Original Story For S2
Ok so season 2 had large portions of it re written for unknown reasons. We can get a slight idea of what was meant to happen by some of the episode slides. What do you think was originally planned?
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Where's the evidence for this? Those slides are made before everything is written out. TT writes an episode after one episode is complete. The slides in S1 were the same way as S2. Just showing a general idea of what was gonna happen in the episode.
The only thing I can think of that they very clearly rewrote was the town at the end of episode 4 being completely ignored in the beginning of episode 5. There are certainly areas of the plot where it feels like they changed their minds on some plot point, but it could very well just be a feeling.
Doesn't really matter either way. Either the plot sucked because changes and lack of planning screwed it up, or the plot sucked just because it sucked.
Uhh, no I doubt it works that way.
But amid the ruins had nothing to do with his slide.
The plot did indeed suck
I think the main thing that changed was episode 4 amid the ruins. I think the shdows in the thumbnail were going to be scene in the episode. Larry,duck,Carly,Doug were going to appear In a flashback and another shadow which I think was Eddie from 400 days was going to make a major appearance in this episode. Also in episode 5 the possibly leaked stats showed the possibility of lily and Christa making reappearances.
Things i believed in the S2 slides
EP2 : Troy is the leader of group (But wasn't)
EP3: Rebecca giving birth to a baby (Didn't happen)
EP4:Meeting Eddie and Clem is doing something crazy (Didn't happen)
EP5: A corpse of a unknown but didn't even get to know whose corpse it is when EP 5 was released
Everyone. The thumbnails are inconsistent. In season 1 episode 5 the thumbnail shows clementine looking down at a body in an area at tall grass dressed up in her tank top and this thumbnail was a metaphor for what happens at the end of the episode
Pardon me, I take it back, I think that amid the ruins the thumbnail actually had something to do with the episode. The shadows are dead people and in the episode the deaths are similar to the thumbnail characters. Doug and Carly are representations for the shocking demise of sarita. Duck is a representation of Sarah. Someone who was a liability. Larry is a representation of Rebecca. Someone who was going through a traumatic time and was originally distrustful of clementine. The two other shadows are possibly metaphors for other people, I don't know but this is what I think.
Larry was never distrustful of Clementine. He seemed quite protective of her, when he thought Duck was bitten.
I believe Luke was supposed to live, and I am so pissed that he didn't. Out of all the cabin survivors he seemed to be the most fleshed out. Not only that but he spent the most time with Clementine as well. In season five we see him begin to develop as a character, watch as he finally breaks down at his losses and forced to put himself together again for the sake of survival. Why would TT build up a character to only kill them off so senselessly? Also, I can't confirm this myself, but apparently there is audio of Luke actually getting out of the freezing lake. So if that's true why did they re-write him to die? I loved that guy. Whatever reason telltale has for taking him out so suddenly will never make sense to me.
Again, thank god for fan fiction. I'm still grieving. RIP Luke.
Sorry, I mean lee, he was protective of her i was not talking about her.
Your right about like, in a deleted audio sequence, it seemed like Luke would have survived
Some of the moments in season 2 are really unexplained why could'nt they have walked around the ice. Why could'nt they have taken over carvers place, why could'nt Arvo be nice to Clem if she did not steal.
I did of course wish that the two shadows were not Christa and onus. I wanted them to be new characters because the way how the post credit scene was shown, it felt like telltale wanted us to believe that it was not cheista and omid. It was also stupid to kill of cheista and omid in the begging. When you bring back characters. You do not kill them off in the first ten minutes.
I don't understand how the thumbnails being inconsistent has to do with No Time Left's thumbnail, which made some sense.
Yeah, walking around the frozen lake should have been the most logical choice. When I saw the group was actually going to risk treading across I just knew that was the end. Ugh. You can't take risks like that in the telltale world they live in. I was also confused as to why Avro attacked even if you didn't steal from him. I guess he didn't like how Jane treated him. Honestly though, if that would've been up to me, I would have killed him or locked him somewhere before we left. Not because I didn't like him but because you can't always trust people that randomly stumble across you.
I can never stand when directors, writers, editors or whoever delete what could of potentially been great scenes. I would have enjoyed exploring that eerie distant town. Could have made for a great additional 30 minutes worth of play-time and puzzles. I'm grateful for season 2 but it sure could have been done more justice. Like Jurassic Park 3.
It shows that the thumbnails have stuff that were partially accurate but not 100% accurate to the episodes. Examples. Around every corner: lee's jacket is nowhere present, long road ahead: duck is wearing his tea shirt from episode 1. Starved for help: lily is wearing her tank top.
Onus???? Who the hell is Onus? Is Christa having an affair?
I mean omid, very funny
Why did they make Jane against Kenny, Jane had been in the series for three episodes, Kenny has been in there for 10 episodes, it should have been Luke or Kenny instead of Jane or Kenny
It does. Telltale finish one episode then get started on the next. It's not, the whole story is completed and then they work on programing and developing. It's all a work in progress till the episode is completely done. It's also why we see different writers in the credits every episode.
The Amid the Ruins slude did match the story. Clementine was covered in blood at the start of the episode and surrounded by people whom she's not sure to call friend or foe. Just because it wasn't exact does not mean the story wasn't rewritten.
I really have no idea. I suppose it's due to the fact of what Jane can offer Clementine. She is a survivalist, thinks logically, remains calm in chaotic situations, etc. Basically she is the opposite of Kenny, who I love, but I think TT thought people would resonate more with Jane and her skills than Luke. Idk. Fuck that. If it came down to it I would have gone with Luke before any of them. In a heart beat, yo.
Omid's evil twin
Onus bastard son of Anus
They don't just make it up as they go, I think they know what they want to do for every episode but certain things change along the way.
They make the slides before the actual episodes. I don't really think they rewrote the WHOLE season, they probably had a concept ready for each episode but lack of planning caused those concepts to be scrapped.
Agreed. I assume they have a broad idea of what's going to happen in the season and then write the specifics like dialogue and choices when they are actually developing the episode. However, there is no indication or evidence that at any point S2 was rewritten.
Well the game was clearly setting up for a choice between Luke and Kenny but ended up being Kenny and Jane. We can't prove this but it's pretty clear that this is what the story was setting up before.
I don't know about that. It could have been TT pulling the old trickery shit that they've been known to do. Everyone and their mother was expecting it, but TT seem to like tricking their audience, teasing one idea of what's going to happen and then giving us something else. Just because some people didn't like the way the story went, does not mean it was rewritten .
If they intended the choice to be Kenny and Jane from the beginning that's not teasing it's bad writing.
That is funny.
Onus gets drunk and calls Omid at 4 am, and proceeds to curse him out, then start to cry about his life, his dead dog. Omid sees that Christa scowls, and tries to get Onus off the phone. Despondent he hung up with the final words "FU".
I think the very basic direction of the season (as in: Clem ends up alone > Finds cabin group > Learns about Carver > Gets captured and taken to Howe's > Escapes > Tries to survive while moving North) largely stayed the same, with the roles of individual characters and sequences shifting around the most
I know for a fact that Carver wasn't originally as large of a presence in the season, which leads me to believe that he wasn't originally the leader and main antagonist of the Howe's arc, but rather a secondary antagonist of sorts, similar to Troy. When they got Michael Madsen in on it, they expanded Carver into a much more central role of the Howe's arc.
The rest I think is more or less the shifting of scenes and sequences around into different episodes. For example; Rebecca was most likely going to have the baby in episode 3, but at one point was changed and instead moved into episode 4, while the herd sequence (which is what the Amid The Ruins slide seems to represent the closest) was instead split into the outro/intro of episodes 3 and 4 respectively.
Concept art suggests that certain things were practically bound to happen since early in development.
Christa and Clementine together was a piece of concept that was notably shown to the public at one point in the past, far prior to S2 being officially announced. I think it was at a Comic-con or PAX? Either way, that implies that the two of them ending up together was set in stone quite early in development, which by extension can also imply that Omid's death was planned quite early as well.
Other concept art shows Clementine alone, which also suggests that her being fully separated and ending up alone was planned to happen.
There's concept art of both Kenny and his eye injury, which implies that the choice to have him both return and eventually lose an eye was something planned from the start, more or less. Artwork for Howe's shows that this was always intended to be a location. There's an extensive amount of texture and model files for Howe's present in the files for episode 2, and 90% of those remain unchanged moving into episode 3, suggesting that the textures and models for location itself was more or less finalized for a fair amount of time prior to episode 3's release, and possibly even episode 2's.
Mike is someone who was re-written, or maybe a better choice of words is de-written. Almost all signs point to him definitely intended to be the bandit Ralph from episode 1, even legacy dialogue/scenes from episodes 3, 4, and even 5 seem to imply this (Kenny getting into a fight with Mike in episode 3, Luke and Mike both have things they say that reference an amount of distrust and difficulty integrating with the group in episode 4, and Kenny saying Mike's turned out to be a real disappointment in episode 5).
It seems that, more or less, they just removed that plot-point, but didn't really bother giving Mike much of a character in return. As a result, he largely just feels like he's there. It also makes his betrayal, and the since-removed choice to shoot him make much more sense from a narrative standpoint.
Achievements also seem to suggest some things were planned quite early in advance. Examples beings most of No Going Back. If memory serves correct, the achievements for this episode were released alongside the achievements for episode 4, or very close to it, both of which were before the actual release of episode 4 itself.
Center Cannot Hold, for example, is pretty obvious when you think about it: episode slide shows snow, other achievements for NGB imply snow, achievement references getting to the other side of something, and all of that combined with the not-so-subtle name quite make it pretty obvious that something involving crossing ice was planned to happen. That became even more apparent when episode 4 came out, as the episode moved into winter towards the very end, and with the civil war site being right next to a river, it just made sense. In fact, I actually guessed that someone was going to die falling through a patch of ice as soon as I saw that achievement for the first time.
One of the few things that I think was truly re-written was the town from episode 4. However, I think it's more likely that the town wasn't actually planned to be a specific location originally. The church is the most prominent building, and even has it's own unique model in the files, and is featured in the final achievement for episode 4, which seems to suggest that it was simply meant to be a landmark for the group to move towards, but not a specific location that they were intended to visit. Why the writers decided to make it a town, though, is a mystery (much like quite a few of the writing decisions made in that episode)
One of the most argued things is Luke and Kenny, and in all honesty, I'm partially convinced that Luke and Kenny wasn't even an intended thing. For the most part, episodes 2 and 3 don't really imply any intense rivalry between the two. The choice of who to sit with at dinner does not feel like it's a test of loyalty between the two characters themselves, but between the groups that they represent. Essentially, they're just the mascots of their respective groups.
Luke and Kenny barely share a rivalry in episode 3 outside of Kenny simply not trusting him (which, given that this is Kenny we're talking about, isn't exactly something new)
The only episode where there seems to be any notably implied rivalry between the two is in episode 4. And if anything, I think the writers of episode 4 are at fault here. I think Kenny and Jane was truly planned to be the main conflict, but due to episode 4's writing, it ended up making it look more like it was Luke and Kenny. That lead to two major issues; the first being that it mislead everyone into thinking that Luke vs Kenny is a thing, and the second being that it made the rivalry of Kenny and Jane in episode 5 seem abrupt and out-of-nowhere. So it basically broke the writing's integrity two-fold because of one bad decision.
TLDR: The main story was more or less established from the beginning, but characters, locations, and scenes were shifted around between episodes, which led to much of the inconsistency between characters, locations, relationships, and conflicts, especially those in the back-half of the season. I specifically think that episodes 3 and 4 are the root of many of the problems of the back-half of the season. All of the episodes written by Nick Breckon honestly feel consistent with one another. Episodes 3 and 4 feel like they changed or otherwise switched around many of the elements established in the first two episodes, which lead to many problems from a narrative standpoint. It also helps make episode 5 look bad, when in all honesty, a lot of what episode 5 did isn't even it's fault directly, but more of the previous two episodes helping to lead the story AWOL.
K whatever.
K whatever? That's a disappointing way to end our debate.
Not gonna bother with the whole "bad writing" argument. Just not worth my time. I'm just trying make my point that there's no evidence on a S2 re-write.
And here I thought we were having a good, old fashioned, healthy debate
Sorry.
I love this. Don't suppose you have the concept art? Or a link. And to be honest. I always thought Kenny's disappointment with Mike was due to the fact he wasn't as urban as Lee. Kenny was hoping for a Lee 2.0.
I doubt that; they easily could've used placeholder models for the shadows.