The choose your own adventure genre
Not sure what the 'official' title for the Telltale TWD type of games is but decided to just call it 'choose your own adventure'. Anyways is this genre of gaming pretty much dead again at this point? Season 1 of Walking Dead really seemed to be an aberration (in large part having success due to the popularity of the tv show at the time in my opinion) in the Walking Dead series and the following entries quickly fell off a cliff sales wise. I think Season 2 sold about a tenth as well as season 1 did and season 3 may have sold about a fiftieth as well (and by the time season 4 came around Telltale was closing their doors). And TWD was really Telltale's best selling series even though season 3 and 4 sales seemed to be in the gutter.
So is this style of gaming just not marketable enough to continue (I know there are a few other games out there that allow the player to have a big impact on the plot of the game but not many). I know for me season 1 was a lot of fun but I really started noticing the drawbacks to this style of storytelling once season 2 came around. I let season 2 slide but once I saw the same things happening in season 3 I was pretty much done with the series and only played season 4 because I just wanted to see how the story ends.
It's difficult to have a great deal of narrative structure when you are constantly having plot branches happening throughout the game. It makes it especially difficult when you start trying to have multiple entries within the same series. Narrative branching I think works better for one off stories. For instance Heavy Rain never had a sequel. Beyond Two Souls never had a sequel. Not sure if Life is Strange had a sequel or not.
In anycase do you think there is much of a market for this style of gaming? It doesn't seem to be hugely popular or else there would be more games like this and more gaming companies would be making games like this.
I honestly think it would have been better if each season of the Telltale series started over with an entirely brand new set of characters that had nothing to do with the story of the previous game.
Comments
I think the proper title imo anyway is interactive story/ point and click adventure
It is,you just need a good story,with good writers and to not change the writers of your game every episode,just stick with your story and don't have any huge rewrites.
You also need more gameplay in these games,either make it a point and click game with some puzzles and shit and lots of hubs like Season 1 had,
or put some gameplay segments like The Final Season had.
I don't know,but these games need more gameplay,give people a reason to buy that game and to not watch the story on Youtube.
The choices also need to be good,i remember a lot of choices in TWD S1 where i had to pause the game for 10 minutes before i decided what to do,we need more of that,
you also need to feel like your choices matter,you don't need to always have choices that have huge consequences,but it's nice.
It's pretty hard to explain that but TWD S1 did it perfectly.
I like what The Council did,that game had choices and shit but they also had RPG elements in it and puzzles,that was cool.
QD's Detroit Become Human is closing in on 3 million total sales as of late.
I think if more developers and studios tried to follow the gameplay structure and branching path of Detroit and actually try to evolve the genre, they'll see success and the genre itself will continue thriving.
With better writing hopefully.