EPISODE FIVE, Post-Launch Update

An Episode Five post-launch status update from our founder and creative director.

Hello players!

We’re about 48 hours after the release of Episode Five, and I just wanted to give you a quick update on what’s been going on.

The team was thrilled to watch the launch live at 10AM Pacific Time, along with our players. We had a successful trailer watch party on YouTube with over 3000 fans logging in to watch and participate in chat, and then we quickly overcame our historical Steam CCU peak and hit the highest concurrent player count on Steam since our launch back in 2014 -- 14,878 concurrents, and we think we might break 15,000 this weekend. 

This means that across all our platforms, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players playing Episode Five. We’ve even had over 500,000 new Steam players join the community in the just the past month! We’re excited to see so many of our players jumping in to see how the WINTERMUTE story resolves. Thanks for making the time to experience this last part of the story!

Unfortunately, we’ve also discovered new bugs that weren’t found before launch. This is, sadly, what often happens when you have 1000s of people playing through the episode at the same time. New player patterns and issues with hardware appear, and new glitches that didn’t show up with a test team of 6-7 now become apparent. Our players are no stranger to bugs, and we’re glad to see that a lot of people have made it through the episode without any issues, but of course we’re not happy for any of the players who have hit progress blockers along the way.

The Test and Development teams have both been working hard in the lead-up to launch and since launch to prepare a hotfix, which is currently slated for release next week, April 8th (Pacific Time). This hotfix will include about 300 fixes (yes it’s a big number, but most of them are minor environment bugs like floating objects, etc.), and should address some of the more frequent major issues with Episode Five that some players have encountered, specifically:

• Multiple issues with progression and UI objective text in Suzuki

• Perseverance Mills objective confusion

• Multiple crashes/progression blockers involving checkpoint/autosaves in Part 2

• Unexplained deaths during gameplay

• Jace issues while traversing the Mine

• Players getting stuck or able to go out of the intended play area

• Shotgun adjustments

• Certain trailers trapping players

I also wanted to share this personal message from Andrew, who heads up our Launch team and is responsible for Test. It’s important that you know there are humans on the other side of these bug reports you send in, who work hard to make the game as good as the team can make it:

***

[c]We are thrilled that many of you are enjoying Episode 5, but we are also aware that many of you are encountering issues that detract from the experience we intended Players to have. [/c]

[c]
To that point, the team is currently working on a bug fix release that will contain a myriad of fixes for bugs that Players are encountering on Episode 5. The last thing we want to do is rush this hotfix out without proper verification and validation against issues reported by the Community. We are working as fast as we can to get this hotfix to our players with a target to release on Steam for Wednesday, April 8th, with consoles to follow ASAP.[/c]

[c]
Please continue to post issues in our Forums and via our Support Portal, so we can ensure that the highest impact issues are addressed with the Hotfix.[/c]

[c]
We appreciate your patience and understanding at this time as we work on getting an updated Episode 5 build rolled out to players.[/c]

[c]
- Andrew[/c]

***

For my part, I know how hard the team worked in the lead up to Episode Five, and while some of you see bugs in the game now, I see all the bugs that got fixed before launch -- and there were thousands of them. I’ve seen some comments in the community to the effect that we released the episode without any testing, which I can assure you is not the case at all. We have a talented, dedicated internal test team who works very closely with the development team to ensure the episode (and all our releases) are in the best shape possible before launch. It’s impossible to catch all the bugs, despite our best efforts, and I assure you nobody feels the pain of launch bugs more than us. All we want is for your experience of Episode Five to be as enjoyable as possible, and we care a ton about our work. So, please don’t make assumptions about our dedication or process -- we are the first players, and the ones who care the most about the game.

We’ve really appreciated the support and patience from many of our players who have been willing to report bugs to our Support Portal, or aggregate bug report threads in the Official Forums and on Reddit. These efforts help us a ton to get the fixes identified, verified, and into the hotfix queue, which can then go out to all our players.

I know for some of you, these fixes will come too late, as your experience of Episode Five has already been defined, but I’m hopeful that with time you’ll come back and give it another go, if you did indeed run into issues during your first attempt.

And for those of you who have made it through Episode Five and sent kind words of love and support to the team -- we thank you for that! It means the world to us that you have enjoyed our work.

Since the Switch certification process takes quite a bit longer than the other platforms (20-30 days), our plan was always to wait for the first hotfix to be out the door before submitting a build to Nintendo for certification. We’re hoping to be able to verify this next batch of fixes in the Switch build, and then submit to Nintendo for verification. That means Episode Five won’t likely come out much before the end of April, but we’ll keep you posted as things progress. The best way to stay on top of development news is to check the News & Updates section of our Official Forums. This is where all our cross-platform community of players across Steam, EGS, GoG, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch tend to come together. 

You might have missed it within all the rest of the news leading up to the Episode Five launch, but after three years, THE LONG DARK is back on Game Pass! This is a great time to download the game, and if you find you like it, we hope you consider purchasing the TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY DLC. You can find more info on what’s included in the DLC here.

We recently shared the news that Volume 3 of the soundtrack for THE LONG DARK will be launching on April 22nd. It will first appear on Steam, and then on Bandcamp, just like the other two volumes. We’ll work on bringing it to other platforms in the future.

One of the most common questions we had leading up to the Episode Five release was, would the Ep5 regions end up in Survival. At the time we said we’d talk more about it once we had the Episode Five launch firmly behind us. We’re seeing this question come up a lot now that people have seen what’s in the episode. It’s still a little too early to share our specific plans, but we know you want to see as much of Ep5 in Survival as you can get, including some of the new mechanics. As long as we feel it makes sense to include them, we will. Again, we’ll share more details in the future, so please be patient while we figure out the best way to do this.

We’ve heard that some of you don’t like it. 

I like it, I believe in it, and it fits into my future plans. Don’t expect a “redux”.

If you encounter bugs in the game and want to help out with the fixing process, we appreciate all your reports submitted to our Support Portal. Please continue doing that. It’s a much more effective way to help us improve the game than submitting a negative review. Remember that we are a small team working hard to improve the game for you, and although you might not love everything we have made, it has been made with love and respect.

Thanks for your patience as we get the Episode Five hotfixes into your hands ASAP, and I will check in with you again in a few weeks, if not sooner.

- Raph