What happened to the magic of Telltale?
What happened to the magical feeling of Telltale? Don't get me wrong, I still love Telltale games and will continue to get their games, but I feel something has been missing for a while. I remember way back when I first played the first episode of The Walking Dead on my iPhone and it was so spectacular I bought and played through the entire game after finishing ep 1. It made me feel so many different emotions and I loved it so much! Then once The Walking Dead Season 2 : Episode 1 came out, I was so happy. The feeling of happiness carried through Episode 1, but slowly it started to drop off. Now, although loving most things Telltale makes, I don't have that feeling of excitement or happiness when I play their games. I really don't want to sound like one of those people saying "SEASON 1 WAS THE BEST AND EVERYTHING ELSE IS CRAP!" As previously stated, I love all the other series Telltale have released, with the exception of maybe Minecraft Story Mode, but I just feel something is missing now. Maybe I just feel a little too familiar now and it's just me, but sometimes I wish I could feel the same way I felt when I first played The Walking Dead Season 1.
Comments
Different and shittier writers. That's what happened.
They stopped taking risks and trying new things. The Walking Dead S1 was special because it was so different. Now its just a formula. You're not getting the same feeling of excitement because you've seen it all before.
It was the first game you played and possibly the first time you played that type of game. Telltale basically just makes the same game over and over with a different story, so now you have grown tired of it.
Borderlands & Minecraft happened.
You do realize that most of the writers from Season 1 besides Jake and Sean are still at Telltale, and have been since before Season 1 right? Even if you didn't like Season 2, the same writers still gave us Wolf, Borderlands, etc.
It's called marginal utility, that is the additional satisfaction a consumer gains from consuming one more unit of a good or service. As you get more and more of a product, the amount of satisfaction always goes down. If you have one cupcake, you originally enjoy it, but for every subsequent cupcake, you enjoy it less and less. At first, it was something new, something you hadn't expected but you ended up liking, you expect to get that similar satisfaction from future cupcakes, but once the novelty wears off, while you still enjoy the cupcakes, it doesn't have that same magic as the first one. That's why you and many others hold Season 1 in such high regard, it was the first time you came across this, but now, with more and more Telltale games following the similar method, the novelty wears off. You still enjoy them, but it doesn't have that "magic" that you had the first time you played them.
Everyone's experience is different, for me, I still feel that Telltale magic, it was in Tales From the Borderlands, The Wolf Among Us, and even in Game of Thrones (which I despise but Telltale got me to like).
I loved season 2 and their future games. I'm just explaining it in the smallest answer possible.
I think they took on too many games at once. More employees doesn't necessarily mean they should take multiple games a year when what they release is on an engine that's long outdated and runs choppy. I'd rather see them focus their attention on one (maybe 2) game(s) a year and make them great instead of just working on episodes or series that are just mediocre, straight up weak or average (TWD Season 2, TWD Michonne, Minecraft etc.)
Well good luck with no longer feeling "THE MAGIC". I'll just keep enjoying their stuff as much as before.
You love Telltale's stuff, but shit all over their writers....makes sense.
Not all of them, just some of them.
Here's what I mean:
The people who made TWD S1, TWAU, TFTBL, etc., I love those guys. Very good dudes. But the people who purposely wrote the bad flaws in GoT Episode 5 and TWD S2 E4, I don't like those guys. That's what I mean.
So basically, there are two kinds of new people: Different people who just joined Telltale and make great stuff, and bad writers who are still there, and making more bad flaws.
Plz tell me you understand...
Jeez, that felt unnecessarily passive aggressive.
(?) Batteries will remember that.
It was better when they where making one game at a time.
Keep in mind, Telltale had like 70 people during Season 1 and now they have almost 350. The quantity of games they are working on at once has nothing to do with it, as they even had periods where they worked on multiple games at once in the past. When Walking Dead Season 1 was announced, it was one of six upcoming projects Telltale was working on at the time.
Lots of new Telltale fans think that Telltale working on only one game at a time is a magic recipe for success because they only paid attention to Telltale around Season 1, but that's not really the case. It's more correlation than causation.
Several of the writers on Wolf/Borderlands/etc are writers that have been on Telltale since Season 1 or beforehand, though.
That's who I'm talking about about.
But you implied it was mostly the old writers who were bad. Several of the old writers worked on Wolf/Borderlands/etc, which you cited as good games.
There are some old writers that are bad, and some that aren't is what I meant to say. Sorry if I confused you. And I'm also sorry if I'm still confusing you.
I know, I was just trying to say that the gap probably isn't as big as you think it is. I mean, yeah, it's a given that some writers are going to vary in quality but it's not exclusive to old writers. All the writers are going to vary some, and it's not going to be an even split, or a split that correlates to how old/new the writers are. It seems a bit random to limit that distinction exclusively to the old writers.
Ah okay, I get it. Thx Blind.
I wouldn't say the magic is "gone", I still enjoy playing Telltale's games, but lately I haven't been feeling the same feeling of hype for releases. Walking Dead Season 2, Wolf, GoT, and Tales had me so excited the moment news came out about them no matter how minor it was, but lately with Minecraft and before Michonne ended, I wasn't super excited about episode releases or news. Maybe its just because I didn't enjoy Michonne or Minecraft that much as the others, but when Im still playing the games I still love how it is.
It depends really how well they manage the "resources."
Let's say your company has this one really amazing writer among many of "lesser" writers. They all are good but this one is expectional one. Now how far you can stretch that one writer so that you ensure amount of projects don't somehow deteriorate them all.
I believe that when there are multiple projects, they don't really get their company's best as they usually focus on the one project at time and has other projects as "side things" or whatever. It took years from Square Enix to start doing Final Fantasy VII remake due they wanted their best on those projects as it makes sense without them the game would probably not be as good once it comes out.
Quality gets affected but good management can minimize it and make every project a success (that they're currently working on.) Parallel projects tend to tax other projects, that's nature of their business.
Why are the episodes shorter then?
Because they relay too much on illusion of importance of the stuff you do in the games. In a way that was fixed in TWAU because the mistery itself was interesting whatever your choices mattered in the end or not was secondal. TWD season 2 almost every choice was build up like this big deal you really have to think about but in the end it was just a short interactive movie with average writing compared to season 1.
But Borderlands is amazing.
The magic, I haven't really had this problem with other games Telltale has done, but TWD, I can agree on it with that. Even with all the improvements the Michonne Series made, I still had some issues with it despite enjoying the episodes. I think the main issue I have is that I wish Telltale could learn to handle the character deaths better like how they did in Season 1, because my heart sunk a little when it came to the Michonne series and having a few characters get killed off, and some of those death I either saw coming just based on the character or what they were doing with them, or one certain death involving a gate that could've done with better planning behind it to come off more convincing.
I think of that old Powerpuff Girls Knock it Off episode where this guy Dick got a hold of chemical X and started mass producing Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup to sell to the public, but the more he made in larger quantities, the more deformed the clones became because he used less of chemical X and resorted to making them out of dolls rather than sticking to the original ingredients. Season 2 episode's quality decline in a nutshell, and I love those earlier episodes.
Same.
It's because they think people liked Season 1 because it was "interactive TV" and not because it was a role playing game; that's also why they moved towards less puzzles/hub areas/etc. It's a deliberate choice they make because they want people to play episodes in one sitting.
I'm not defending it, I'm just explaining why.
Borderlands was fantastic, probably one of the best series TellTale has created.
For me the magic of Telltale disappeared a long time ago. Probably around the time of Jurassic Park for me, that was certainly the list physical (collectors box edition) and full priced game of theirs I've bought. All the others since have been sale or Humble Bundles.
It felt to me like they grew too big and lost their personal touch & the merch (I'm to this day thankful they did the Sam & Max merch they did back in the day), and the inclusion of QTE into the games just never sat well with me.
I guess there's two different perceptions of Telltale this day and age, and that makes sense. Those that felt that what Telltale originally was was magic, and those that think the magic came from The Walking Dead Season 1! It's interesting in that way!
I think that it would help if Telltale tried to personalize the interactivity and role-playing/story tailoring of each individual game a little more to fit the source material instead of trying to make each game have the exact same template. Just to be clear, I like Telltale's current games and all, but I think that if they looked into giving each game something unique in terms of the gameplay mechanics like they used to, then people would be more likely to feel the same way they did when they first played Walking Dead Season 1.
I guess that would be the answer to the OP's question then.
I think making them more varied would be fine.
Phoenix Wright series , Miles Edge Investigations and its sequel, all make some "subtle" changes and/or additions to their mechanics.
Psyche-locks, a bracelet that can somehow react to other people than its wearer, a device that can re-create the crime scene based on the information.
Amazing? Fantastic ?
I don't believe we've played the same game but to each it's own I guess.
For you perhaps . For me that's when the magic started to fade.
For the sake of formula lets pretend TWD was their first game for now.
TWD was magical because it was new to us and as consumers we were fooled by the illusion of choice and consequence but we've wised up we can spot the patterens instantly when it comes to the illusion. Telltale expect us customers to be just as naive to their tricks as we were first time round but human nature wont allow us to, we have no choice about guessing determinate characters we just can because we recognise patterns thats how our brains work.
Telltale can only convince us if they come from a new angle, this cookie cutter formula is not working anymore.
In very early literacy class, when you learn to write stories you get a sheet thats basically got a frame of a story structure and you just fill in the blanks, I think thats how telltale write now.
You know, if Telltale wanted 1hr. - 90mins. of gameplay per episode, then they better increase the episodes from 5 to 7 or 10 instead.
i dont think the magic has gone just the episodes seem familiar and episodes elseem shorter but i still love the games
I'm going to have to say it's due to the formulaic nature of their games. S1 was a unique game. Pretty much everything about it was something that people weren't used to seeing in the industry as of late, and hell, it was unique even to Telltale themselves at the time. But after the template that they used for TWD ended up exceeding everyone's expectations, they started basing all of their new-era games on that template. As a result, the games just start to become old hat, as much as I hate to say it. The formula starts becoming apparent, and if you don't make enough effort to change that formula, the games start to feel more like factory-line products. Like they're just putting a different brand name on the same type of game.
They've made some attempts to move away from the sameness in some of their recent titles, but it's kind of hit-and-miss to be honest. You have TWAU, which tried to get more varied when it came to combat scenes, partly since they had a lot more leeway in how combat could play out due to the universe the game was set in. But then you have TWD S2, which while it introduced some new QTE types to break up the usual "QQQQ-E" of the first game, it didn't offer much other than that, as well as the streamlining of some of the other elements seen in S1, such as hubs and puzzles.
You have Borderlands, which tries to break the mold a bit more with things like the echo eye and money collecting, but then you have GoT, which doesn't introduce that many of it's own unique mechanics into it, outside of a few different QTE events like "Press E at the right time" and so forth. Purely in terms of gameplay elements, GoT feels like medieval TWD.
Then you have Minecraft, which tried to implement a basic version of crafting reminiscent of the game it's based on, as well as a more nuanced combat system that fits the world of Minecraft and adds another layer of interactivity. But then you have Michonne, which has honestly done less with its mechanics than S2 did with S1's. You get that combo QTE in the first episode, but that's the only time it ever shows up, and they've already experimented with that in TFTB, in a way that was actually quite entertaining.
They need to focus on trying to individualize these series more. There's no problem with using the choice-based gameplay template they're currently using. The problem lies in the fact that these games are slowly starting to feel more homogenized.
I still love their games and will continue to play them, but that doesn't change the fact that I have this lingering thought of "this feels too familiar" lurking in the back of my head whenever I play a new series they put out.