"Telltale Games is being revived"

[kane_magus]

Meh.

I'll believe it when I see it, and even if I see it, I'll still take it with a grain of salt.

Also, the smell of shit is rife in the air with regards to how this is being handled, in my opinion, though that could just be my typically anti-modern-video-game-industry cynicism and jadedness talking. (Though not, I guess, nearly as shitty as how the original version of the company was run into the ground?)

Comments

[owsf2000]

I can't say expect that much out of the revival. Even with the bad decisions the original company made with how it did actual business (overspending for licenses for instance. I think that killed the company most of all personally) in the end it'll probably not be too much different.

Their games tended to be linear, and episodic. This results in a highly predictable game that can't do a lot of meaningful variation of the story regardless of choices the player makes. That's one of the things that seemed to make the company sales sag - people started realizing their choices ultimately meant jack all and it was just a video novel.

If they defy my prediction and succeed, awesome! I just can't say I'm going to believe they can pull it off until they do.

[kane_magus]

Personally, I'd be okay with the linear storytelling with marginal choices, because usually the stories are still pretty good... ...if the games actually fucking worked properly. It was all the repeated progression bugs and sometimes game-breaking shit that finally turned me off to Telltale.

[kane_magus]

That said, actual, story-redefining choices would have been good, too. Other games have managed to do it. I guess the main reason Telltale never did was because that would have required them to make essentially two (or more) separate games for each game, to accommodate different choices, and they were already stretched thin as it was, due to the executive/managerial bullshit. And there's no guarantee that each separate path would have had the same generally high quality (outside of bugs and crap) as the "main" path.

[kane_magus]

That said, a lot of the games I've seen people laud for having "real choices" actually, um, kind of don't. Not really. It's still mostly the same railroaded shit as what Telltale had, with temporary branches that converge back at the spot where the devs want the story to go, no matter what "choices" you made prior. Granted, I haven't played some of those games, or at least not all the way through, e.g. Witcher or Alpha Protocol, so I don't know if those actually do what has been claimed of them or not.