(spoiler) Telltale Games, why my actions really do not matter ?
So i am wondering, why Telltale games like walking dead or game of thrones have to be so grim ?
Why i cannot save everyone, why i cannot do the good thing ? Why there is no good option ?
For example is walking dead carley gets killed no matter what i do.
They say i got control but most of time i really do not have control if someone dies or lives.
Why do they give us options and then take control and prevent me from doing something.
I had simillar thing in dragon age inquisition, i had choose between loghain and hawke. I didn't finish the game because i have to choose between those two characters. I love both of them.
I see this as a cheap, they say we have tough choices, fine, but most of the time we do not have tough choices, they are artificial. What is the difference if i save someone in one session, if that person is killed in another but this time i have no option to prevent it. I do not see what is tough about it. If i could sacrifice 3 people to save only one, that is tough, but choices presented to us by Telltale aren't choices at all.
It is like going to bookstore and you are forced to buy a book, the thing you can decide is the color of the book, and yet the tell me i have a choice. The choice would be going out of the bookstore and not buying a book, or buying a different one.
So i really do not get why they so popular. This type of game is what gaming should be against, gaming is about making choices, even dead island have more choice, i could choose if i wanted to kill this zombie or that one, walking dead doesn't give me that option.
Cheers,
Comments
Sometimes you can't save everyone, and most of TT games tend to be realistic. Not everything is in your control.
And to the rest of your post: As stated many times, the story is tailored by how you play. See, the story has to follow a script, they can't make a whole new story to every single choice that you make in the game. They give you a choice, but you can't control everything. It would be impossible to make a game like that. And if we're going by that logic, not even open world games give us a choice, since we can't kill whoever we want. I wish I could kill maven black-briar in Skyrim. I can't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: grammar.
Since when?
Anyway, these types of games are about relationships with other characters and how they feel about your character. Story is TAILORED by how you play, so some things won't happen (Depending on your choices), some will anyway, because they still have to tell a tale. Also, TellTale is a small company, they simply don't have big enough budget like, I dunno, Until Dawn to make milions of different storylines. I hope I explained everything.
I agree with most of your post, except for this part. DONTNOD is even smaller than Telltale, Square Enix published it but they had a very small budget to make the game.
I will never try to be smart again, because when I do, I make epic fails like this one. Thanks for telling me that tho.
Telltale is actually a bigger company than Supermassive Games. They're bigger than a lot of devs, actually.
The issue is how spread thin Telltale is. They're working on too many games and their dev time isn't long enough to make a game like Until Dawn. They put out two full games every 8-10 months or so. By contrast, Supermassive Games worked on nothing but Until Dawn for a good 2-3 years before releasing it.
Personally, I would prefer Telltale to dump the episodic model and work on one project for a couple of years. I think that if they did this, they would blow everyone else out of the water. But a lot of people disagree with me and like the steady stream of flawed games.
Notice how you said The Walking Dead which was Telltale's first attempt at making choices and narrative interwine. If you've played some of their more recent games the branching and choices are much more involved than back in 2012. Yes, it's still a linear experience and everybody's going to always reach the end of the episode in the exact same place, but going through the episode can be entirely different. Take Telltale's more recent effort game of Throne's final episode which depending on your choices can have you in entirely different area's, plot points, and choices. Telltale's goal is to make your experience different than someone else's which they've been accomplishing beautifully recently. It's not fair to compare their first project with this idea when they've been slowly getting the right idea on what they want to do with their choice mechanics with each new project they work on.
the games choices are tailored not changed
Haha, no worries, it was just a minor mistake. But you know... I had to be that guy :P
Can't Telltale do both though? I mean, they could work in one project for a longer time and then release it episodically. But of course, they should try to take a shorter period of time between the episodes, like 4-5 weeks. They would just have to wait to release the first episode, develop the whole game and take those weeks to fix bugs and etc.
I don't know how you enjoy the game playing that way. I treat it like i'm in the moment, which makes the game ten times more enjoyable. If I save Carley and she dies later down the track, it makes me angry, sad, but the thought's in my head aren't, "Why didn't TellTale let my choices matter?", it's "Why the fuck would Lily do that???", I still got to build a 'relationship' with her, and she seemed to with other characters also, then bam, at that moment, she is gone. But it's the zombie apocalypse and this stuff happens. Thinking too much about outside influence ruins the game, Carley could just as well have died having a heart attack, or getting bit, or getting shot by someone else etc.
The games have a beginning and an end point, it's how you get yourself through it that matters...plus, if you hadn't replayed the game or looked online you wouldn't know the difference anyway? Many people would finish this thinking all their choices added up to this moment, yes, it's an illusion, but frankly, it doesn't matter, the journey was still a great one.
The real reason outside of the plot excuses is the budget etc.
It's bit unrealistic to expect from a still relatively small company like Telltale Games to keep choices that would have a big impact to your story progression and be almost completely different from the someone else's. It would be a big undertaking to let you keep all the characters alive that can die and then take that account with rest of the episodes so that they stay included as relevant part of the plot.
So yeah for now at least. If it's your choice who to save and other one dies on-screen, it triggers survivor's death flag to reset the situation (there's that point where the surviving one dies so they don't need to take account them anymore.)
Kind of similar thing happens if your choice decides who disappears, they eventually come back anyway so that they don't need to take account who's away and make a lot different scenes based on to which one is away.
It's kind of scene ruining in their new games if you realize that what path they likely take due making the games is expensive.
Since always. Life is strange is the only simillar game i played to this one. I get invested in the characters, i like them, the last thing i want to see is their death.
In baldurs gate if i slay druirds i could get quest from the hunters, that involes a lot of gold. If i kill the hunters i did the right thing and do not get any quests.
DAO if i spare loghain, he can join my group, and has some interesting stories to tell. In original fallout if i go to bandit camp and i high luck rating, i can convince bandits that i am their lost leader. In gothic i have an option to join three different guild. In DX HR i can either use stealth to play the game or just gun everyone down. In wasteland 2 i can save a village and this village stays alive. etc,
So choice matters, even in old fps we had choice, what path you choose to finish a level, that choice had impact on what you had in the next map.
They have more then 200 people working for them. simillar size to cd project. And yet they were able to make witcher 3. So do not give me that about small company.
And yet in witcher series, you had many choices that impacted the game overall. Not to mention when first witcher game came out, which was in 2007 and the company was smaller, they still were able to make a game where choice matter. And they were hard since they impacted the whole story of the game.
It has nothing to do with game being expensive. Developers were able to do it even 15 years ago, when game prices were much smaller.
Yes, games are more expensive but there are making much more money now, then 10 or 15 years ago. If the game is already expensive to begin with, it isn't really that big deal to add few lines here and there.
What draws me to Telltale Games isn't choices, but experience, character interaction and character immersion/roleplaying. Our choices doesn't affect the overall story, but it affects the way that the characters perceive your player character and you feel like you are personally developing a bond with these characters.
The choices are more so meant to question your morality and decisions you made in the game than actually have too much of an impact on the story. It's still meant to tell the overall same story to the audience, plus I feel like with the recent Episodes of Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands, heck, even MineCraft: Story Mode, I've noticed that my decisions have had a bigger impact to the story, they went off track with decisions changing the story with TWDGS2 I think but it made up for it with the endings and TWAU actually had some decent impacts throughout the story imo. Overall decisions still have an effect, even if they're small effects like a change in dialogue to big effects like an entirely different scene.
If i wanted only plot and characters, i could watch the entire thing on youtube, and do not waste my money.
Then go do that.
I lol'ed.
If i get everything from a game not playing, only watching it, i think something is wrong.
Movies and books offers plot and characters, videos games offers interactions on top of plot and characters.
That's why there are two specific genres of games called Interactive movie and point and click. Telltale is a mix of these two, and these genres are known for plot/characters/dialogues over gameplay.
One thing that upset me was in TWD season 2 when you chose whether or not to admit you stole the walkie talkie I didn't say anything and Kenny got beat up then I learned that Kenny would get beat up no matter what you say, I just feel like these are big enough parts of the story that in some way you should be able to prevent them. Or at least know that you could have prevented them this would lead to a guilt and regret element of the game.
I like your name
Interactive movie is interactive movie. Example
. Broken Sword is a type of point and click game. I played of 5 of them. Only liked first two and the last, but no the point. If you ever played that game you will see. I agree that dialogue in walking dead is good, no complain there. But naming this game point and click is a stretch. Using one thing with another thing, talking with one character so i get this information and using this item on this character, this is point and click. In walking dead i do not see this. Amount of point and click in this game is shallow.
Lol, funny that you said that because i could say that on many bioware titles too. Example dragon age origins, i didn't like gameplay overall, but the plot was nice, characters interractions are the best, not to mention the dialogues, which are also very good. And yet they still manage to make your choices meaningful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_movie
''An interactive movie, also known as Movie Game or VCR Game is a video game that features highly cinematic presentation and heavy use of scripting, often through the use of full-motion video of either animated or live-action footage. In modern times, the term also refers to games that have a larger emphasis on story/presentation than on gameplay.''
So yes, interactive movie is a genre of videogames.
That's why I said that Telltale is a mix of these two genres. Their games are not completely point n click, except for their old titles. They take some elements from point n clicks and some from interactive movies. Oh, and yes, Broken Sword is an excellent example of Point and click, it's inspired by the 90's adventure games. But as I said, TT's recent titles are a mix of both genres.
But Thats the Point Right there! 200+ Peoples were working on Witcher 3 for nearly 3 years straight (without Pre-Production). And an average Telltale Games has about 1 year of Development with a much smaller Developer-Team, Because they have more projects than this. CDP focused on completely different mechanics than TTG. But the biggest Problem with the Choices and Consequences Genre is, that many People Are just to close minded about it. If the Consequences aren't obvious enough for Those people, it just don't exist for them. They play These games with the expectation, that they're going to have a completely different Experience than others. And i can't blame them, Because telltale uses the same "...is tailoard by how you play" Headline in the Beginning of every Game. But it's Not "False Advertising" it's just "Complete misinterpretation". Telltales way to handle the Choices and Consequences is the best way right now. It's by Far Not perfect But there is nothing better right now. Until Dawn had Big problems to handle the Determinant Characters. If a character has it's first opportunity to die, they will become completely irrelevant for the story. LiS has Big problems, to show the player the Consequences. With one exception, the Game has the exact Same beginning, middle and end(Until you Chose your Ending, wich is (again) against the Consequences part of that Genre). In GoT you get completely different locations in the end, But they don't let you Chose! Why? Because it's part of the Consequences you get, for a Choice you made in a previous Episode. It's Not just Black and white.
Movie Game that make me laugh lol.
Movies and games are two separated forms of media.
I can make, interactive movie using youtube annotation system. That doesn't make it a game, those are just editing skills nothing more.
Game can be cinematic. I never heard of cinematic being gammy.
Same way they may say that interactive movies are games, they are not they re just movies well placed together. To an extent you can call them programs. Since you engine or other stuff for them show at the right time when you click the correct button.
I do not even know how to call telltale games. I cannot name them story games, since every game have a story. Narrative games, no since every game have a narrative. I cannot tell that they are interactive movies since they do not look like are movies, and last i check movies are pre recorded videos. I am trying to figure out what genre they are but i just cannot figure this out.
It's a game, end of story. The reason you can't find a name for it is because you are denying the title it actually holds, a 'game'. Movies and games aren't as separate as you might think, both are forms of storytelling, just done in different ways. What separates a game from a typical 'film' is interactivity, and as far as I'm concerned, TellTale's games have PLENTY of that.