Didn’t they do that to an extent with the 500 Days DLC?
Well not exactly. We controlled their backstory and most of them were actualy average peoples trying to survive. What I’m talking about is actual problematic peoples. A bit like the game tyranny did. They approached some pretty uncomfortable subjects but not only you didnt have to take part of it, you could actualy fight it from the inside and despite the weird loot system, the experience felt pretty special.
Hmm… in S1, Lee is off to prison, and it’s mentioned multiple times that prisons are normally relatively safe structures to hide in from zombies, if isolated.
Imagine a Walking Dead game where you’re actually a convict then, trying to handle it, from inside one of these jails, and having to decide what happens with everyone else.
That would be cool.
Then again, a lot of people are influenced by the charisma of others, or simply going with the crowd to help one another and themselves. I bet, in most instances, if you isolated the ‘bad-guys’ from their teams for a time, they would have reasonable morals and instances for their chosen actions.
1 Like
Tbh i think that since this is an rpg game you should be able to shape whatever hero you are in control of to be the way you envision them thats why it’s a choice game.
2 Likes
Not sure if anyone is interested, but TellTale is hiring:
Narrative Designer, Telltale Games
Location: San Rafael, California
We want experienced designers to help create interactive action and exploration beats, compelling choices, and narrative branches that reward player investment. Use your skills in traditional design principles like pacing, mood, risk/reward, and action to entertain and surprise players, within a strong story and character-based context. You won’t be placing enemies or building levels, but you WILL be leveraging those hard-earned skills in exciting and challenging new ways.
You’ll work in close partnership with our world-class writing and cinematic teams to craft compelling interactive narrative in the vein of Telltale’s award-winning The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Minecraft and Batman.
Candidates with a serious passion for creating interactive stories and player agency grounded in narrative will be rewarded with creative ownership, highly-skilled collaborators and opportunity for rapid advancement.
Responsibilities
Create role-playing design and choices that enhance overall narrative and make it truly playable.
Work in close partnership with writers to craft emotionally-engaging pieces of interactive entertainment.
Collaborate with art, animation and programming to design new and better action sequences that offer great feedback and consequence.
Most important - always be an advocate for The Player!
Essential Skills
Minimum 2 years game design experience.
Preferred at least 2 shipped titles in a design role.
Good communication and interpersonal skills.
Maturity and flexibility: Telltale is a fast-paced highly-iterative development environment.
Diverse interests such as psychology, writing, improvisational acting, or tabletop role-playing experience a plus. (Designers at Telltale need to know and care about what makes people do the things they do, and how to react accordingly.)
I was a big fan until the Game of Thrones game. I loved The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but GoT is one of my most hated games of all time. I’ve pretty much ignored Telltale since episode 4 or 5 of that one
I looked at that ad for a very long time. But having to relocate to California was a dealbreaker for me. I love living in Boston too much to move.
1 Like
I see Telltale focusing on more media games. Like Guardians of The Galaxy and Walking Dead. Choice of Games and Hosted Games feel more indie and original. Yeah Telltale Games make amazing games, but I like CoG’s originality and community. Plus my computer can handle Telltales latest engine…
1 Like
So Telltale has got a pretty busy month with episodes for all three of its current projects three weeks running on Tuesdays! Episode 1 of the new season of Batman: The Enemy Within, Episode 2 of Minecraft Story Mode Season 2 the week after and Episode 3 of Guardians of the Galaxy after that! Phew! Been loving Guardians so far and the new season of Minecraft is off to a good start. It’s kind of weird how well Telltale do with telling stories in frachises like Minecraft and Borderlands I haven’t played the main games of yet love.
Anyone else following those series? Telltale also lately announced that in 2018 a second season for The Wolf Among Us is coming (YAY!) and they’ll be doing a fourth and final season for the Walking Dead with Clem back as the playable character. Haven’t played New Frontier yet so I’d best play catch up!
And lately I’ve gotten keen about trying to create my own Telltale style game on Twine, probably Spider-Man. Have to see how well that goes…
Season two of the Wolf among us?!? SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEBoom
Ok my excitement is out now. after Most of season 1 of minecraft i stopped playing it
I Enjoyed Batman so kinda interested in season two though like Guardians im gonna wait till episode 2 or 3 Before i play it.
I have season 1 and 2 of Walking dead i kinda forgot to finish season 2 Didnt even Know there was a Season 4.
1 Like
Lol! Here was the video Telltale released talking about all three projects!
Gotta say I am excited about playing Bigby again after all this time.
3 Likes
Just played Episode 1 of Batman: The Enemy Within, definitely one of the best episodes Telltale has put out so far and an excellent opener for a new season with lots of cruel evil choices to have to make. Without spoilers there’s a new relationship system I like which tells you your current relationship with certain characters at the end of the episode.
2 Likes
I find myself enjoying the second season of Tell-Tale’s Batman over the first; it definitely got some surreal fun with the Joker/Harley Quinn in the mix.
The first season I was lukewarm about because to much of it was the constant ‘square-jawed hero’ without much deviation in tone/mood. The second season has that in spades, but it is varied just enough that I am enjoying it so far.
Agreed, I’m liking this season more already, I like the fact you have situations which play Bruce in very amoral positions, all for the sake of doing good. The new villains area also engaging, especially their take on the Joker, who traditionally I always thought was very overated. The fact TT says you can tool what kind of Joker John Doe might become via his actions is certainly interesting.
2 Likes
I’m liking season two but am disappointed with the glitches with the codex and choices.
1 Like
I know; imagine my surprise when it said I redid Arkham Hospital when I chose the police. I think the most frustrating was the occasional moments when Waller flickered out of screen.
I just wish Bruce Wayne was a more dynamic character. One reason I was in the middle with Season 1 is that I just couldn’t dig playing as Bruce either.
I do like the idea that in this case it is Harley is the one pushing Joker to become who he is, rather than him corrupting her as usually happens in the comics/TV.
It depends on heavily they railroad this. Obviously they don’t choose to branch off paths too much…but sometimes it would be nice.
Uh, not necessary. CYOA in video games is only difficult to do because developers have to please the studios paying the money by putting up fancy graphics and interesting gameplay mechanics. CYOA books (which can also be considered as a form of gaming), on the other hand, don’t have that problem and features multiple routes and endings that even Choice of Games struggles with.
The best example of this is the first issue of the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” series books, “The Cave of Time”, where entering a cave (or even choosing not to) can lead to myriad amounts of possibilities and endings, not just tie the choices together at the end of the story, rendering most of your choices meaningless and superficial anyway (like Choice of Robots or Hero Rise: The Prodigy). That’s the true beauty of a CYOA game - anything can happen, not one of two things, not three of four endings, but dozens of well-written endings and (therefore) real consequences.
Those interested in CYOA games should check out one or two of those books to see what the CYOA genre can really do. No one has even tapped into such potential yet, except the Japanese with their visual novels - and even they struggle with it.
While I do get annoyed when things are proven meaningless, I can understand things to some degree in video games as the more you have ending wise the more expense and time you have to dish out and video games get much less time than most designers and programmers want due to sweet spot issues time wise if they take to much time it risks falling into design limbo, never to see the light of day or become the game that broke the companies back.
When you deal with long multi game series in choice games it happens too especially since you have far fewer people working on them the longer they work on it the more likely they will burn out and give up or toss out something really horrible becuase of the stress of trying to please everyone and overlooking things.
But ignoring that long winded devils advocate moment
I like tell tale games most of the time despite the sometimes railroading, the serious glitches games like the walking dead: the new frontier had. Games like batman, the wolf among us, and their borderlands one really pulled their rep up a lot to hold up any possible issues I had.
They (the company) aren’t perfect but I’d say they are worth the cost and mostly entertaining if I had to rate them I’d say 8 out of 10.
Ugh… do you really have to reply to a comment that is 8 months old?
Also, you missed the point entirely. Even a CYOA book filled with all sorts of routes is rail-roaded in the sense you have the play the game the way the author envisioned, the choices therein in are still a part of the author’s vision on how you can accomplish it. Here’s an example: If your main quest is to acquire a gem from a wizard tower in the middle of Hell, you can choose your path, what to do and how to do it, but you can’t really deviate from your goal because otherwise there would be no story. This is what I mean by “every game, even CYOAs, are a little rail-roaded”.
As far as I know there is no game, book or digital, that truly gives you the freedom to do as you please, not unless people come up with a sandbox-like CYOA that is proceduraly generated by a complex AI, which, as amazing it may sound, hasn’t been invented yet. Even if someone were to replicate those CYOAs of old I just don’t see how it would profitable enough to compensate the years required to write dozens of endings and a hundred routes, all more or less equally interesting and doable, with good writing and pace. What kind of publisher would even back that up? CoG is an exception among exceptions.
1 Like
Having read the CYOA books with a kid and writing one currently for Nano 2017 I can confirm that yeah, they can be fairly rail roaded in the sense that the author has a finite number of ways the story can branch, both so they can make sense of it better and so make their job easier. The one I’m currently designing is actually about nine different possible stories/‘missions’ the two characters can be involved in and has four hundred sections planned, but each mission is still going to have six possible outcomes of varied success or failure.
It’s probably why Choice Games are more popular these days because the use of stats and your skills can affect the outcome, but even that has to have some finality. Regardless of what you do in Choice of the Dragon you still have the Growing Up section, the getting your lair section, the defeating the queen and the heroes sections etc. And even with something far broader like Life of a Wizard we have four core sections a player goes through on most playthroughs - the growing up, the magic academy, the team of adventurers and the king’s adviser.
But I still love traditional CYOA books, anyway. 
1 Like