Really disappointed with Season 3 and the general direction of TTG

Personally I would say that the third season was by far the weakest. Both in content (with episodes taking me less than 2 hours to complete) and storylines as I honestly felt that the story of ANF was unbelievably predictable. From the start of the game it just felt very rushed to me, and at times had me scratching my head as to how drawn out certain sequences were. An example of this is when Javi is captured in the changing room. I had walked around the room and took note of what was there. I saw the window and stood on the bench only to get a message saying something like "I'm not sure that will hold". I remembered there was a stool in the corner of the room. Went back to it. Unable to use, but can look at it. Went back to the bench, had to click on it again for the character to say "i'll never reach the window from this" (which was obvious!) and then tell me to look for something else. Obviously I went back to the stool and now suddenly I could use it.

Little moments like this made me feel like the programmers thought we are all stupid so need to be spoonfed every step, but it also made me realize that they had packed in "extra play time" by making you do these things back and forth, over and over again to ensure that the already gameplay lacking chapters were drawn out to the maximum.

I must admit too that I didn't really find myself warming to any of the characters that I was supposed to give a damn about. The big choice between Tripp and Ava was pretty lackluster to me since I had only really spoken to Ava briefly before that and Tripp was a fairly bland character anyway. It just made the choice feel like it really didn't matter in the slightest and took all meaning away from what was going on. It also doesn't help that Telltale has now developed a habit of ensuring that whomever you "save" at the end of the season long playthrough will be dead by the end of the first episode in the following season. Again, it creates a huge disconnect between the consequences of the decisions and the player since TTG have now made themselves a track record of wiping the slate clean every season (most likely to save them any effort of making a story continuation that could actually be engaging). On that note too, the "shock" death of Marianna really wasn't a shock at all for me since TTG used the same trope recently in the Game of Thrones game with Ethan. If you want to keep shocking players, you need to keep creating new shocks and not reusing old ones.

I can't say that I really care what happened on my playthrough of season 3 now because I can pretty much bet my house on Javi and his family being gone come season 4 and maybe mentioned in either a brief 2 minute scene or throwaway line by someone else who you won't yet know but be supposed to care about. It really is sad that having played through the season, I really do not feel like i have anything to look forward to if they ever do make a season 4.

I personally waited to play through the season once all episodes had been released, and I also played through the first two seasons, dlc and the michonne game beforehand and unfortunately it has brought me to the conclusion that TTG no longer really care about engaging the player or making you feel like you are actually a part of the story being told, but rather just a viewer. Unfortunately, whilst their original format of game enticed players into a choose your own adventure style videogame, it is becoming more increasingly like you are just watching a TV show (in this case The Walking Dead). The problem with that being that we already have these shows that we can watch if we want to fix that craving whereas our gaming addiction is starting to become pushed out. I'm a long time customer of telltale games and used to really look forward to their games being released, but now I always know that there won't be enough gameplay to keep me interested in episodic content and the story will not be compelling enough to make me want to wait either which leads me to wait for all episodes to be released first. When you start to play the games in this way, you start to really notice the shortcuts being taken and to be honest you start to question whether their next game will be worth it at all.

Recently, TTG released their Guardians of the Galaxy game and as a lifelong comic book nerd I should be throwing money at them as we speak. Unfortunately I know better than to buy at release now, and I very much doubt that they will buck this trend of minimum effort they seem to be putting into their games lately.

Ah well, this is just one frustrated gamer's opinion. I genuinely used to adore TTG. I would like to again. That really isn't up to me though.