Telltale Announces Three New Games, Including a Wolf Among Us Sequel

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Telltale Announces Three New Games, Including a Wolf Among Us Sequel

Telltale Games has three new games in the works, including a sequel to The Wolf Among Us.

Earlier this week, Telltale Games head of communications Job Stauffer cautioned fans on Twitter [https://twitter.com/jobjstauffer/status/887031561417244672] about "getting their hopes up in the wrong direction," when talking about a Wolf Among Us sequel. So it was a bit of a surprise when the company announced that sequel today. Here's the "Summer 2017 Update" from San Diego Comic Con:


The new episodes will feature the familiar voices of Adam Harrington and Erin Yvette as main characters Bigby Wolf and Snow White, and will feature a new "standalone" story. Yes, that means the cliffhanger ending of season one will remain just that. The new episodes are expected in late 2018.

Also announced today is the final season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. Yes, Clementine is coming back in 2018 to finish up her story, and Melissa Hutchison will return for the voice role.

The third game announced by Telltale today is the second season of Batman episodes that you may have heard leaked recently. Titled Batman: The Enemy Within, the new season will offer up five episodes, with the first set to launch on August 8 of this year.

If you want to get caught up on a lot of Telltale Games, there's a pretty sweet Humble Bundle [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/170791-New-Humble-Bundle-Most-of-Telltales-Games-for-15-Bucks] featuring most of them available now.l

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[Erttheking]

Well it's about time. I admit I haven't really played any of their games beyond the first Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us (despite owning Walking Dead 2, Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones) I'll most certainly be heading back to Fabletown in a heartbeat.

I'm honestly excited to see what characters they'll be bringing in. I thought "fables" meant old time fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm era. But with Grendel, Tiny Tim and the Jersey Devil in the first game, I'm realizing just how much is on the table. Mythology, folklore, and later stories are all good to go. Fingers crossed we get to see a washed up Beowolf.

 

[Sassafrass]

Oh yeah, gimme more of that depression with TWD:S4, Telltale.
And also gimme some more of those fables with TWAU:S2.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

I ended up buying the Fables graphic novels because of TWAU, so colour me intrigued for the second season.

 

[IamGamer41]

Not really games. More like more interactive comic books where your choices mean nothing.

 

[09philj]

Any chance of updating the engine? No? Thought not.

 

[Nismu]

Nice new wolf among us, can't wait to watch it from youtube >.<

Which is kidna problem with telltale games, they are more enjoyable that way.

 

[votemarvel]

Any chance of updating the engine? No? Thought not.

They have updated the engine.

Batman and A New Frontier both use the updated game engine, though to be honest I am not sure that I like the change. Not only does it not run as well as the previous one but they've lost that 'lifted off the page' look that made the first two seasons of the Walking Dead so pleasing to my eye.

 

[DeadProxy]

After the horrible travesty that was season 3 of the walking dead, the disappointingly unfunny Guardians game, and the simple choice of giving mincecraft a second season in less than a year after giving it "bonus episodes" that you had to pay extra for, I am not excited.

According to their forums, people are saying they're learning based on how things are introduced and happening in Minecraft and Guardians, but after they clearly used season 3 of the walking dead as a testing ground for their shit, I have nothing but low expectations of telltale for the future. And Guardians is seriously unfunny, ugly garbage. Update your engine, Telltale, I don't care if you just did, it's unstable garbage and it makes everything look ugly.

 

[laggyteabag]

The Walking Dead keeps getting worse. It went from pretty good in season 1 to mediocre in season 3. They put the message "Clem will return" at the end as if I still care. I don't wanna follow her anymore. Overall, the third game feels pretty lazy.

Season 3 was pretty poor. Making you play as Javi instead of Clem was a mistake. I don't dislike Javi, but I always felt like Clementine was the protagonist of the series. Seeing Clementine make some choices that I wouldn't have done myself made me feel disconnected from the character, and I always felt compelled to make pro-Clementine choices, despite Javi not having any history with her, which was a story faux pas.

Not to mention that the best parts of Season 3 in my eyes were the flashback parts where you played as Clementine just after the conclusion of Season 2.

Hopefully we go back to playing as Clementine in the final season.

 

[laggyteabag]

My choices from seasons 1 and 2 didn't even affect the sequels

Yeah, you do kinda notice that with TellTale games. The second a character's fate becomes determinate, their impact on the story becomes null, and they are doomed to die from that point on, so that the game can revert to one standard path for everybody to go down, with as few variables as possible, so that the choices and consequences are always the same. I like to call it the illusion of choice.

Take the conclusion of Season 2, for example:
1a - Clementine kills Kenny and stays with Jane and AJ. They let the strangers into the warehouse
1b - Clementine kills Kenny and stays with Jane and AJ. They do not let the strangers into the warehouse.
2a - Clementine lets Kenny kill Jane. Clementine and Kenny stick together with AJ.
2b - Clementine lets Kenny kill Jane. Clementine leaves Kenny and goes to Wellington with AJ.
3 - Clementine leaves Kenny/Jane. Goes off on her own with AJ.

Then Season 3 starts, and because TellTale have written themselves into a hole, and they don't want to develop so much content that only a small percentage of the playerbase will experience, they have to wipe the slate clean, and kill everybody off. This means that ultimately, the ending choice of Season 2 is pointless, because Clementine ends up in the same spot regardless.

The same can be seen with a bunch of other characters throughout the series, like with Ben in Season 1, who you can let die in episode 4, but if you save him, he dies in episode 5 anyway. Nick from season 2, who you can save in episode 2, but will die in episode 4 anyway. The entire case of 400 Days - excluding Bonie - who's role in season 2 is reduced to nothing more than a short cameo in episode 3, only to never be seen again. Or Conrad in Season 3, who you can choose not to shoot in episode 2, but will die in episode 5.

The illusion of choOOoOOOoOOoice.

But seriously, though, I am surprised that TellTale don't usually get a pretty bad rap for this.

 

[SirSullymore]

Cool to see them doing some non-TWD sequels finally. Fingers crossed for Tales from the Boderlands season 2.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Hm, loved TWD S1, really enjoyed Wolf Among Us (though I'd like a direct continuation), but after buying GoT S1 and only playing the first episode I kindof abandoned Telltale's games. I do plan on playing the Borderlands one, as I've heard that's excellent, but I've still not gotten around to playing Borderlands 2 yet, which I'd prefer to do before starting Tales.

I got TWD S2 on sale, but I felt the ending to S1 was so perfect I didn't really want to see what happened next - partly because I was skeptical they'd be able to match its quality, and also because the first season was such a novelty I wasn't sure the, er, 'magic' could happen again (most accounts suggest that was the case).

Not really games. More like more interactive comic books where your choices mean nothing.

A radical notion, I know, but 'games' encompasses all kinds of experiences (that's the beautiful thing about this sprawlingly diverse medium), though usually people are narrow minded enough to have their own definition, i.e. what must be included for it to somehow magically be ordained A Game.

The illusion of choOOoOOOoOOoice.

But seriously, though, I am surprised that TellTale don't usually get a pretty bad rap for this.

I didn't read your whole post as I'm still vaguely intending on actually playing through TWD S2 (and 3, I guess?), but why should an illusion be such a negative? Game design is largely built upon that very notion of conning/convincing the player they have some kind of agency; usually it's 'freedom', e.g. Half-Life 2's superb world design seeming organic and intuitively explorative, yet it's ultimately doing nothing but funneling you towards the next area or plot beat, which is essentially no different to CoD's very linear campaigns.

...sure, if Telltale still market their IP's around the central premise of a 'consequences', then more fool them. But more more fool the punter who's not savvy enough to see things for what they are.

If the illusion of freedom is done well, then that's all that matters. Same, surely, goes for illusion of consequence/choice.

 

[Callate]

My current computer doesn't play nice with Telltale's updated engine, so until I rebuild, the option is out of my hands. But... I'm kind of glad, really; Telltale seems like it's been making some bad choices, and the video doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

All the "for the fans!" rhetoric combined with the "That is so cool!" regarding their most poorly reviewed series in recent history just makes me want to reach out and slap our promo "hosts". The way they describe their desire to "stretch" the Batman mythos and force the character to compromise himself just reads like everything I hate about the "every choice you're offered is wrong, and you'll get blamed for it" mechanics that Telltale has saddled players with in the past.

I enjoyed "The Wolf Among Us", but having that particular storytelling mechanic hanging over me really started to influence my decisions by the end. I ended up

Spoiler

having Bigby kill the Crooked Man, rather than bring him to trial

simply because I could not trust the other characters as they'd been presented to me not to make the wrong decision (and blame me for it!) unless the wrong option was taken out of their hands. It came down to "well, you're going to try to find a way to make everything my fault anyway; I might as well exercise my autonomy in this one way that I can, even if as the player I don't like the morality of the decision."

If there's one thing I took away from the video, it's that in the wake of their "surprise" that so many people chose to have Clementine go on alone, Telltale should probably clue in that a fair number of their players want to tell the characters who are facing them with these "lesser of two evils and it's all your fault" decisions to go stuff themselves.

 

[hermes]

The illusion of choOOoOOOoOOoice.

But seriously, though, I am surprised that TellTale don't usually get a pretty bad rap for this.

Every medium is a dialogue between the author and the audience so, by definition, every game works on that illusion. Even "choose your own adventure" books work under the premise of very limited transitions. In Witcher 3, Geralt does not have the option of joining the Wild Hunt, or abandon his quest to fulfill his dream of becoming a travelling troubadour; in Bioshock, Jack can't talk Fontaine out of his evil ways; in Walking Dead, Lee can't find the cure for the zombie apocalypse, etc... I don't know why Telltale should get a worst rap than any other game developer.

 

[njrk97]

Don't care if its not a true sequel i'm just freaking hyped to finally get more Wolf Among Us, although thanks to reading all of fables, character fates may be a little more set in stone for me in comparison to the first one.Also how does it be a contained story work continuity wise? Is it still set after the first one,just not addressing more of that story,or is it set before it.Cause the fables have been blending it since like the 1600's or something, so you could easily do a story set in a different era, 1920's and 1800s just to name a few.

 

[h@wke]

Shame there's no news about expanding on Tales from the Borderlands. Their best series by far IMO