Pretty much. Strongbad had more game-play/puzzle solving in it, but all their later stuff was strictly story based.
And that is part of the reason I tired of them. It just became formulaic and repetitive after a time. If the releases had been fewer and further between, they would have seemed more like rare treats. My perspective and experience, anyhow.
There used to be. The Sam and Max games, even some later stuff like Tales from Monkey Island and (I think) Strong Bad had actual puzzles. But that stuff sort of fell by the wayside as storytelling took priority, I guess. I didn’t mind too much as long as the stories were interesting, like in The Walking Dead, Borderlands and the Batman games I mentioned. Everyone seems to love The Wolf Among Us, but that one bounced off me. So if the story doesn’t grab you, there’s not much else to keep you clicking.
Pretty much agree, Dive. Wolf bounced off me and I got tired after the Batman stuff.
Guardians of the Galaxy was surprisingly good! Though I think at least half of that was the soundtrack - come to think of it, that’s also half the reason I love the movies.
Pretty much why I stopped paying attention to them. The early games had the usual adventure game puzzles, but they eventually just turned into visual novels with much higher (and apparently unprofitable) production values.
You are gonna dig this @divedivedive, I just bought Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People on Steam. :) A tribute to Telltale! It’s been so long it’ll seem like new. And I get to spend time in the world of the Brothers Chaps again.
I just did a search on my steam library and found these in my backlog. Cool. I wonder how I ended up owning these? Four Wallace & Gromit episodes.
Pretty sweet - I actually own a boxed copy of the PC game, must be one of the last boxed PC games I ever bought!
Wish I had thought to buy them on Steam before they left, I own copies on Xbox and unless they get added to back compat (not bloody likely) I’ve got to go dig out my 360 to play them.
None of you guys mention the 2 Minecraft Stories games. Those were really good and I had fun watching my daughter play through them both.
I would have thought they would have been popular and might have helped the studio. But I guess they would only have been popular with a younger crowd. And it seems that wasn’t near enough.
My wife has been playing through Tales of the Borderlands over the past few weeks and really enjoying it. But that bombed.
I kept hoping they would get to the point where they could offer a completely new engine. But that didn’t impair their creativity too much.
I’m sad to see a studio with so many good stories to tell go under.
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.