers of info turned on and off. It also helps you locate your caches, keep track of surveyed locations and so on. They go over a lot more detail in the below video:

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In addition to the extra features they also made a few optimizations to improve performance, reduce texture popping and the environment got quite a few little annoyances fixed like places you could get stuck or floating objects.

Loving the direction they're taking with this, probably one of the best survival game experiences available on Linux and one you need to try. You can pick up The Long Dark from Humble Store and Steam. It's also currently 75% off on both stores until May 22.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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4 comments

psy-q May 20, 2020
Opt-in telemetry. That's the way it should be done! Looking at you, mobile games with 12 built-in always-on trackers.


Last edited by psy-q on 20 May 2020 at 12:29 pm UTC
hummer010 May 20, 2020
Hopefully this makes it's way to GOG for us poor suckers who bought the game there. So far, Hinterland has made good on their promise to keep it up to date.
g000h May 20, 2020
I really need to get around to playing this. Looks like my type of survival game, and I've had it in my game library for quite some time, watching these updates keep on coming (and the game getting better).
RanceJustice May 21, 2020
Very nice to see the continual support for The Long Dark. It is one of the truly unique and exceptional single-player focused "survival" games, taking its place alongside Subnautica (and the upcoming Below Zero stand alone expansion), 7 Days To Die, The Forest, Don't Starve / Don't Starve Together, and a few others. Some like The Long Dark is a purely single player experience while others offer multiplayer as an option, but I like to delineate these sorts of titles vs multiplayer focused survival titles such as the very popular ARK: Survival Evolved, Rust, and perhaps best of all Conan Exiles.

Between its in-depth and semi-realistic approach, its Northern setting, and innovative mechanics The Long Dark really feels like a unique challenge where you're far more likely to succumb to the cold, exhaustion, lack of food/water etc.. than you are to die by way of hostile wildlife, though the latter can certainly happen. The long term support for the title is impressive, adding to the main story Campaign (probably the best for new players, currently chapters 1-3 are now available), the open ended Survival mode (where you simply survive as long as you can, though there are achievements to acquire ) and the Scenarios where are somewhere in the middle (each offering an ultimate goal and noting its relative difficulty - from traversing over a mountain ahead of a blizzard, visiting a whole host of landmarks, to an adrenaline-filled 2-parter where you're being hunted by a near invincible bear and must cross a sprawling expanse to procure a weapon capable of putting it down for good!)

These updates often benefit all game modes in one way or another and the developers don't shy away from going back and updating their older work, as evidenced by the "Redux" update to the early chapters of the Wintermute Campaign late last year, remaking them with new features at parity with the (at the time) newly released Chapter 3. The fact that The Long Dark has always offered native Linux support completes the picture that developers Hinterland Studio care a lot about their project and providing an excellent player experience.
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