A reader offers his thoughts on the imminent closures of Telltale Games and what legacy he feels theyll leave behind.
Im playing a game sat in front of my TV screen frozen, a controller dangles limply in my hands. Im scrutinising the screen closely, face screwed in concentration and consternation. This wasnt because of some awe-inspiring cut scene or some mind-bending puzzle, this was a choice. The simplest thing in a video game, we make thousands of them, usually at the drop of a hat with little thought or consideration of the consequences.
The choice is usually a binary good/bad decision and once made a notification pops up to tell you that you did a good thing or a bad thing, with an accompanying meter showing your morality like a pious fuel gauge.
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But, right now the decision The Walking Dead has just thrown my way is which one of two people I care about must die based on my actions. Its fair to say thats the moment when I knew this game was a bit special.
Telltale have announced the sad news that they are closing, but before they pass from the stage I would like to reflect on them, guess at how they found themselves where they did, and look at their legacy within the game industry.
Im probably part of the problem that Telltale failed. I only ever paid for and played The Walking Dead Season 1 and The Wolf Among Us. I mean, sure, I played more than that but those games where mostly free giveaways from Games with Gold or PS Plus, so I can hardly highlight these as my patronage of this studio.
I can remember thinking though, as I played The Walking Dead that they had hit gold. There was no real action, but they had created a facsimile of choice and player agency that made every decision feel heart-poundingly important. For me it was the first time a game was asking its participants to make hard decisions in seconds and decisions which had no obvious right answer.
I wasnt used to this. Games have shorthand to make themselves comprehensible to players and part of this is the easy binary choice. Boiled down to its simplest idea Telltale just twisted the decision-making part of storytelling. In more detail Telltale made decisions matter, they made them significant in the players minds and made them difficult, they also tried to show that other characters would base their opinions on you from your actions, which in turn deepened the immersion.
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Of course, we now know it was all artifice and that the decisions where not as important as we supposed they were, but for anyone playing that first Telltale game the artifice felt real. I know that as the zombies broke into that shop to drag one of my companions away or when that tractor was going to crush another of my companions it felt damn real to me and in that brilliant artifice were also the seeds of Telltales downfall.
After the breakout success of The Walking Dead, Telltale, at least to my mind, started to become constrained and straitjacketed by their winning formula. They seemed also to be on a production schedule the people who made the Model T Ford would have been proud of and the combination of these two factors stifled innovation. Looking at the reviews for their later work it seems as if the storytelling chops of Telltale were alive and kicking but their ability to change up the formula of how these stories were delivered, both systemically and graphically, stagnated, making each new episode a diminishing return.
Consider this, since The Walking Dead in 2012 Telltale have released 13 episodic games (three in the pipeline have been cancelled) each with around five episodes each, meaning roughly 65 releases since 2012; thats about 11 a year. Regardless of how short an episode is that is still a staggeringly punishing output. This concentration of quantity over quality allowed other developers to learn the lessons of Telltales success and Telltales shortcomings started to be exposed.
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Io-Interactive under Square Enix where one of these developers. They looked at the episodic structure and using this they stumbled on a release method which was perfect for their Hitman franchise. I know not everyone was a fan of this decision, but I absolutely loved it. It drip fed those murderous model towns, kept Hitman in the minds of gamers, and it allowed development of the game to be fluid and react to player feedback.
As a bonus, timed events were rolled out which extended and amplified the usually terse and narrow launch window games must make their money back. So, other developers had worked out how to use the episodic release window more effectively than Telltale.
Perhaps more pertinently, Dontnod more brazenly looked at the Telltale structure and thought to themselves we can do better and with the release of Life Is Strange its hard to argue that Its not Dontnods student-becomes-the-master moment. True, graphically both developers games were similar, and they had excellent storytelling, but Dontnod took that ball and ran with it by making decisions that tangibly impacted the outcome of the story. They provided additional gameplay mechanics with the ability to rewind time, excellent music, great voice-acting, and most crucially an original idea from an unusual perspective.
Telltale used existing licences to tell stories, which meant if you were a fan of the source material you knew roughly what you were getting. It was safe but predictable, already Telltale had found itself in a world which they had lost their competitive advantage.
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I never thought theyd close, I thought that though they werent innovating they were at least treading water. It turns out that the situation was a lot worse and goes to show what a knife edge gaming development is balanced on. The gaming world is littered with sad tales of companies blinking in and out of existence, but Telltale at least has its legacy in becoming a synonym for an entire genre of episodic game development and decision-based storytelling. Which means that whatever else their name will be remembered long after this closure.
Its a title few other extinct developers can lay claim to, which I know must be cold comfort for the people affected by the job losses but to have made a difference and to be remembered is sometimes all we have.
By reader Dieflemmy (gamertag/PSN ID/NN ID)
The readers feature does not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email [email protected] and follow us on Twitter.
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