Should Telltale Games Stick To Being Adult?
I wouldn't mind a Minecraft: Story Mode, it's coming from telltale so I know it's going to good. I've played every telltale game since Back to the Future and I've enjoyed each one more than the last, my favourite is probably the Wolf Among Us. This is probably because of how dark it was. I also loved this in the first episode of Game of Thrones and I enjoyed the dark comedy in Tales from the Borderlands. My point is I feel like a Minecraft game aimed at children, will be no where here was satstfying as there last 4 games or show. I'm not sure if this is just me so I would like to see other people's opinions, if you disagree with me that's fine too?
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No, they need to be diverse, they aren't a mature only company, and they can create some fantastic games, even if they aren't M Rated.
Thanks, I don't hate the idea of them making a chold friendly game, it's just kind of sad for me that they will be focusing on this rather than something more in the vain of their previous titles. I'm still probably going to get it when it comes out though.
I think they should just make games that feature puzzles again.
I wouldn't mind seeing a puzzle or two, but with their narrative focused games, the puzzles could potentially distract from the narrative, they'd have to be simple and implemented well into the narrative.
Though I think they should release games that resemble their older titles along with their narrative driven games, I recently finished all three seasons of Sam & Max, and I have to say that they are good and their puzzles were fun and it had a pretty cool story. Currently doing Tales of Monkey Island and it's also pretty good.
no they don't have to we have already seen what they can do with less mature ips and they work well i just don't like the idea of a minecraft telltale game at all i would much prefer if they did something else or they did a sequel to one of their older titles (sam and max, back to the future etc)
Tales of Monkey Island is where they peaked, in my opinion. I don't agree that puzzles hinder the narrative, as adventure games have had great stories and great puzzles for 30 years. It would only hinder the narrative for people that aren't smart or patient enough to solve them, and I am fine with there being a "cinematic mode" difficulty setting where the puzzles are auto-solved/non-existent, but I don't find an adventure game that is void of puzzles to be satisfying to play.
Telltale has made games suitable for all ages before (such as Bone, Wallace & Gromit, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People). All of them are excellent games (the latter two more so than the former, as it was Telltale's first series, although The Great Cow Race is still a fun game), and Wallace & Gromit still remains my all-time favorite Telltale season so far.
They definitely have it in them to make a game suitable for all ages that is just as captivating as their series aimed at adults.
Nah they need a diversity. That being said, I hope they do still stick to making mature games like Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Wolf Among Us and some dark comedy games like Tales from the Borderlands. A balance of both wouldn't be bad
Surprisingly enough, Telltale's mature games are the diversity from their older games to fans who were around prior to Walking Dead. As Jennifer said, Telltale used to be known for light hearted comedy games before Walking Dead.
Most definitely not, Puzzle Agent and Wallace & Gromit were light hearted games for all ages and they were pretty damn great, so no, they shouldn't do that because they are really good at making light hearted games and after what they've learned from doing mature games for what? 2 years? It would be interesting to see them make light hearted puzzle games again, the backlash against Minecraft it's probably a combination of people being silly and Minecraft being kind off a weird IP for Telltale, plus due to being extremely popular Minecraft has a lot of detractors, I personally don't are for Minecraft but the announcement doesn't bother me.
i agree that tales of monkey island was the peak of the classic era of telltale even thoe i enjoy back to the future the game the most. telltale seems to be moving on from making puzzle based adventure games. but it's not like they are dead we got wadjet eye who make the puzzles work with the story.
This.
I just want Tales of Monkey Island to be continued. They have essentially put the final nail in the coffin of that happening since they're entirely focused on obtaining whatever the flavor of the week popular licenses are and tossing in casual streamlined interactive movie gameplay. This way, they spend less money on development (no one has to write any puzzles) and make more on sales. The only people who lose are the entirety of their original fanbase, that put them on the map by buying 5 copies of each adventure game they made. Greed > Integrity/Loyalty.
I'd love to see Telltale make a new Tales of Monkey Island (it would be neat to see an adventure game with their current style of choices combined with traditional adventure puzzles, since Dreamfall Chapters has shown they can be blended, and the Monkey Island license definitely would be one where such a pairing could work quite well), but it's very unlikely, even if Telltale wanted to. They'd most likely have to go through Sony as Sony seems to have sought control of all of the LucasArts adventure licenses, and Telltale is not a company that would be open to console exclusivity, or even timed exclusivity, since that would definitely go against their game design philosophy.
I'm one of those fans of Telltale that has bought tons of their games (I own all of their games, all the way back to Telltale Texas Hold'Em, and most of them at least twice) and I don't mind their new style. If you play them from Bone to Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones, it's quite interesting to see their progression. Each game is an evolution of the style that eventually leads up to their current cinematic adventures. So, it's definitely a stylistic choice rather than something that is easier to do, as it definitely is not.
Speaking as a programmer myself, I know first hand that making a branching story like Telltale does is actually more time consuming than making a standard point and click adventure. The amount of code in the scripts tied to each choice and outcome (even the minute ones which don't directly affect the story) is much greater than that required to tie an action or an inventory item to an object or a character, which all that's required to do in a traditional adventure game (although, if you have dialog for every object, and branching dialog trees it can indeed get time consuming on its own, but not as much as a branching storyline like Telltale's cinematic adventures).
Also, even if Telltale's cinematic adventures don't have puzzles, they still retain some of the functions of the traditional adventure, such as the look command, which means they have some of the standard adventure game scripting to do as well as the branching. The branching is also required to be designed, as puzzles would be, in a flowchart during the design period to make sure that everything works before the game is produced (and this would be much more involved than the design of a standard puzzle adventure game as well, due to the amount of options that each minute choice would make, and there are a lot of them, even if they aren't readily apparent in the story). That's the reason why it takes two months to make their cinematic adventures as opposed to the one month for their more traditional adventures.
From what I've heard, that doesn't just extend exclusively to the programmers. Around Season 1 of Walking Dead, Sean Vanaman said that the average length of the script for each episode was the length of two typical movie scripts.
This is my worry: they started as a kids games company who have become more adult with things like TWAU and TWD. But now that they're getting a larger kids audience, are they gonna have to tone down their other material to make it more kid friendly? That's my main worry.
There's no need to worry about them stopping making mature rated games. They've never been a company that makes games just for children, and they've never been a company that makes games for just adults. They'll always make a mix of the two.
Telltale has always made a combination of games that were aimed at everyone and games that were targeted at adults. While they were making games like Bone and Wallace and Gromit, they made the CSI games (pretty much since their foundation, as their first game was released in 2005, and the first CSI game was released in 2006) and they made Law & Order: Legacies as well. Those games were mature rated games that definitely weren't aimed at children.
While games like the Wolf Among Us are fantastic, you can't really call the games challenging. Puzzles can help to mix things up a bit more between all of the character development and quick time events (btw, I don't hate quick time events, but I do hate the ones that can kill you. I mean, would it hurt to maybe have a warning that comes up whenever a quick time event is about to initiate? Just saying.)
I wouldn't worry as Telltale's first priority is having a presentation faithful to the series' source material. They aren't going to "water down" or "amp up" how a series is presented just because they are selling other games that are more mature or more family friendly at that time. The only notable way in which one Telltale game influences others is the experience that Telltale has from writing and designing past games, as well as various gameplay elements they have added to their template - again, gained from experience working on past titles.
There aren't nearly as many choices, or impacts by choices, as you seem to believe there are. Most of the choices just shift an invisible reputation slider for a certain character up or down, kind of like a simplified version of what Bioware games have done, and very few dialogue trees are affected by the reputation for specific characters. Most of the "major" choices aren't even really that affecting. No matter who you save in TWD S1, they both perform the same role in the following episode, and both die regardless. Designing coherent, logical, and satisfying puzzles would take far longer than writing a handful of variables to slightly modify a minimal amount of dialogue. I'm a programmer too, programming is easy, puzzle design, not so much.
Plus, every game from Back to the Future on has had a pitifully minimal amount of objects to examine, usually 1-2 per scene, at most. Compare this to any single room in any Sam and Max episode. There's a significantly reduced amount of environmental interaction.
You know, some people thought the puzzles slowed down the experience and felt like needless filler back in the Walking Dead season 1 days.
There were only about 3 puzzles in the entire game, and you'd have to be a braindead chimp to take longer than 5 seconds to figure them out. If we're going that route, QTEs, dialogue choices, and anything involving the player doing anything other than watching a movie "slow down the experience."
DAT Puzzle Agent, man.
You're playing down those small choices too much, development wise. Even the small choices require branching code and extra dialog, which take up a whole lot more development time than the games that don't have that kind of branching at all (I've written adventure games before, so I can attest to the fact that even interacting with every object with every verb is a whole lot simpler to do, programming-wise and writing wise, than to do branching, even just dialog branching. Dialog branching isn't a case of keeping track of an arbitrary meter, you need to keep track of every case, and then keep track of the cases branched from those cases, and so on (for instance, it's not coded in a way that the group is mad at you or isn't (which would be a simple reputation slider, as you stated), the game keeps track of who Clementine sat with, whether she took the watch, did she try to fight back at the cabin, who is still alive with the group after the fight, etc). That's a lot of cases to keep track of, not to mention all the alternate dialog that is needed to be written). They may not mean as much to the gamer as something readily apparent like puzzles, but there is a whole lot going on under the hood (and definitely a whole lot more than a standard adventure game).
I agree with you that their games released in the last couple of years have been lacking in interaction (but even this simple interaction would require code on top of the already complex branching code, as well as additional dialog). However, Their new games are getting more interactive as well. Tales from the Borderlands actually lets you not only look at most items, but examine them with one of the main character's bionic eye as well, which again, would require more development time, both from a programming perspective and from a writer's perspective.
That's the one thing that has remained constant about Telltale from their foundation. They haven't abandoned anything, as their style is constantly evolving. Tales from the Borderlands is quite apparently different in style from The Walking Dead: Season One, even though they both are choice based (much like how Bone is different from Sam & Max: Season One, or Tales from Monkey Island is different than Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures). Heck, even in their series the style changed. Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse is radically different from the other seasons. Going by Telltale's history, I wouldn't be surprised if The Walking Dead: Season Three is radically different from its predecessors as well.
Now that I'm writing it down, I just realized that the constant evolution of Telltale's formula is probably the main reason that I've stayed a fan of theirs for so long.
No one has to play every game. If it's not your cup of tea, don't play it, but it should be an option for those are interested. I dont think they should just cater to one subset of gamers.
I would not say I hate this but...isn't the whole point of mine craft in general just building and crafting stuff? How would a story even apply here? Unless its about a bunch of people on their computer playing it then that would kind of make sense to me.
They should branch out, but this kind of stuff is what they used to do before TWD. So I'm fine with them going back to their roots, but I really don't like Minecraft.
Do people really think of MineCraft as just a kids game? I consistently see very popular games that are evidently played by people of all ages being called 'kids games', I understand it has a target audience but that doesn't mean that the game itself is only meant for the target audience, in fact I've met more people on games that span out from the target audience than actually in the target audience. It just feels like people undermine games because of a small portion of people who play it or just because of it's theme :x
This isn't a Rockstar games company you were looking for
if you want some M/Adult(content) rating
Every instance you just listed there would be a simple if/then (or a case/switch if there are multiple states) statement to check the status of a single variable for a single line of dialogue to determine which version of the dialogue should play. I do not consider this difficult. This is basic programming. This would only require minimally rewording a handful of lines of dialogue to make it appear that anything you've done has mattered in some way, while maintaining the same general dialogue arc. There are almost no circumstances in which multiple "choices" would affect the direction of the dialogue simultaneously, and even if so, it'd be a matter of a few nested case/switch statements. It'd take longer to draw out a flow chart of possible dialogue options than it would to program it. I have a hard time believing you have done much programming if you think it would be a colossal undertaking to use a handful of variables, if/thens, and case/switch statements. It seems more like you don't fully grasp how these can be easily implemented and therefore believe it to be a much more difficult task than it would be in reality.
In Borderlands, there are still painfully few objects in any given scene. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that Sam & Max's office (or even Sybil's) contains more items to look at than the entirety of the first Borderlands episode.
I don't see how you can genuinely believe "they haven't abandoned anything" when they've literally taken everything that made their games great and thrown it in the trash and started from scratch, and refused to even attempt to cater to the fans that gave them millions upon millions of dollars.
The constant de-evolution of Telltale's formula is probably the main reason I've hated their guts for 4 years running, after being their biggest fan for 5 years prior.
That was when their fanbase was a lot smaller- now that it's expanded massively, it's a whole different situation. I don't think they will tone down their games, but it still worries me a little...
Good point. Still worried, but reading that did reassure me a bit. Thanks
As a developer who's worked on these kinds of games, I have to agree with Jennifer here.
The concept of the "if/then statement" is very simple at face value, but when you stack "if/then statements" on top of "if/then statements", and need to program a sequence of events that complements all the decisions a player's made (in a hour-or-so long episode), the complexity quickly begins to compound on itself. (Heck, at the end of Walking Dead Season two, new backgrounds and character models needed to be created depending on the decisions you made, so it's not just the programmers that need to take on this extra work.)
Having said that though, I do agree with SHODANFreeman that I miss seeing puzzles in TellTale's games. Hopefully they can find a fun and innovative way to work in Puzzles in this new Minecraft game.
The sequence of events you're talking about is changing a line of dialogue here and there, or playing a slightly different version of a scene. It's not like every line is dependent on choices, much less multiple choices at once. The vast majority of the dialogue framework is set in stone, with minor variances here and there.
They've always been aiming towards cinematic games. Even at the time of Sam & Max: Season One they stated their goal was to make cinematic games. Their current style is just a progression of that goal (and you really can see that by playing the series in order). They really haven't abandoned anything as they just kept evolving their style towards the goal that they have always had.
Sure, I miss the puzzle games, and would have liked to have more, but I'm fine with the constant tweaking of their style, as part of the fun for me is seeing what the next iteration of their style will bring with each new release.
The puzzles may not have been challenging, but they still can take awhile, and FOR SOME, slow down the experience.
They actually haven't been doing that many adult games. They started out making more kid friendly games. In fact, I think about 1/3 of all of their products are meant for a younger audience.
That interview you posted a link to does not in any way imply that they intend on removing puzzles from games in order to turn them into films. It simply states that they think it's important to properly frame each shot, which adventure games have literally always done. Cinematography has been a part of gaming for decades. Their goal was stated numerous times to be reviving adventure gaming via episodic gaming. The games they make now are not adventure games in the slightest.
I, for one, am not fine with every game just being a film that you click on. They abused the Sam & Max/Monkey Island fanbase for the financial pull to land bigger licenses, and then started making cash-ins for mainstream appeal.
It really just sounds like you're in denial and trying to come to terms with the fact that money is simply more important to them than the genre they initially swore to revive.
Why not have a cinematic difficulty and a puzzle difficulty? It's been done numerous times in numerous other adventure games before.
The simple answer? They couldn't care any less about the fans who made them what they are, and are only interested in catering to mainstream audiences that wouldn't even be able to figure out puzzles that amount to little more than basic common sense busywork.
"We, Telltale Games Inc, solemnly swear to revive the adventure game genre in exactly the form defined by ShodanFreeman, from the founding day of the studio till death do us part."