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The Long Dark devs on balancing player feedback with creative vision
Steam’s Early Access program has helped many indie games get off the ground by allowing developers to sell their in-progress games to fans. Players get to play the game long before it comes out and contribute feedback to its development, and creators get the steady funds needed to complete their games.
Hinterland Studio Inc, the Canadian developer behind the Early Access survival game The Long Dark, has learned that while player feedback can be a great help when developing a game, sometimes a line has to be drawn between the demands of the players and the creative vision of the team.
“The challenge is that now you have thousands – and in our case, hundreds of thousands – of players who all have opinions about the game,” Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop told GamesIndustry.biz. “You need to be open to feedback, but also very firm in your vision and stubborn to some degree. When you have a lot of people yelling at you about something that they don’t like, not only do you feel like you should listen to that, but it can erode your confidence about what you’re trying to do. Sometimes you need to step back and plug your ears a little bit.”
He added, “Acknowledge that people don’t always know what they want. They think they know what they want.”
According to van Lierop, many players came into The Long Dark as fans of DayZ, another Early Access survival game. Those players enjoyed the differences in The Long Dark, but they frequently suggested changes that would make the game more like DayZ, including adding multiplayer and zombies.
“We were going against the grain on a lot of different levels: gameplay, aesthetic, tone, everything,” van Lierop said. “We knew that was going to limit our reach at the end, but we were comfortable with that. It was a choice. It was more important to make this game than it was to make a really successful, popular game. In the end it’s been both. I’m not saying we’ve done DayZ numbers, but we’re doing something that’s resonating with people. That’s heartening.”
Image credit: The Long Dark | Hinterland Studio Inc
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