Telltale nearly scrapped The Walking Dead's Clementine a week before recording
Telltale writers Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman revealed at a Game Developers Conference panel attended by Eurogamer that Clementine was nearly cut from The Walking Dead a week before voice-recording took place.
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.
The pair explained that one of the greatest challenges about writing The Walking Dead was to make sure the supporting characters were likable and empathetic enough that people wouldn't want to leave them.
"We tried to answer this one question: Why would you not leave this group of assholes?" said Rodkin. "If you don't care about that child then we're doubly screwed, because you'd be frustrated by this group and you'd be shackled to this little kid you don't care about. Was there talk about leaving Clementine out of the game a week before voice recording? Yes. Yes there was."
This isn't that surprising given how many children in games are incredibly obnoxious. "We learned that characters in the Walking Dead need to a) be capable, and b) be capable of eliciting an empathetic response from the player," said Rodkin.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-02-telltale-nearly-scrapped-the-walking-deads-clementine-a-week-before-recording
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.
The pair explained that one of the greatest challenges about writing The Walking Dead was to make sure the supporting characters were likable and empathetic enough that people wouldn't want to leave them.
"We tried to answer this one question: Why would you not leave this group of assholes?" said Rodkin. "If you don't care about that child then we're doubly screwed, because you'd be frustrated by this group and you'd be shackled to this little kid you don't care about. Was there talk about leaving Clementine out of the game a week before voice recording? Yes. Yes there was."
This isn't that surprising given how many children in games are incredibly obnoxious. "We learned that characters in the Walking Dead need to a) be capable, and b) be capable of eliciting an empathetic response from the player," said Rodkin.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-02-telltale-nearly-scrapped-the-walking-deads-clementine-a-week-before-recording
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Comments
I'm surprised that Clementine was considered to be scrapped from the final game, though I understand why they had thought of doing that at first. If the writers didn't know how to write child characters, Clementine would have came across as annoying, much worse than Duck since she's your responsibility as much as Duck was to Kenny and Katjaa, only that you would have to look after her yourself.
Thankfully they made the effort to make Clementine likable and relatable to us and it worked brilliantly. I really can't imagine Season 1 working without her appearance.
More games should try to go out of their comfort zones and do what Telltale games did with Clementine, rather than take the easy way out with stereotypes.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/12/26/creating-clementine.aspx
Good thing that the issue was resolved moments before Clementine was taken out of the game.
Hear hear!
maybe tl;dr: Sean and I being paranoid weirdos about Clementine during the design process doesn't actually mean she would have been cut from the game because smarter people than us would have never let that happen.
I personally didn't care for Clementine much, So for me it did feel like an escort mission. At least she wasn't annoying though, like Ashley from RE4. I just didn't feel attached to her. No feeling for her whatsoever, anyway, I hope you consider making an entirely new cast for season 2. Since you guys are eager to start on season 2 so soon
I think that you're in the minority of not caring for Clem but its good that you also have your own opinion on caring for her,most times i playthrough even if i want to choose another path i still end up saying to Kenny on the train that 'me and Clem are gonna go our seperate ways' when we get off this train and into Savanah.I think Clementine changes the player early on in the game after the crash,i don't know if its the voice acting or the animations of the character but you just put Lee's life on the line trying to keep her safe.(the animations that are used are so great Telltale!!)
Animation is nothing special, yeah she has good voice acting, but at the end of the day she is just pixels
Well of course at the end of the day she's just pixels, it's just a game, and nothing you do there matters in the real world, and all the characters are pixels, and how you treat them doesn't matter. But thinking like that spoils the fun, when playing you should consider them real persons, and try to get soaked into the game world as good as possible, it just makes more fun that way.
Of course having a healthy distance to all that, when turning off the console/PC is good, and knowing and understanding it's not reality is important in my opinion, but while playing I don't do that, while playing I try to get as involved into the world and characters as possible, I play such games to feel such feelings, and to get emotionally touched that way, just as I play horrorgames to get scared like a bitch.
So I'm obviously one of the people who did care for her, and I personally still think of how her story could continue every now and then, hence I come to this forum to share my thoughts, and see what other people think.
i was thinking of the specific scenes in question shows the true emotion example: when she has to be covered in zombie guts at the end,she goes a little cross eyed and puffs out her cheeks,the hair cut scene,her lying about the bugs,the cheeky face together with the voice acting...its damn near perfect:)
there the ones i think of off the top of my head theres more...
oh wow, that's so amazing, jolly, a video has never been able to pull off facial expressions before
Look, I don't hate Clementine, but I don't care much for her either, If Telltale is smart, they would give us a brand new cast, perhaps Clementine can appear but it should either be in the future, when she is a young adult or make a short cameo
Anyway, think about what SquareSoft did with the Final Fantasy series. A new cast every installment. and it works
if you don't care for the characters because they are just pixels, what actually made you like the game? i am genuinely curious as to how you can like the game but not care about the characters in it
Anwser this!
This is the Walking Dead not Final Fantasy. This is based on Robert Kirkmans work and it has 100+ issues and each one sticks to one story with 1 character at the centre. Rick Grimes will only die near the end. If this truly is The Walking Dead they wont do the easy thing of '
whiping the whiteboard and gathering.
Kirkman said the worst thing with Zombie genre is how it does not go deep into the apocalypse. That is the Walking dead. So your new cast dream is not The Walking Dead. Its established now Clementine is the centre. You have to stick with THE best character made in a game ever in my opinion. I liked Ezio Auditore and many others but no character has captured peoples emotions than those in the first game. It is a COP out to just move on.
I don't see why Clementine being pixels means anything different from anything else. At the end of the day the characters in a film are just light projected through celluloid onto a big white surface. At the end of the day a stage performance is just people pretending. At the end of the day stories are nothing but the forms of letters struck to a page, or a string of words spoken from one person to another.
Maybe by saying "it's just pixels" all you're saying is "we need to do better," but that's like saying "it's just actors playing" or "its just words on a page." EVERY story in EVERY medium (other than the story that is real life) requires your imagination to be engaged, and requires the suspension of disbelief, for it to become anything but its raw component parts in the viewer's mind.
Indeed.
This is a very good question and I too would be interested in the answer.
What's strange about that? I don't care about characters either. I liked the game because I like playing games where your choices influence the story.
You see, some of us have a hard time liking real people, let alone virtual ones.
P.S. I did like Kenny though
just the curiosity of what will happen next I guess.