![]() "When we started to think about what would it be like to be a little girl in the zombie world," says Bruner, "then it became really rich. It was an idea the studio had tossed around for some time. ![]() Season two takes things a step further by making her the playable lead character. Clementine served as the series's moral compass, making you think extra hard about some of the game's more difficult decisions. ![]() Season one put you in the role of Lee, a man who soon found himself the unofficial guardian of Clementine, a young girl orphaned from her parents. The studio will be facing perhaps its biggest challenge so far with the release of The Walking Dead's second season starting later this month. "They’re role-playing it as they themselves would do, and not playing it like a video game where there’s no consequences. "It lets you know that people are playing the game as people," adds Lenart. And sometimes changes are made to upcoming episodes based on this feedback. "These are the kinds of surprises that are fun," says Darin. In fact, in that same episode many players even gave him some of their extra food despite their professed hatred. But when that opportunity was presented, few actually took it. Season two writer and designer Mark Darin explains one such example with a character that players just wouldn't stop complaining about in season one - some even sent Telltale messages saying they would let the character die if they had the chance. And the studio uses that information to inform how later episodes are designed, altering things based on player feedback, which can often be drastically different than what the developers were expecting. You may not be able to influence the the final outcome, but your decisions greatly change the way events unfold. Part of what makes Telltale's more recent games so compelling is the way they make you feel invested in the story. The Walking Dead also remembers your decisions, tailoring the narrative based on what you did in the past. You'll choose whether people live or die, and often the results are ugly either way. The game plays out something like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book - there's little in the way of traditional gameplay instead your most important actions are the difficult moral decisions the game forces you to make. But much of the drama comes not from the flesh-eating undead, but from other humans, who struggle to live with one another in a world gone to hell. ![]() Like the comics and television series of the same name, Telltale's take on The Walking Dead thrusts players into a world ravaged by zombies. "With The Walking Dead, one of the reasons it’s been so successful is because we focus less on the head and just aim straight for people’s hearts," Lenart explains. "We focus less on the head and just aim straight for people’s hearts." That finally changed in 2012 with the first season of The Walking Dead. As Dennis Lenart, director for season two of The Walking Dead puts it, they were often aiming to stimulate the player's brain with challenging puzzles. Early series like Sam & Max Save the World and Tales of Monkey Island felt a lot like those classic adventure games, humorous adventures with lots of puzzles to solve and witty dialogue to navigate. Instead of 60-hour epics, Telltale built games as short episodes, which were released every month or so over the course of seasons lasting around five or six episodes. Over the years the company carved a niche for itself as it pioneered a different kind of structure for games. " The Walking Dead was a place where a lot of that work that had happened over the years came together." Now, with several new projects in development - including a second season of The Walking Dead - Telltale is hoping to keep that dream alive. "Every game we’ve done, we’ve been trying to solve a specific problem," says president and co-founder Kevin Bruner. But it wasn't until last year that Telltale finally managed to bring that dream of TV-like gaming to a mass audience. Over the years, the studio was slowly perfecting a formula that would turn gaming into something closely resembling television, both in terms of structure and distribution. There were games based on the comic series Bones, and episodic series covering everything from Monkey Island to Wallace & Gromit to Jurassic Park. But soon after that, Telltale started tackling projects that would hint at its future aspirations. ![]() It would be impossible to have guessed Telltale Games' trajectory from the studio's first title, a poker game called Telltale Texas Hold 'Em. ![]()
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