Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is out on PC & Mac today!

i’ve decided to release The Director’s Cut of Lone Survivor slightly earlier than planned so that the fans who own the Mac and PC versions can play The Director’s Cut together with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita fans on Halloween.

despite taking ten months (and at times being a challenging project), i am really happy to give away The Director’s Cut as a 100% FREE update to anyone who has previously purchased the game on Mac or PC previously, in any form, including the Humble Bundle. it’s my way of saying thankyou for enabling me to make games long into the future by supporting the original release.

it really is a huge update, with a great deal of new content, new areas, complete remastering of visuals and lighting, new music, a new enemy, two new endings etc.  i very much look forward to hearing your thoughts about the new edition, and interpretations of the new content… especially the secret endings!

also, the Mac and PC versions of the game will now include access to both the Original and the Director’s Cut versions of the game. you can continue your game from The Original Cut in the new version (*see IMPORTANT NOTE at the bottom of this post.)

anyway, to all the players who have supported the game and myself over this last year and a half, to the journalists whose kind words have helped the game reach new people, to the hardworking folk behind the scenes at Valve, Curve and Sony, to the many testers and supporters and of course to my family who’ve supported me all the way, i’d like to say what may be a final thankyou for your help with this game.

it’s been very long journey to reach this point, but i guess i could almost say i’m proud of the final result, and look forward to what the future may hold!

anyway i hope you enjoy the game, and…

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

– jasper

    today Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is available for:

    Lone Survivor’s Website (DRM-free)

   Steam

    Good Old Games (DRM-Free)

Sony Entertainment Network (PS3 and PS Vita Cross-Buy)

   A Pumpkin (actually can’t buy Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut here)

*IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT SAVED GAMES & THE ORIGINAL CUT

Just a quick word of warning regarding moving from one version of the game to another. I wanted to include access to both versions of the game for purists.  However, please be aware of the following when playing The Original Cut:

1. You can continue your saved game from The Original Cut in The Director’s Cut at any point, without any issues.
2. However, loading a saved game from The Director’s Cut will cause you to LOSE ALL NEW NEW GAME+ SIDEQUEST ITEMS.This is because The Original Cut does not include these items, and they will be trimmed from your inventory should you load the game in The Original Cut. All other aspects should work fine, but: BE SURE NOT TO CONTINUE A DIRECTOR’S CUT ‘NEW GAME+’ GAME IN THE ORIGINAL CUT.
3. One other point to note is that you will not lose your ending collection should you decide to play through The Original cut, so don’t worry about starting a new playthrough to check it out!

To get hold of The Original Cut:

1. On Steam, right-click the game in your library, select ‘Properties’, go to the ‘Betas’ tab, type ‘sleepycat’ into the password field, and select ‘The Original Cut’ from the menu. You can opt-out of this version via the same menu at any time.
2. GOG has The Original Cut available as an optional download.
3. The version on the official website has the Original Cut game packaged in a folder called ‘TheOriginalCut’.

it gives me great pleasure to present to you the new and extended version of Lone Survivor which is now entitled:

‘The Director’s Cut’

first, allow me to let the launch trailer* speak for itself:

 *(trailer by childhood friend and collaborator Caspar Newbolt of Version Industries)

so what is The Director’s Cut, exactly?

i won’t try to describe the original game again, much has already been written and said about it, and i prefer to leave the interpretations up to the players. especially with interactive media, everyone’s perception of a story is different and, to me, equally valid.

Lone Survivor has been lucky enough to have found a following, all of whom have their own interpretation of the game. and for those fans especially, i have made The Director’s Cut. it contains some elements which didn’t quite make it to the original game because they seemed too elaborate and i needed to get the game out, it contains a lot of new ideas which i’ve had since releasing the last update a year and a half ago (and having since had time to think more about my own interpretation), and it has a sort of meta-narrative which ties it all together which emerged as i began to work on it.

on top of this, the game has been polished, fixed, tweaked and honed in hundreds of different ways. i spent weeks improving the look of the lighting, and even found and fixed bugs that the 800,000+ people who own the game had hadn’t yet reported! 

the PC + Mac release, on Steam and the game’s website, won’t be far behind. in other words, it will be out as soon as i can physically do it. it will take time as it’s not a simple port, but it is my next priority and i will have more news about this soon.

PlayStation

i originally planned to do a fairly straight port of the original game, but when Sony said they’d be interested in new content, i started to think about whether i could implement some of these ideas. and i got a bit carried away with it. i thought it would take about six weeks, but it ended up taking around nine months!

i’ve been working tirelessly alongside Curve Studios for the whole period, not just creating the new content, but making sure the ports and all their related marketing materials are up to my (i now realise) stupidly fussy standards: drawing PS3 background images and store images myself, searching 7 years of old hard drives to re-source all the audio so that we didn’t convert from the .mp3 format the original game uses to the .ogg format that the PlayStation uses, rather, from the original .wav masters – for a marginal improvement in audio quality that only musos will hear. i’ve spent many a night uploading endlessly tweaked Photoshop marketing images to the Curve servers at 3am, or rewriting the cloud-save interface to look more ‘Lone Survivor’, repeatedly redrawing the PlayStation button images until i found the most beautiful ‘6/7/8/9 pixel circle’, playing the different paths through the game time after time alongside the QA department. i have had endless email debates with the production team and Sony on how to make the trophies as cool-yet-unobtrusive as possible, i have designed the competition prizes by hand, the list goes on and on… and that’s to say nothing of the hard work Curve put in on their side!

to my knowledge, anything that could be done to make the experience better has been done, and Curve totally got that these kinds of details were important to me, and humoured me time and time again when i asked for things to be tweaked. Sony were amazing to work with (and i must send special love out to Shahid Kamal who helped make it happen in the first place), listening to my outlandish requests, and even allowing me to be one of the first ever third-party games to mess with the Trophy format, certainly the first predominantly made by one person… yes, it’s been an almighty task, but we got there in the end.

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is out today on PSN in USA + EU

(priced $12.99 / €12.99 / £9.99)

i hope you enjoy the game

– jasper

The Changes

i knew the fans would be the most sensitive to changes in the game, so to me the challenge was to go back and improve the original game without in any way changing or spoiling the original vision. for this reason, i decided to make the majority of the new content, including the two new endings, only accessible in New Game+. so when you play the game for the first time, it should feel as before, only far more polished and nicer to look at and listen to. but when explore it for the second time, you may discover an entire extra layer to it…

it’s been really hard to keep the details to myself for so long, but the game’s secrets are no doubt being discovered right at this very moment by the fans. i greatly look forward to hearing what you think of the new content, so be sure to share your thoughts here (or via email, see address at top-right, if you’d prefer) if you do get a chance to play it.

anyway, here’s a rundown of the new features of Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut (without spoiling the specifics of its content):

general features:

• whole new lighting engine, also supports 1 extra hardware light
• many locations have additional lights and / or tweaked lighting
• anamorphic lens flare for the flashlight
• new sleeping and game over music
• new title screen and game over screen
• 2 additional locations
• new gamma settings, saving of gamma and aspect settings
• new expert mode
• hundreds of small bug fixes, balance tweaks and improvements
• automatic monster-facing on gun-draw
• a few small easter eggs
• new short sidequest
• ending ‘collection’
• ‘The Ritual’

specific to New Game+:

• around 6 new locations
• 2 completely new endings
• 3 new songs
• over 20 new items
• 2 new sidequests
• new enemy
• new dialogue for all characters in the game
• many other easter eggs that are better left unspoilt

specific to PlayStation:

• trophies (including a platinum)
• cloud-save (cross-play)
• French & German languages (EU)
• Cross Buy (buy on one format, get both PS Vita and PS3 versions)
• controller support!

specific to PS Vita:

• touchscreen controls for inventory, option screen & textboxes

specific to PS3:

• rumbbbbbbbllllle

(new titlescreen on PC, to show it is actually in the works!)

Competitions! Competitions! Competitions!

we are also going to be giving out prizes that i designed myself, to the press to run competitions and so on. i spent a long time on them to hopefully make them really exclusive and unique:

 5 super-limited ‘First Aid Edition’ art-card prints, signed and individually numbered by myself

(now only 5 more exist and i’ll be keeping them for posterity!)

super limited edition physical prints of the game soundtrack in vintage PS2 survival horror style (i had fun making these and they look really cool in the flesh)

actual Sleepy Cat plushies (from my original sketch on the right) made by sukisuki.co.uk

(… yes, Sleepy Cat is real!)

for more information about the competitions and prizes, or to request a press kit / review code, please contact:

 pr@curve-studios.com

won’t be long now, my friends…

won’t be long now.

After months of back and forth, and what ended up being one of the largest internal discussions at Sony on a game’s requirements for such things in the history of such things, I am now allowed to reveal What I’m doing About Trophies.

Achievements. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re here to stay. They don’t motivate me personally as a player – I prefer to play entirely within the ‘world’ of the game – but I completely respect and empathise with those who enjoy them.

For this reason, I wanted to ensure that Lone Survivor’s trophies were as unobtrusive as possible, but also a very deep additional challenge, free of grind, for those that wished to explore the game beyond the surface.

It is especially important in a game such as this where immersion is critical to the experience, that I don’t let them get in the way of that: the last thing you want is to be taken out of the adventure by a system message.

1. Trophies Will Be As Unobtrusive As Possible

For this reason, after many months of discussion, I have persuaded Sony to allow me to:

a) … not show any trophies during gameplay. They will be displayed only when the player goes to sleep, or on the completion of the game.

b) … display the following message at the start of the game (I’m very glad that Sony have recently allowed players to disable Trophy notifications via the System Settings in the latest firmwares, I also recommend disabling Friend Notifications, although I would still lobby for developers to be allowed to change this setting from in-game, on a per-game basis… hopefully Sony are listening and at least considering this in future as it isn’t currently possible.):

c) … let all but a few trophies remain secret to ensure the first playthrough of the game is not coloured by trophy hunting.

2. Yes, there will be a Platinum Trophy.

(… but it will be hidden, deep.)

I worked hard on the Trophy designs, so that it would be a rewarding additional layer to the game, if you choose to explore it.  Particularly so that your repeat playthroughs are interesting and varied.  The idea is that the player will be rewarded for exploring the light and dark corners of the game, not for simply making progress or for repeatedly doing the same thing.  There is a huge amount to see in this game, especially in The Director’s Cut, and the Platinum Trophy takes you on the widest possible tour of that content.

Not only will Lone Survivor will have a Platinum Trophy, but this Trophy, if pursued, will be rewarding and open up new aspects of the game. It will not be an easy one, but it’ll hopefully be an interesting one!

However, I still hope that players who are new to Lone Survivor will disable trophy notifications on their first playthrough so that they experience the game as deeply as possible.

– Jasper 

I’ve done so much work on it, constantly for the whole of this year.  It’s bigger than I ever expected to be.

There are hundreds of tiny little changes and improvements.  It has a lot of new hidden, dark corners.  It even looks and sounds pretty different.  It is playing great on the Playstation Vita and PlayStation 3, and Curve are doing a great job on the port.

It has become a new thing.

It is for this reason that it is now called “Lone Survivor – The Director’s Cut.”  And I’m so excited and proud to share it with you guys.

1080p wallpaper for your pleasure