Hinterland Games is a new kid on the block, made up of triple-A game developers who are working on an all new independently-developed game called The Long Dark. The game is described as a first person survival simulation for the PC.
I got with Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop to talk about the company and their inaugural title.
Let's begin by talking about Hinterland Games. How'd the studio first come about?
Raphael: After shipping Space Marine I felt I needed a change. The big triple-A productions were starting to feel like a slog, and I wanted to strike out as an independent. When I discarded the notion that I had to live in a big city to make great games, my wife and I decided to move our family to a more remote setting. This is where the idea for Hinterland, the studio, was born.
The game itself, The Long Dark, is one of those projects that has incubated in my head in various forms over the years. I feel like I needed a lot of years as a developer and gamer to understand what I truly wanted to make. Then, when I started pulling the team together, everyone brought their own point of view and creative energy into the mix and over time the initial vision evolved into something much stronger, much clearer. For us, the game and the studio are both very much about holding on to our creative independence and staying true to our ideals as developers.
We want to create something meaningful that our players connect strongly with and feel ownership of. They are our partners.
The Long Dark is clearly walking in uncharted territory. Could you talk about the inspiration behind The Long Dark's design?
Raphael: I've always been a fan of the sprawling environmental exploration games like STALKER, Fallout 3, and more recently by the excellent Red Dead Redemption.
We approached The Long Dark from the point of view, how can we create that amazing feeling of exploration and that sense of losing yourself in an environment, without the benefit of a huge budget and team? Obviously we're not going to be able to achieve the scope of those games with budgets in the tens of millions, but we believe that combining the deeper survival simulation gameplay — which involves a lot of exploration and searching for resources, seeking out knowledge about the world, interacting with other survivors, applying survival skills to overcome various environmental hazards — combining this with a beautiful art style (created by Hinterland's art director, Hokyo Lim, who was the art director on League of Legends and The Unfinished Swan), and some really strong storytelling (largely thanks to Marianne Krawczyk who wrote all the God of War games), we think these things combined and presented in a really thought-provoking package will allow us to give our players a fresh take on the post-disaster setting.
Why develop the game for the PC and not, say, the PS4 or Xbox One?
Raphael: We're not ruling out PS4 and Xbox One in the future if that's what our players ask for, but for the time being we feel PC is the best platform for us. It offers the best combination of openness and flexibility, the strongest self-publishing options, and really our roots as gamers and developers go back to a lot of PC games.
I worked on the original Dawn of War and Company of Heroes RTS games at Relic. Alan Lawrance, the tech director at Hinterland, is a 16-year veteran of Volition and helped ship every Saints Row, Red Faction, and Descent game from Volition, many of the early games on PC. Dave Chan, Hinterland's audio director, was the original audio guy at BioWare and worked on most of their early titles including Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Mass Effect. And again, Hokyo Lim, Hinterland's art director, has left his mark on PC games by creating the art style for League of Legends.
So we have a really strong pedigree as PC game developers. That said, we're also excited about the possibility of taking this experience to other platforms — we've already mentioned PC, we're going to launch on Mac and Linux as well, and who knows, we'd like to explore consoles and tablets too if they make sense for us down the road.
What engine is the game being developed on? Tell us a little about the software powering the game.
Raphael: We're building The Long Dark with Unity. Unity is an amazingly powerful engine and just perfect for a small independent studio like Hinterland. Alan is an incredibly tech director and is able to do some amazing things with the engine.
We're building technology on top of its core functionality, but for the most part our focus is to be a studio that creates experiences, not one that creates technology for the sake of technology. Unity is a great foundation for us, as it has been for hundreds of other independent developers.
Is there a narrative to The Long Dark? How emergent is the game's narrative?
Raphael: Yes, we're very story focused at Hinterland. But, we also believe that the game should feel like the player's story. So we're striking the balance between having our own authorial voice present in the game, but empowering the player to make their own choices and leave their own mark on the story and game.
Our belief is that players want to feel empowered to drive the game experience, but they are also choosing to enter the world we are creating because they trust us to deliver something interesting, compelling. Something worth their time and money. And our strategy to build worlds and IP that can exist across multiple mediums means we have to think about "big picture" storytelling — not just what's happening in the game, but how that impacts the broader universe we are creating, and how to ensure we can keep our promise to the player.
When can we expect to play the game?
Raphael: We want to release next Fall, so 2014. We're really excited to see how the community reacts to the studio and game — so far the response has been incredible — and we're really looking forward to what people think about our Kickstarter campaign, launching next Monday, September 16th. We hope your readers join us on our journey!
