IGN interviews TTG CEO Ottilie - Wolf 2, AdHoc split, potential future TTG games
Blind Sniper
Moderator
How was development impacted by the Ad Hoc leaving? Can you talk about why that partnership ended, and how far it got?
Ottilie: We were working with Ad Hoc in the same way we were working with Trick, as an integrated team. It was not like a Deck Nine situation where we had an [external] developer. When we started working with Ad Hoc, they were relatively new. They were effectively four people, three of which had worked on Wolf 1. So it was natural for us to work together. When we did the tech reset and we realized that we're not going to be producing content for at least a year in terms of how we're approaching this, it didn't make sense for us to keep them tied up and effectively sitting on the sidelines not doing a lot while we went through the pipeline and [worked out] how we were going to build the content. And so it sort of came to a natural break point based upon the reality of where we were from a pipeline standpoint and they obviously had desires to ship their own games and did not want to be idle either.
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If everything goes well, what is your ambition for Telltale next? Is it more remasters, more sequels? Is there a particular focus? Is it Wolf 3? Is it bringing back another popular franchise from Telltale's past? Where would you love to go?
Ottilie: We are actively looking at what we'll do next. We're working on what we're calling a sequential slate, right? Instead of going wide, we're doing things in parallel, one thing in a time. We'll choose what we're doing next this year and have it in concept development while we're finishing up Wolf 2 so we know where we're moving to when we're done. There are quite a few games in contention for what that might be. It won't be Wolf 3 out of the gate. I mean, there needs to be some breathing room between sequels. Certainly we'd love to do Wolf 3, but I think that's a 'ship this one, probably ship something else in between, come back to Wolf', that kind of cadence. In a perfect world, we'd ship a new game every two years or so, taking about three years to make it, starting about a year prior so that there's a little bit of overlap with concept teams.
We do a lot of writing and experimenting on paper. Before we move something into production, we throw away a lot of pages. Sometimes we write for an IP that we haven't even talked to the licensor about just to see if it's worth talking to the licensor about it. So we certainly have some ideas. There are three or four frontrunners in terms of what we'd like to do and there's a blend in there. There's some original IP in there. There's some legacy Telltale stuff in there. There's some new universes in there and I don't think we're ready to make that kind of commitment yet in terms of what's next, but it's top of mind for sure.