The Long Dark has done well since its release in 2014.
According to developer Hinterland, The Long Dark has now surpassed 5 million units, with another 3.5 million active players coming to the game through Xbox Game Pass and the Epic Game Store where it was a free give-away at Christmas. This has brought the total to over 8.5 million players to date.
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The team is now hard at work on Episode Four and is at the stage of development where it has been able to complete a full run-through of the episode from start to finish. The episode includes a new section of gameplay and a new mechanic.
The environments are mostly finished, apart from a "few small areas that are getting completed right now." After that, the team will go into the polish phase of development, but there at least a couple of more months' worth of production and then a testing and optimization phase.Hinterland will share a date when the episode is closer to launch.
With Episode Four development coming to a close, Episode Five is being written. The team is committed to shipping the episode as part of the game purchase, a promise it made back when Hinterland did the Kickstarter in 2013.
To that end, the studio is interested in what players would like beyond Episode Five and has posted a survey so you can share your thoughts and allow the team to take them into consideration as it plans for the future.
While Hinterland is not committing to anything beyond Episode Five, depending on how "passionately" players want the team to keep expanding The Long Dark, and providing it can make it work from a business perspective, the studio is "open to considering a variety of things."
