Village Gamer

It has been revealed in a late night note from Hinterland Games that the team has derived so much useful feedback from The Long Dark‘s early Alpha playtesting, that they want to open up the Sandbox to a much wider audience, and to that end a decision was made to bring the Sandbox Alpha to Steam Early Access in September 2014. Along with this announcement came news of a redesign for the game’s official site and a link to the game’s newest trailer.

The development team’s note went on to say that “being on Steam Early Access will give us, well, access to a wider playtest audience. This will help us do a better job tuning the game’s Sandbox mechanics, fixing bugs and compatibility issues, and help us understand what kind of features and content the community is excited about. We’re really excited by what some of our fellow indies have done through Steam Early Access and how it’s helped them to make better games, and we’re looking forward to taking The Long Dark’s Sandbox mode into Early Access in September.”

“And what about the Story mode? Well, nobody wants to play the story content while it’s still in development. Not only would this introduce massive spoilers, but it would also ensure your first experience of the game’s story content was not your best experience of the game’s story content, and we wouldn’t be satisfied with that. So, we’re holding the Story mode back until the first Episodes are completely finished and we’re ready to share them with you. We promise it’ll be worth the wait.”

In the meantime, here’s the new trailer, featuring narration by Mark Meer, and some incredible music from award-winning composer Cris Velasco:

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcdT1fQQuwY]