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The Long Dark to offer players a season pass & paid DLC for Survival Mode

Hinterland Studios is creating new paid expansion content for The Long Dark's Survival Mode, which should launch in late 2022.

TJ Denzer

April 29, 2022 1:00 PM

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The Long Dark has been a generous game. Over the many years of its growth, Hinterland Studio has brought content and updates to both the sandbox Survival Mode and Story Mode for free as long as you owned the base game. According to a recent developer diary, Hinterland is preparing to launch The Long Dark’s first paid content later in 2022 in the form of individual DLC or a season pass.

Hinterland Studio announced the initial details of its plans for paid content in The Long Dark in a new and lengthy developer diary from Raphael van Lierop, creator of The Long Dark. According to Lierop, not only is the studio pursuing paid content for Survival Mode as a means to better sustain development on the game, it was actually requested by a large portion of the community. With this in mind, Hinterland plans to launch paid content for Survival Mode in the form of a season pass. It will also make that paid content available individually and continue to offer free content updates alongside any new paid DLC.

This is an interesting move for The Long Dark, which has been getting free content on top of the base game since 2014 as the game went through early access, fleshed out Survival Mode, and put out four episodes of the Wintermute Story Mode. In our official review of the game in 2021, we called The Long Dark “the pinnacle of survival” for how incredible the exploration was inside and outside of Story Mode. Lierop has also spoken on the future of Survival Mode before and it looks like the upcoming paid DLC is the major culmination of that discussion.

With plans to launch something in late 2022, it will still be a bit before we see how The Long Dark’s first paid content and season pass for Survival Mode shake out, so stay tuned as we await further details on what The Long Dark’s paid DLC will entail.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.