Builds for the aether + underworld pylons in my forever world!

World generation stuck the dungeon entrance in a pit in the side of a hill, and I had already built up the areas around it at a higher elevation, so the dungeon entrance ended up basically underground. That also let me terraform+fill in (with basic micro builds) the space between my Hallow and Graveyard, which was nice. The teleporter there takes you into the dungeon proper. The small shrines use echo-painted walls and bubble blocks to make them act as proper NPC houses for the pylon.

100,000 people were killed when the meteor struck Drakkenheim; all land within 100 miles of the impact crater is toxic and uninhabitable; the Haze is growing at an accelerating, exponential rate. If major progress isn't made in the next decade towards reversing it, Earth will gradually become uninhabitable and, eventually, the planet will be destroyed.

And yet nobody!! Is doing anything!! About it!!

Everyone is mining delerium to get rich or starting civil wars to restore a useless monarchy or playing politics or starting a cult around the idea that destroying the world is maybe a good thing, meanwhile the world gets closer to the point of no return every day.

The situation is growing desperate and Ryan suggests seizing control of Drakkenheim because that's the only effective thing they can do at this point, but everyone around her is more concerned with placating the Church and a now-dead monarchy, and so they steal credit for her research and brand her malfeasant and throw her out of the Academy, and while all of this happening, the world is STILL GETTING CLOSER TO BEING DESTROYED HELLO PEOPLE CAN WE FOCUS ON THAT!?

In the final episode of the story, there's a twenty minute long cutscene consisting entirely of an NPC lore-dumping at you. This single scene is payoff for one of the long-running mysteries of the game and the reward for the previous several hours of gameplay where said NPC constantly reminds you that she won't answer your questions yet and the research she's doing here is so fringe and extremist that no one believes her.

And then we get to the cutscene, where she explains that she was tracking solar cycles to predict the next geomagnetic storm, and that the current geomagnetic storm happening around us is the "big one."

Except...we already knew that. "Survive the harsh winter after a geomagnetic storm destroyed all electronics" is the pitch for the game.

Nor is it such a fringe subject as to be career-ruining...unlike the follow up that auroras cause brain damage and violent/erratic behavior, which is 1) just accepted as fact, 2) is another part of the basic premise of the game, and 3) her belief in it is not the reason why the scientist is considered an extremist. (And while a good portion of that cutscene is spent effectively reading the Wikipedia page for the Carrington Event out loud, the ultimate explanation for the brain damage is "magic dementia that's cured by alzheimer's vaccines," no further info ever given.)

Yes, the primary point of the scene is to emphasize that the geomagnetic storm is worldwide and likely will last beyond our characters' lifetimes, but to just slip that into a twenty minute long recap of everything else...

???????

The game's writing just feels so disconnected and loose. Episodes lack connection and casualty -- each new event feels less like the culmination of the story up to that point and more like someone saying "and then X happens and it's cool!" This is only further reinforced by episode 5 constantly teleporting us around and removing our gear.

Story beats are either forced into becoming cryptic/mysteries when they make no sense to be purely for suspense/intrigue or they're dropped and forgotten seemingly at random. The pacing is wild and instead of the story and its themes being reinforced across the five episodes of the game, we end up with twenty minutes of someone explaining the lore that was never touched upon until now.

We didn't need a twenty minute long lore dump! If every last bit that information has to be conveyed to us, well, we just spent the last two episodes traveling with the PhD student of the NPC that gives the lore dump! We could have used any of that time to hint towards the greater story, instead of constantly reminding the player that it's too complicated and secretive to explain yet.

The Long Dark is at its strongest when the story is left ambiguous and subtle, with a greater focus on themes than flashy villains. The game is quiet and somber. The survival mode excels both in environmental storytelling -- corpses frozen holding hands, a knife stabbed into a doorway, etc. -- and in slowly delivering a story, like the series of notes left behind (admittedly a Kickerstarter backer submission) detailing a young couple falling in love as their small group of survivors slowly dies off after the power went out. Heck, the survival mode has a full, voice-acted storyline in the form of Tales from the Far Territory, and it's reception has been better than Wintermute as a whole!

I've been playing this game a long time. Back before Wintermute, the game was just a survival sandbox mode meant to test mechanics. And this mode eventually spun off into a pseudo-separate, successful survival game!

And so it's wild to me that survival mode was originally built for Wintermute, because by the point of episodes 4/5 of Wintermute, you can tell that it doesn't want to be a lonely, open-world survival game at all. Wintermute gives you all the resources you need to survive, removes major survival mechanics (cooking, crafting, mapping), and turns into a thriller/shooter.

(Also, the CEO/game director has returned to the forums/Reddit to argue with people about how his game is actually perfect, which is...awkward.)

Just...ten years of development on Wintermute, and it would have been a better story if they just stitched together the survival mode challenges (Hopeless Rescue, Archivist, As the Dead Sleep) and the tales (Signal Void, Buried Echoes, Last Horizon).

Sketch continuing to iterate on Chris' next outfit design! There were a few attempts in between the last one I posted and this one. Notes below the cut.

I moved a conversation between Chris and the Clothier to Hardmode -- this gives the Clothier more narrative importance in Hardmode, and keeping it in its original place I feel would have muddled the tone a bit -- having it come after Andrew's death gives more weight to both his death and the conversation.

I slimmed down a conversation between Andrew and the Witch Doctor and moved it up in the script. The main reason for this being that I wanted to use the time immediately preceding Andrew's death to interact with the core cast, and didn't want to step away suddenly to talk to a character with little prior narrative importance. I also think that the message he's trying to send in his conversation with Andrew makes more sense if he gives it earlier than he originally did, as it reinforces Andrew's actions in that chapter better.

I extended the timeskip/"pre-hardmode montage" chapter to cover right up into Andrew's final night alive. I went back and forth on this change a lot, but I feel like it does a much better job building up momentum going into Andrew's death. It also got rid of a kind of unexplained time skip that was messing up the pacing.

I moved all of Andrew's final conversations into one chapter together to better contrast them, and to make room for some...not necessarily resolution, but additional insight into Andrew's past with the Lunatic Cultist.

That all reworks the following few chapters to look like this:

Chap 11 Lunar Interlude: Chris succeeds as a hero while Andrew's fate weighs heavier upon his shoulders. Builds up Chris and Andrew's relationship, fleshes out Chris' character a bit more, and covers most of the remaining pre-hardmode content.

Chap 12 Last Words: Andrew's final night alive. His final conversations with Chris, Alalia, and Malik.

Chap 13 The Wall of Flesh: Reflecting on Andrew's greatest mistake, and the Wall of Flesh fight.

And after that jumping into Hardmode.