THE LONG DARK: IRON ROAD — Launch Details for Tuesday, October 27th

Hello players,

We’re excited for you all to dive into IRON ROAD, the new Early Access Expansion DLC for THE LONG DARK. IRON ROAD adds a whole new island, a train, and a deep mystery that will unfold over ~18-24 months of Early Access. 

When you buy IRON ROAD, you’re paying for access to the features and content available at launch, but also everything that will be included in the updates we’ll release along the way. For the full roadmap, outlining a range of planned features and content, visit the official website for THE LONG DARK.

LAUNCH TIMING

IRON ROAD will be available tomorrow, Tuesday, October 27th, at 11AM Pacific time. To find out what time that is for you locally, please refer to the following global release timings map, or consult one of the many time zone calculators available online.

PRICING

IRON ROAD will launch for $24.99 USD, with a 10% launch discount. At around the midway point through the planned Roadmap, we will increase the price by $5 to $29.99 USD. And then when IRON ROAD hits 1.0 status, we’ll increase by $5 again, to $34.99 USD.

This pricing reflects some planned increases to general TLD product pricing across the board, so while for a little while IRON ROAD will be more expensive than the current price for the SURVIVAL MODE base game, things won’t stay that way forever. 

The main point here is that if you’re interested in buying IRON ROAD, the best time to get it is always now!

WHY EARLY ACCESS?

For more information about Steam’s Early Access development model, please review their documentation here: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6554-ED29-FBDB-1612

Why did we choose this model for IRON ROAD development?

IRON ROAD adds new and significant gameplay systems to THE LONG DARK’s core survival sandbox. The addition of the train is a game-changer in many ways. The new island is designed specifically for train gameplay, using a new map-creation approach specifically designed for the needs of the train. The train is more than just a way to get around; it’s a mobile shelter that has components that need to be maintained (and eventually, upgraded), and the train has its own “survival needs”. The train systems themselves will need a lot of player feedback to ensure we get the tuning right. Building it alongside our players is the best way we know how to build something we’ll both be happy with in the end.

Whereas TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY added incremental gameplay systems to the base game layer, IRON ROAD adds significant new systems that have the potential to really change the way the game feels for players. This is exciting, but also brings with it some anxiety for us, and for you! Making the game Early Access highlights, front and centre, that this is a work in progress, that depends on your involvement to reach its full potential.

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.

The development team will also review and process all the Feedback notes, and will work hard to assess and incorporate useful player feedback into the iteration loop on the game. This doesn’t mean that we’ll act on every bit of feedback we get, but we will read it all and we’ll act on the information that we believe will help make the game as good as it can be.

In some cases, we may see bugs or feedback that require a bit more information to be helpful, and in those cases someone from Hinterland may contact you directly to ask for more information. We may request that you submit an official IRON ROAD feedback ticket to the Support Portal, where someone from our team may request more detailed information about your hardware, save files, etc.

It’s a time-consuming process, but we believe this is the best way to ensure we’re using human intelligence to analyze your feedback, and then using that information to make well-informed decisions around how to improve the game for all our players! We appreciate everyone who chooses to support this process with us.

As always, please educate yourself about our Community Guidelines when you participate in discussions with our development team, and other players.

EXPERIMENTAL vs. RELEASE BRANCH

When we launch IRON ROAD, you’ll play it in the Release Branch of the game. When we hotfix the game, we will typically hotfix the Release version. But when we work in major iterations in between, we may opt to push builds to an Experimental Branch, which will allow us to release early versions of key systems and get early feedback on them before they are pushed into the Release version of the game. This protects your save files and also gives us a chance to test something with players ahead of time in case we think it might benefit from a bit of pre-release feedback.

We’ll be sharing more information on how to access the Experimental Branch when we get closer to releasing our first update. You should only participate in the Experimental Branch playtesting if you enjoy trying things in an early state and don’t mind encountering bugs or early tuning on game systems.

Saves from the Release Branch will be protected from the Experimental Branch, and vice versa, to avoid players losing their saves due to Experimental build instability. We’ll share more details about the mechanics of the Experimental Branch in the coming weeks. For launch, only the Release Branch matters.

EXISTING SAVES

You can definitely use your current favourite TLD save with IRON ROAD; there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues, and there’s no need to create an entirely new save to experience the IRON ROAD content. You’ll find the Fulmar in Desolation Point, and you’ll be able to travel back and forth from Cauldron Island. 

That said, we want to remind everyone that IRON ROAD *is* an Early Access DLC, and that means there is some risk that something could happen to your save. 

If you have a save you would be heartbroken to lose, it might be wise to start IRON ROAD with a new, fresh save, at least until you feel confident in build stability. We’d hate to see players bringing their favourite long-running survival games into IRON ROAD and then losing them due to launch bugs.

WHAT ABOUT SURVIVAL MODE UPDATES?

Tuesday is about launching IRON ROAD. After launch, once the team has had a chance to deal with the initial wave of bugs and feedback, we’ll share another dev diary with details on our plans for maintenance and updating of the Survival Mode base game. So, while there aren’t any fixes to Survival Mode in the Tuesday launch, we haven’t forgotten about it, and we still have plans to update it.

LAUNCH DAY

Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11AM Pacific time, we’ll launch IRON ROAD. We’ll have a trailer which you can watch via a YouTube Premiere on the Hinterland YouTube channel, which we’ll share the link to tomorrow at 10:30AM Pacific (half an hour before launch). Feel free to jump into the Premiere and chat with fellow TLD fans to share your excitement for launch!

The IRON ROAD development team will be actively monitoring the game and community feedback channels for any issues that arise on launch day and beyond, and we will hotfix the game as quickly as possible to ensure your experience is the smoothest it can be.

We hope you enjoy IRON ROAD, the first part of Cauldron Island, the fragments of mystery you encounter along the way, and most of all, the Prototype Train!

All the best, and we’ll look for you along the quiet and lonely tracks of Cauldron Island. Safe travels in the Fulmar!

– The Hinterland Team