The Long Dark is a unique and much-loved survival game which captured the interest of many following its Early Access debut all the way back in 2014. In the many years since, The Long Dark has continued to see updates from the studio. With the final chapter of the game’s story nearing completion, the team have announced and released ‘The Long Dark – Visual Enhancements Update’ – bringing improvements across all systems.
Announcing this ‘Visual Enhancements Update’, the team at Hinterland Studio wrote “This is a free update available to anyone who owns THE LONG DARK or SURVIVAL EDITION, and includes visual enhancement options targeted at high-end systems, various bug fixes, and tuning changes.”
Alongside the announcement, a video was released going into detail on some of the improvements made. While focused on high-end PCs and current-gen consoles the update does bring some notable enhancements to even older systems (Switch 1 included), namely:
- Coloured Shadows
- Coloured Fog
Of course, a majority of the upgrades are limited to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, including:
- Anisotropic Filtering
- Enhanced Draw Distances
- Terrain Blending
- Ambient Particle Effects
- Improved Terrain Shadows
- Improved Anti-Aliasing
- Improved Ambient Occlusion
- Improved Structure Shadows
As is the case with all PC games, your ability to utilise these features will depend on your rig and its capabilities. That said, Hinterland Studio did share what they have listed as recommended specs to make the most out of this update, writing:
“If you would like to enable all visual enhancements and run at a target of 60FPS at 2560 x 1440 resolution, we recommend a PC using an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU or equivalent, 3GHz or faster CPU, and 32GB of system RAM.”
As always, your mileage may vary, but it is still a welcome surprise to see a decade old game receive such extensive visual enhancements. Hopefully the long awaited final chapter is just around the corner. The Visual Enhancements update is available now on PC, and coming next month to consoles.
KitGuru says: What do you think of this update? Which of the visual enhancements do you think will be most impactful? Let us know down below.
