What is up next for Telltale games?

And it was a studio based in California. Not the cheapest place to live / hire people.

My guess is that the minecraft games were concomitantly more expensive to make, because of the value of the license.

“While I was at BioWare, this was early 2017 I think, Telltale approached me because they wanted some consultancy on a specific narrative, procedurally generated thing,” Kennedy says.

The thing in question was a new zombie game, based on a popular video game series that isn’t anything to do with The Walking Dead.

“It was a project that had been ongoing for years, with a variety of different people coming and going, to try to find a way to do something different to the usual Telltale approach,” Kennedy explains. “Above all, it was something that didn’t require hand-tuned content but allowed room for stuff that emerged naturally from procedural generation.

“It’s a hard problem and my strong impression is that there was a significant, long term effort by Telltale to try find another way to do things. But given their brutal dev cycle, they could never focus attention on it. It’s really hard to do two kinds of things.”

The game, planned for mobile but possibly also considered for other platforms, would be built around base management and resource gathering. Mobile game Reigns and the narrative-focused Fallen London were quoted as influences.

It would keep the iconic Telltale art style, but its stories would form from its systems. For example, one of the resources you manage would be people, but each person would have their own traits, strengths, and weaknesses. The drama that unfolded would be derived from those.

These came out during the height of my son’s Minecraft fad. I offered to buy for for him but he said he already watched a play through on Youtube so no need :(

I think the S&M was their first series and I loved the original so I was so excited for it that I even pre-ordered the first season on DVD and a Max baseball cap. I loved that hat. It ended having apricot or some other fruit smeared all over it :(

I like the Monkey island games as well, I thought they were really well made, but after that I guess I tired of the adventure game formula. Both Cool Bad and Back to the Future were abandoned at the 3rd or 4th episode. Maybe I should try to revisit those.

I played the first Walking Dead episode but didn’t feel any interest to continue. I remember thinking that I might as well read a book or watch a TC show.

They actually started with two games based on the comic Bone.

You’re right, I played those as well and bought the comic book.
Now I’m really sad they closed.

Oh hey, I totally forgot about the Bone games, I don’t see them on the Telltale website either. And I played the two Minecraft games with my son, who is a total Minecraft freak. They were ok I guess, I just didn’t get the lore. Seemed like they were toying with some characters ring from the “real world” but never really went anywhere with that.

They also had two games called Puzzle Agent.

I really enjoyed the first one (the second is in my backlog). It’s got a charming story of a detective that goes up north to some Alaskan town and solves a mystery. There’s weird locals, and gnomes that steal socks and stuff. It’s puzzles are so easy that I think it was designed for kids, but I don’t enjoy super-hard puzzles in adventure games anyway, so that was perfect for me.

Can’t believe no one has mentioned Quicktime Events. That’s what the gameplay in your standard post-Walking Dead Telltale game was. Personally, I felt that by the time Batman came along, they were doing a pretty good job with them. But a lot of people just naturally chafe against them, for a variety of reasons, I think. For what these games were I don’t think they are the wrong approach–particularly for Batman where cinematic action sequences are a requirement–but but I think they needed to find something unique in each game in addition to their standard formula, and for the most part I don’t think they did.

Batman did have a kind of detective mode where you’d “link” related elements of a crime scene together to deduce what happened. But maybe that already felt stale by that time?

Did Minecraft have a special interaction for building things?

The Walking Dead also had occasional shooting gallery sequences in addition to the QTEs.

I wonder if maybe they should have tried to make their own stories, their own IP, instead of buying expensive licenses. The seem to had enough writing chops.

Yeah, the Minecraft had a few “freestyle” occasions where you could kind of build what you want. In a limited kind of way.

So, like getting a small Lego box…

Pretty good article looking back at Telltale -

I forget that Campo Santo, who made Firewatch, and Night School, who made Oxenfree, were studios created by former Telltale writers. And while I think they’ve earned the criticism and Life Is Strange did a lot of things better, I have to wonder if the game would even exist without Telltale blazing the trail.

I quite enjoyed the Telltale games. TWD was a great game and something I considered for GotY when it was released because it had a powerful emotional impact. But they spread themselves too thin and never were able to replicate that level of emotional involvement for me. It was not the somewhat stale mechanics that stopped me from buying the latest TWD series. It was that the quality had continually declined since the first one.

I do think Telltale’s stuff was proof of concept and marketability for episodic games. Before that we had abortive stuff like Sin Episodes and the infamously unfinished Half Life 2 Episodes. (shakes fist) VAAAAAALVE!

I’m lamenting this a bit. Been playing their games since Sam & Max.

I thought the Sam & Max games were all pretty good adventure games, in the traditional sense. Pretty much a straight line between where LucasArts left off to that whole phase of Telltale’s output.

Besides Sam & Max, I really enjoyed their Strongbad game. Wallace & Gromit was okay. I liked their Monkey Island game. I enjoyed the Puzzle Agent games, too, but I came to those as a Grickle fan. I even played around a little bit with their Poker Night at the Inventory games. They lost me with Back to the Future, though - didn’t like it much and I took a break from their games, when they released Jurassic Park.

Of their second-wave cinematic games, I did pick up the Walking Dead, but played just one episode and didn’t touch it again for years. I’m three episodes in to the first season. What brought me back was Tales from the Borderlands. The trailer looked fun, and it didn’t disappoint. From there I backtracked to Wolf Among Us, which was also really good. I played Minecraft - they hooked me with the free first episode. There were some things that bugged me about it, too much inter-personal friction amongst the characters, but the season pass was a real hoot.

At this point, as they shut down, I’m a bit off of their games again. The Minecraft follow-up wasn’t as good as the first. Guardian’s of the Galaxy focused on character conflict (like a bad reality-tv show) and I found it’s humor flat and the experience unpleasant for the most part. Then there are the other licenses I didn’t play, like Game of Thrones and Batman, and the continuing Walking Dead stuff. There are just more of these games than I can play, especially with the varying quality.

I’ve been reading about Telltale over the last couple years from talent who have left and started other companies, and it’s hard not to think employee retention wasn’t a factor in the quality of their work. Sometime around 2010 or so, I was at a party and chatted a little bit with a Telltale employee. Didn’t seem happy to be working there, and was talking about leaving. Tempered my enthusiasm a bit for the company.

Telltale did some really great work, and I’m watching all these teams that former employees put together. And I’ve played some their games, and I like them, too. It doesn’t really feel like gaming is losing much with Telltale’s closing. They were a good incubator for talent in the narrative gaming space, but these days I’m not sure the industry still needs one - this stuff is here to stay. But I do hope all their employees find new jobs and get to do good work elsewhere.

I think Game of Thrones was my least favorite of their games, it was even more misery porn-y than Walking Dead, and neither the characters or story were all that interesting. You could tell they were kind of treading water plot wise because they couldn’t shake up established lore from the books or TV show.

And if any of you were holding out for the Stranger Things game Telltale was working on, there may be hope:

Walking Dead : Season One was one of the most unique game experiences I’ve ever had in nearly 40 years of video gaming. There were moments in that game, such as the kid and his dog, and the ending with Clem and Lee, that made me feel raw emotion in ways most video games just can’t accomplish.

However, like so many others in this thread, I felt like Telltale was oversaturating their own little niche market. It seemed like they teamed up with a new franchise every 6 months, and some of them were kind of head scratching (Minecraft?). I bought Walking Dead : Season Two on sale, and added Game of Thrones and Borderlands later via bundles…but those purchases were based mostly on the nostalgia I had for Walking Dead Season One, and I have yet to play any of them, even Walking Dead Season Two.

I am sad to see the studio close, and I wish they had been better managed and more successful. My condolences go out to all who have lost their jobs, and my sincere best wishes for a quick return to employment. I’m dismayed to hear there was no severance, and that people may not even be paid what they’re owed for work completed. That is inexcusable, especially since the company was apparently still hiring new employees right up until the end. I feel terrible for the person who just completed a cross country move to one of the most expensive cities in the country only to have the studio close ONE WEEK later. I mean come on, the people in charge HAD to know what was happening, and they couldn’t have held off hiring this person and effectively ruining their life? WTF?