Yeah, that’s the one. I love how they included road network on Himfjall (before the announcement of the DLC), the island above it and straight road to The Mainland. Not to mention the small road section on Aspholmen.
It shows that back in the 2019 there were plans to intorduce this island to the game after Himfjall (just as its name suggests in game files - DLC Island 2). Sadly “it is what it is”, sometimes i wonder what kind of theme it would be.
Version 1 is the version I first played the story on, and that was definitely the version I had the most fun with. In my opinion the story was better before they added the npcs in the intro missions. Kind of took away the almost “empty” feeling in the world, which you normally wouldn’t want in a game, but that was kind of the point, and they did it well too. The early versions were for sure the best, I still have the disk for my old ps4, and I can even run version 1.00 on my ps5, but I haven’t done it in a long time, since I play on pc now
they were abducted by aliens 
then the aliens put bodies back to hide there tracks, lol
Ok, there are some screenshots that i’ve made. If You would like to see more details on particular region just let me know:
Some additional info about the core gameplay during my short playthrough:
Lack of bases, experimental weapons, PLUNDRA, Rivals - the most vanilla of all ice cream flavours 
Moving anywhere is A CHORE - no bikes, no stamina bar, inability to go prone and absence of detection meter makes fighting even prototype runners something to remember (btw, im terrible at playing FPS games on a gamepad)
Game feels “underbaked” on many fields (common thing up to this very day, lol) - low machine spawn rates, lack of many options (such as difficulty setting, graphics settings only limited to FOV and screen borders)
Tanks on ice skates 
They move very slow, “moonwalks” on flat surfaces and most of all - they lack the ability to run. They always nobly stride to Your direction (ofc if they wont forget / lose aggro on character, as it happens rather often)
Draw distance was better, machines were drew up to 450m (making the original 400m Marksman achievement doable)
Constant fear of crashing the game - mainly to the age of system itself and always-on leafblower mode
Feel free to ask any 1.00 related questions, i will try to answer them (maybe not on an instant - i dont think i will be able to finish the main story, but i’ll try to crawl myself up as far as i can)
Here’s some captured Xbox One gameplay a few months back from installing the game from disc and being offline 100%. Glitchy, scary, aggressive robots, no plundra, no weapon wheel. This is the game I love and have the best memories from when it was super difficult and was really a survival game and completely its own game.
After playing for about 2 hours i can 100% agree that “back in the days” machines were more difficult to handle. Especially Hunters - those are bane of my existence and borderline broken pieces of shite. Their leap attack was “laser guided”, meaning that they locked onto player’s position and after commencing the attack it had almost 100% accuracy. They could leap onto You including excesive clipping inside buildings and teleporting behind Your back whispering “nothing personal kid”. A group of 10+ Hunters (although rare) was a death sentence
Also our little friends Ticks were more annoying than ever, their leap attack was frame-based instead of one time collision, meaning that during one leap single Tick could do up to 30+ damage! Moreover, their cooldown were shorten back then, so a single Tick could easily solo You, especially with having terrible aim with a gamepad
Runners were almost identical to present version, maybe their machine gun burst were longer, but their lunge attack showed me another major inconvience - ragdoll / downtime of player was ridiculously long AND machines could attack when downed of Your feet! That means constant player stunlock and inevitable death when encountering a combo of Hunter / Runner pack. Madness
Harvesters ale almost the same, some animations and sounds are different, but core gameplay and behaviour remains the same. Tanks cannot run, they lose aggro very quickly (at least prototype variant, maybe higher tier behaves in a different manner). All in all big machines are not as terrifying as their smaller kin. Maybe they are a bit bullet-spongier but this might be the fault of mine 1C weapons and inability to hold a steady aim
One more thing about machine behaviour - i think that in older builds more machines could attack you at once. Nowadays it feels like it is more like a turn based strategy in which every machine takes their turn to hurt You. Back then i saw at least 2 machines firing at player constantly with the rest of the pack non-stop moving and relocating. I would love to try to mow them down with lategame build with mouse and keyboard to clear the confirmation bias, but i’m certain that survival horror vibes were more present back then
Thanks, @BlackPlywood, for letting us tag along on your trip back to 2019. I was totally taken with the game back then. It was scary, insanely hard, and amazingly captivating. An entire world to explore where any incautious move would be swiftly punished. For me the game broke with the introduction of Rivals and silly and overpowered experimental weapons. And all the crowd pleasing that followed with base building, vanity and weapons packs, weird NPCs, iron church cults, and a russian invasion that did make little sense to me. It probably catered for many, but for me it was at the expense of what saw as a great potential in storytelling. Perhaps because I’ve always played the game alone, exploration and story was my primary entertainment. I did play along for years though but with lesser enthusiasm.
But I did like the Semla 
I’m not done yet, so far my playthrough resembles speedruning a bit - constant marathon from one safehouse to another as combat is very exhausting During my exploration i saw many places that are drastically different from current version - when i’m home i’ll take some screenshots of my current favourites and post them here.
I’m back with some screenshots of my favourite locations that i could explore so far:
Let’s begin at Norrmyra Artillery Base. As You can see back then there was no Arena, only concrete rectangular foundation and some leveled ground. On the right side also were two random car wrecks, but that’s it. The thing that disturbs me the most is the marked location - marker is underground, meaning since day 1 there were plans for something down there. I think that originally there was supposed to be underground tunnel network linking all areas of the map, but this idea was ultimately scrapped.
This peaceful settlement is… Stora Dyrbo At least before nuking it to ashes. I tried to go to the location of future crater, but there are many freeroaming Hunters in the area, greatly slowing down my progress as a journalist
This standard looking hill will be Ringfort. As one of the texts in game says:
“Thanks to Uncle Calle’s directions and knowledge of the area, you found an old prehistoric ringfort called Mullvadsberget, which also had been a archaeological dig”
Oh those silly archaeologists, they began to dig during the Machine Uprising, how foolish of them
F23 Air Base, looking really empty back then. I was shocked how “hermetic” the fence around the Base was at launch. There are almost no gaps in fencing, meaning the only way of getting in is either from North at main enterance or by jumping at low section of fence that is close to an elevated ground
As a bonus picture i took this one while running my arse off to the safehouse while being “chased” (or should i say - ominously walked) by a group of 5 Tanks. To be honest - Runners were much more of a threat than those big bois.
One more thing to sum up yesterday’s journey - devs were kind of a jokesters. When i found some GRG ammo to stock up for my further plans of exploring islands / Mainland i was shocked to realize that ammo doesn’t stack, every rocket occupies one inventory space. That… is a major inconvenience. I’m yet to find any quality GRG, but this detail could really hurt my plan. But nevertheless, i’ll try my best to discover more forgotten places from this janky ahh build
So cool to have a look back in time. Very nice.
I have a question that the community might be able to answer or @BlackPlywood could basically test it.
I was thinking about the Arena and I know the doors were locked when I first arrived there. I believe I could just open the doors by standing close and half way up the right side door half, then a prompt would appear. Is this how you remember it?
Had the big octogonal hatch in the center a gap when we first see it, or did that gap come later?
I remember the doors locked and we used the field radios to glitch in to the areas behind the doors. And back then the radios was more rare.
When the Arena doors got ability to be opened I don’t know but it was a thing added later.
As far as i remember doors at the Arena were always possible to open as @Gysbert said. My first playthrough / encounter with the Arena was shortly after Himfjall was added (circa Q3 2020) and i remember both - janky way to open doors and the octagonal hatch. Not so long ago (before Showdown update) i field radio’d glitched myself inside the hatch only to find it empty, as it propably was for last 5 years. Only things that were alternately enabled / disabled were those “one man covers” sticking out of ground inside the arena (the same that serves as an elevator out of the missle silo during one mission included in the last update).
@Gysbert wrote a really interesting account on the Arena “back then”. Never read it before. I would have loved to see that myself.
As far as I remember I’d say that there were some changes around landfall update. I’m just not sure if it was Landfall itself or the update before… Those days there were some changes at the arena… Pillboxes came and vanished again…
I revised the arena account, corrected mistakes, updated it with “Showdown stuff”, and added some new pictures. I took the liberty to add pictures from other members to whom I of course gave credit. I hope they do not mind. 
I just need to add (for comparison) a recent (2025) arena top view picture to finish the arena story. 
I am lucky enough to still have my original disk for my old ps4 from 2019, and surprisingly it works in my ps5 too! I spent a couple hours messing around in the original version, not gonna lie it was super fun and very nostalgic. Since the view distance was still far in the original, I might try to see just how far away you can snipe machines from. Sniping was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game when I first got it. I do wish there was a way to play this original version on pc
