What does it take for Telltale to step it up .
Just to make things clear , I do not have a single complain about Telltale's masterpieces . However , every game industry has to evolve at some point .
Its impossible for a company to keep produce the same thing all the time with different storyline and scenery . At some point people will expect more and if Telltale can't deliver , we are going to have another instance of the call of duty franchise .
Personally I think that telltale should improve on what made their games great . Storyline , story progression , roleplaying , etc .
First of all , they could start by creating different endings based on user choices than having the same ending .
Another thing they could try is to make the game much more dynamic . Imagine if timing was important . For example , in episode 3 you had a limited time(in theory) to search three places . An improvement could be that if you finished earlier , you would find Crane on the witch's house , or if that was hard enough to code , you could find the witch without glamour (if you arrived in time) or you could find her "secrets" much better concealed depending on how late you arrived .
Finally , they could make TWAU in a way that every time you started the game , a random killer was selected from a list of characters and random victims as well from another , increasing replayability by a lot .
What is your opinion ? How could Telltale make their games better in the future ?
Comments
The most obvious and the most required evolution is deeper and more complex decisions and consequences. In a wider scope, TellTale has pretty straightforward consequences, a lot of illusions, and sometimes, they just re-write the story and a decision is barely noted. When they become more experienced, they could branch decisions off in a more realistic way, instead of a "If I do this, she/he will hate/like me." or "kill/save"(which ends up being pointless in 1-2 Episodes) Instead of that, they could make things an actually complex and diverse story. TellTale never changes the overall story, only the characters and some minor differences. The episodes follow the same route, and end in the same way, no matter what you choose. The only difference is how characters think of you. It seems fine now, but TT needs to scope things out, and get more people working on a way more complex story. And I wonder just how much TT is going to actually bring Dum's death into play in the newest Episode.
Yeah this is exactly of what I am talking about . Telltale before releasing walking dead season 1 was not known at all and had all the justification in the world to be unable to fund any further improvement . Now however , TT should start evolving . I think that graphics , gameplay are fine for now . There are other games that excel at these sectors . I once played a game called Nosferatu the wrath of Malachi , a horror-fps that its main idea was to save your family in a huge castle from the vampire lord who planned his resurection . You had to search the castle to find each family member and return him to the sanctuary to save him . However every time you started a new game , each family member was assigned to a completely random location . I think this is where TT must hit . Very few games offer replayability,story depth,good storylines etc . They should focus more on that and steadily transforming their games to a more dynamic "open world"
It seems like TellTale's idea right now is expanding onto other franchises (Game of Thrones, Borderlands). But it doesn't seem like they've really tried to change the complexity of conversations and decisions. For example, in the newest episode of TWAU, TT made the dialogue more varied, with more force behind it, instead of it being filler. TT so far has done things in chunks, with certain parts of episodes doing certain things. Everything you do is completely irrelevant to the development/ change in characters. But then one particular conversation will side you with one of two ideas/sides. (Lily/Kenny) for an easy example. And then at the end they have a split decision moment, that will usually be irrelevant in a few episodes, if not the next one. Remember the Dee/Woodman choice? How much did that really matter, how much did siding with Bluebeard's aggressiveness change things? Snow pretty much just forgets it halfway though episode 2, and Bluebeard is still a dick to Snow and Bigby in Episode 3, so even if you and him were on good terms, that argument made it irrelevant. Crane turned out to be involved in the murders, one way or another, so sympathizing with him was pointless. It's all an illusion, basically. But thankfully the overall story is top-notch and mostly excellent. But that doesn't mean they can ignore the real purpose of choosing your story. Most of the decisions end in little dialogue changes, and not much else.
Yeah this is good for now . But I doubt it will last . At some point , people will ask for more as they allways do . I'd hate to see TT fading out due to this rookie mistake . I've put so much hope on them for creating a better gaming community . I will be 20 years old in a couple of months and I am tired of shooting random jerks or commanding X troops to Y frontiers and using Z tactics .
I think you're both expecting a little to much. You have to realize TellTale have chosen episode by episode development and just can't craft all the features you're asking for unless they change their development ways.
I personally think, as of right now, they're doing incredible. But like this thread implied, things will have to change, maybe not in the next Telltale game, maybe the one after. Things can only get more complex as things go on, but as of now, I'm satisfied. That's what Telltale is trying to accomplish.
The thing is, it's hard to put out that much content on an episode by episode basis so to meet demands TellTale most likely will not stay episode based.
I don't think I could find any other person in these forums that is near enough as Kissaki is on my perspective . I agree 100%
I don't think TT should change their policy of episode-based games by adding more depth to the choices but they would be forced to increase the content of each episode to meet the requirements
Without a doubt, the company will expand, and there will be new positions, and more experienced workers on the team. So, eventually they could push back release dates by half a month to a month, in return for more content. Which will also give people more things to talk about on forums while they wait for a new episode, and will increase re-playability as a whole. We all hate to wait, but I like the Episodic format, but maybe time and content will clash in the future.
I really think they should start with something simple , just to experiment . For example they could begin by making more dynamic some parts of the game . This could be the example I gave for arriving early or late at the Greenleaf's appartment . Even simpler , they could spice up the dialogues according to how much time it took you to reply . They could give a 1 second "dead" time window and then if , for instance , you wanted to lie to the person you are talking to , you should be really fast eitherwise they would see that it took you time to answer . Later they could add as a factor whether the other person likes/trusts your or not .
All I am saying is that they could try adding something new , no matter how big or small it is , every time to their games rather than staying the same . It doesn't matter if that is a dynamic enviroment , or a quick action dialogue or whatever , as long as there is something . In that way , we the fans , can rate that specific improvement and TT can work on it or completely remove it . I doubt it will do any harm
Those are excellent ideas, I hope TellTale reads this discussion
The day that the game choices stop being very well crafted illusions and has actual features like this, and maybe even branching stories is the day TellTale takes over the world.
And the perfect game where Telltale makes a complex narrative is Game of Thrones.
The TV Show/Books has a complex story with many different characters and stories. Surely, if Telltale were to embrace Game of Thrones they could embrace its narrative style as well.
Ugh. I don't mean "ugh, this idea is bad," it's a great idea, I mean "ugh, people are whiny enough about release dates being two months apart as it is." I would rather not see a forum littered with posts about Telltale not working around the OP's schedule. I swear, the only time I see any non-whiny thread titles is after an episode has just been released. Then again, I'm rarely on the forums, so I may be exaggerating a bit and only be online when sucky people are posting.
Currently, the tailored gameplay seen in Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us is "Telltale stepping it up."
Telltale used to design more puzzle oriented games, so this new gameplay style is basically a paradigm shift for them. Of course, as you all do, I also want to see them make choices have larger impacts down the line, but for the time being I think it is fine for Telltale to get their feet wet with this new gameplay style.
I disagree that there should be X number of endings or randomized variables outside of the player's control as that defeats the point of Telltale's "tailored" narrative. However, as I said above, I look forward to seeing how Telltale finds new ways to implement choices in the future.
TTG creating more variables in conversations and different storylines would create longer wait between episode releases. And some complaints if the lagging between the increases of variant gameplay occur.
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Well the topic is not a direct attack on TT developers to immediately change their game to our wishes but rather a place to discuss on what would make TT games better on the near future . Its neither about asking too much , neither asking impossible things (hell, almost nothing is impossible in programming) . Its about everyone writing down his opinion .
They did a major rewrite of the story between episode 1 and 2. My gut feeling is that they re-wrote the game in order to end their story this season. But im not sure Telltalle develops on the scale to be able to do complex consequence and ending trees. Bioware is a AAA dev with dozens of programers and million dollar budgets and their games don't have multiple outcome trees, either. There is really only one ending with these types of games, its only the window dressing that can be different for the player.
Telltale had a sudden outburst in popularity after The Walking Dead.
However, if they have to change their pace, their games will lose quality.
So I say, let those who can't wait leave, because they are the ones who want the product to be rushed and bitch about it later if it's not up to par, and they will ultimately cause bad games. They are also the ones who expect more than what the company can handle. When a company reaches for a goal set to high, the fans become disappointed because they expected more. Their goals should be limited to what they can reach so we can get what we expect and nothing lower. It's just not worth the risk if they can't pull it off.
We can't rush them into higher game production, because if we do we end up getting crap. They are still a small(er) company and don't have the work staff of those bigger companies. For what they have, TWAU is pretty spectacular. Until they can grow larger as a whole, their games will stay with what they can grasp.
I think it's easy to look at the "this is a game" aspect and compare it to what other games do and think of it as missing something. But for me, this is less of a game and more of the huge leap that brings Graphic Novels into the digital age. Now the images are not still pictures on a page and the words are voice acted, and what interactivity we have is what separates it from just an animated feature. It might be nice to have more of an impact on the story, but keeping the plot consistent for everyone is going to help keep fans on the same page.
In contrast, I recently worked my way through all three MASS Effect games and found myself spending a lot of time online reading about what choices I had to make to get the results I wanted from the story. That really distracted me from just playing the game, and I rather wish they'd just decided what was going to happen regardless of what decisions I made so I could just focus on playing.