WHat does it mean by Season 1?

[himmatsj]

Is it like the walking dead, or how?

How come a survival game has a first, second and third season?

[axios2006]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hinterlandgames/the-long-dark-a-first-person-post-disaster-surviva/posts/607852

Update 10 -- Scope of the Game & Dev Budget

Hello Hinterlanders,

Another exciting day at Hinterland HQ! Today we announced the addition of Elias Toufexis to the already formidable team on The Long Dark. And while the team is busy at work prepping content updates for later this week, we thought this might be a good time to address a couple of questions that are coming up fairly regularly from the community: How Much Game Am I Backing?, and How Can You Make This Game for $200,000?

How Much Game Am I Backing?

Some of you have asked us about the structure of the game and how much content you're getting for backing us. On our Kickstarter page, and in many of our interviews, we've talked about the episodic nature of the game's narrative, which makes some people feel they aren't getting the "full game" by backing The Long Dark on Kickstarter.

To answer that question properly, we need to discuss the structure of the game, and some of the reasons why we've chosen to set things up this way.

Our story structure is inspired by episodic television, in the sense that The Long Dark will have threads of Stories (missions) unified together in a cohesive narrative thread that we're calling Episodes. An episode is typically made up of 4-5 Stories (missions), each of those Stories combining the survival sandbox mechanics with some more authored objectives and specific plot points. Each of these Episodes will have a beginning and an end. Like a television series, the Episodes will be combined to form a Season, and the Season itself will have a clear narrative arc, a beginning, middle, and end, with a conclusion and possibly a cliffhanger as to what happens next.

So, like this:

Stories --> Episodes --> Season

Our intent with The Long Dark is to ship Season One of this experience: Winter. We see Winter having 5-6 Episodes, each of those Episodes having 4-5 Stories (missions). We estimate this will result in about 5-6 hours of gameplay time. (It's a little hard to pinpoint this number since the game is a simulation and the player has a lot of freedom regarding when they want to do things.) That's what we call "Survival Story" mode.

To us, this structure is similar (if not identical) to what you see in many open-world games, like Fallout 3 or Red Dead Redemption, for example. They just use different names to describe their structure: quests, missions, etc.

In addition to the Survival Story mode, we will have a non-narrative Survival Sandbox mode, which lets you play in a freeform sandbox environment where your goal is simply to survive as long as possible. We'd like to provide a variety of "Territories" for the Survival Sandbox, and let you play with presets like the general weather conditions, abundance or lack of wildlife, abundance or lack of other Survivors, supplies, etc. Each of these "Territories" would draw inspiration from one of the major "Territories" in the Story Sandbox game. So, things like Mountain Wilderness, Coastal Highway, Crossroads Town & Environs, etc.

So, when you back The Long Dark on Kickstarter, what you are backing is a cohesive, complete stand-alone game that will feature 5-6 hours of Survival Story content, and potentially dozens of hours of Survival Sandbox content.

If we are fortunate enough to have a strong following and good success with the first Season of The Long Dark, we'd like to expand it with future Seasons, each of them having roughly the same amount of content as The Long Dark Season 1 (Winter), but focusing on a different Season (both narratively, and literally). So, Season 2 would be Spring, and would continue Mackenzie's story -- as well as the story of all the supporting characters you encounter along the way -- in a brand new locale, with new weather conditions switching up aspects of the core survival simulation (ex. more wildlife, easier access to water, fewer remaining man-made supplies, more disease and sickness, etc.).

You can think of these future Seasons as the sequels to The Long Dark. They would be complete stand-alone game experiences as well, just like the sequel to a popular triple-A game would be a complete stand-alone experience that would extend the previous game and iterate on its core mechanics.

So, when we talk about the game being Episodic in structure, we're really talking about narrative structure as opposed to how much content you'll be getting, or how and what we might expand it in the future.