We shall always be "omidded".
Recently I've been reading gamers complaints here and there about Walking Dead series. Particurlarly about how Telltale likes to kill the characters we get emotionally attached to and about how the game "adapts to your actions" statement is a fluke in general. I personally enourmously enjoyed both seasons despite the fact that I agree with the above sad truth.
The thing is, Telltale script writers are the last ones to blame here. Keeping our beloved characters from season to season is technically very difficult to implement. Game storyline spin offs add up a lot of complexity. Imagine what have to be changed if we could actually save Lee or Carley or Doug or Lilly. Imagine keeping all their possible storylines on your hard drive. And every character is one big separate load of data that is textures, dialoges, interactions. Not all storylines would be compatible with ingame spin offs, so the script writers would have to write new ones, game actors would have to play and developers would have to create and test. Just try to imagine the cumulative complexity of that and, what's more important, development time.
Imagine Lee, Carley, Doug, Lilly, Christa, Omid, Kenny, Jane all together in season 2 with god knows how many branches which all would have to look logical...
I was very sad when whatever I did Carley got shot, I remember replaying this part several times until I tried every possible dialog line. Maybe Lee and Carley could have something between them after all:) I wanted Molly stay in the group because she seemed like a good reliable friend to have. I wish we could save Walter, Luke and Omid but then again imagine how much more game complexity and therefore data size it would require.
So now we have made our Season 2 choices. Some chose Kenny and some Jane (or some decided to be on their own). No matter what is your choice pray that you have at least 15 min of playing time with your friend in Season 3, because undoubtedly Kenny or Jane will be either "omidded" or gone.
Death is easier to explain than something else, so most probably Kenny/Jane dies in Season 3 otherwise the Telltale would have to keep two separate storylines one of which would never get activated. Now imagine we could have saved and brought Luke to Season 3 or had an option of leaving with Bonnie and Mike. What and who would Season 3 be about?
Comments
We're not asking for Peter Molyneux-esque promises of "planting a seed and in real time watching it grow" bullshit. We're asking that a game that is so adamant on promising a fairly linear branching path at least delivers on that.
Mass Effect did it across three games, Fallout has been doing it since 1997, and lets not forget a huge majority of role playing games pride themselves in at least giving the gamer some agency. Having an option that results in a change of one or two lines isn't doing much to enthrall anyone.
You're mixing genres and thus game designs. This is a visual novel game that means it does not have a sandbox world fallout series had and Mass Effect is not a scripted visual novel either. Most non-linear games are the games with several endings not with several game storylines. You have to develop at least two separate games if you want non-linearity.
And to be honest Walking Dead has been delivering these two lines of freedom all over the place, am I not right?
I call BS on 'Omid is too difficult to keep around for more than 3(4) episodes' coming from the same people as 'I know! Let's put Kenny (a far less universally loved character) in 9/10 episodes in Clem's story!!!!'.
If people we get attached to should have quick and lazy deaths, the effort put into each character shouldn't be so drastically different as it was in season 2.
They felt they had a plan for Kenny (whether that plan was any good is debatable).
Christa and Omid they didnt want to use, they killed both (presumably) because the massive reaction to Kenny being alive probably made them nervous about making anyone just leave.
They came back to somehow explain how clem survived for two years
I'm simply using games like ME and FO as a point of reference to compare that having a choice result in consequence has been done before. That's really the only thing I'm saying, I want the choices to at least have consequence, I'm not talking about every little choice branching game paths entirely. Choice based games are or will never get to the point of switching the entire plot for one little decision. It's just never going to happen. However, having the decision at least give different variants on the subsequent scene is fairly easy to code into a game.
I hear you. Walking Dead although allowing us to see different new cut scenes does not let our choices mean anything or at least become serious enough to have consequences. I agree. Unfortunately I think Season 3 will not change much, this is how they designed it. Since I was playing only Android version I had very little expectations. But now that I looked it up, for a PC it definitely could have been so much more.