The Walking Dead: The Game

Looks like everything might work out okay in the end. (warning: Kotaku article)

For those not inclined to click, Telltale's talks with an undisclosed developer to get TWD Season 4 finished apparently includes getting the former TWD dev team hired as paid contractors to finish it. Telltale themselves are reportedly going to receive little, if any, money from the deal. As for how close the final two episodes were to completion, Episode 3 was apparently in the bug testing and polish stage, while Episode 4 had its first round of VO recording finished and a playable beta/prototype ready.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Oct 3rd 2018 at 3:43:21 AM

God speed to any devs that return to that train wreck. If it were me, I'd already be applying and interviewing at Ubisoft.

Telltale should be more concerned with giving their former employees severance, not finishing their precious game.

Edited by InkDagger on Oct 4th 2018 at 10:49:30 AM

And now the skeleton crew will be missing a few bones

So I saw this on the TWD subreddit: apparently they have a relative on the TT team, and TT has indeed managed to make a deal with another publisher to hire some of the team to work on the final episodes on a short-term contract. Now, obviously 'my uncle works at Nintendo' is a thing and I'll warn I can't actually tell you what proper proof they have of any of this — the mods say he sent them something and stickied the post, but whatever proof was left private.

Yeah, mods are saying that OP is legit (they're keeping the confirming info private for NDA purposes). Good to know at least one thing hasn't gone horribly wrong at Telltale...

EDIT: In other, shittier news, infamous Telltale Community Forums troll / psychopath Lexi Porter has single-handedly harassed fired developer Emily Grace Buck off of twitter◊ after vandalizing a google doc made by the latter containing fundraising links for the jobless ex-devs.

This comes about a week after she was banned from every single Telltale and TWD-related subreddit for making toxic and harassing posts about Buck, and the TWD development team in general.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Oct 6th 2018 at 3:25:26 AM

The infamous wut...

Yeah this person has been around since Season 2, and her trolling / harassment is so prolific that pretty much everyone who was on the Telltale forums, subreddits, or TWD wiki back then knows her name. It's honestly surprising to me that it took this long for her to get banned from literally everything for being terrible to everyone.

Also she shipped prepubescent Clem with various grown men. So there's that.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Oct 6th 2018 at 3:34:11 AM

Oh she was that person.

Yeah I heard about her but never realized she was the one whom did that.

Skybound games will finish season 4.

Yes!

The subreddit's mods have added about 30 lines worth of "OUR GOD IS AN AWESOME GOD HE REIGNS FROM HEAVEN ABOVE WITH WISDOM POWER AND LOVE" to its sidebar description lol

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Oct 6th 2018 at 11:57:10 AM

Hopefully they got paid in full up front.

So the significance of the final season being finished by Skybound Games is because Skybound Entertainment (of which Skybound Games is a division of) was co-founded by Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead.

I may not be a zombie fan, but I am a fan of people getting nice things and I hate when hard-workers like the former employees at Telltale get screwed over after having to put up with toxic work environments and superiors who refuse to innovate and experiment further, so I'm happy that those who love TWD: The Game are getting their grand finale and Skybound will be able to expand on their video game library.

TL;DR: I'm happy that you guys are getting your last 2 episodes and I wish the best of luck to Skybound.

So at least the original creator of The Walking Dead gets to finish one of the Walking Dead things. That's good.

We've truly gone full circle.

I can already see the "I will finish what you started" memes...

I wonder how much of a hand will go into the last two episodes considering, based on reports, Episode 3 was in bug-fixing and clean-up stage while Episode 4 was complete with its first round of voice acting.

At the same time, I almost wish it wasn't finished. I wish the game had sat as an unfinished sacrifice and a testament to the evils of employee abuse, greedy and incompetent execs, and the very uncomfortable lack of stability in the video gaming industry.

I don't envy the new guys, considering how Telltale struggled with bugs in their (proprietary) engine. And unless they start hiring former Telltale devs, it means the new guys have one hell of a task.

Anyone who has ever had to go over someone else's code knows how painful that experience can get. Especially if it's code that's been built upon itself iteration over iteration by different people - like Telltale's engine. There goes hoping telltale's devs were great at documentation at that the new guys got those docs.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 7th 2018 at 7:18:48 AM

Supposedly Skybound is bringing in the entire (ex-)Telltale TWD team as paid contractors to do it, so there's that.

Telltale did the best they could.

(shameless plug for one of my favorite musicians because I finally can listen to this song without ruining the game)

This is a good teaser.

And I'll be ready for Season 2 as soon as I finish 400 Days and Season 2 finishes installing..

Don't get your hopes too high. I won't spoil anything but the writing team started having internal issues around the third episode and the fandom is split 50/50 on whether it's the lowest point of the series or just the second-lowest.

Season 2 was a mess. Admittedly it was an big case Tough Act to Follow but I do agree that near Episode 3 and when a certain character conspicuously came back is when the writing went downhill.

Its saddening to me that the final season, the best season since Season 1 is right when the project is shutdown and Telltale's shittiness is brought to light.

Finished 400 Days.

Just realized who the corpse on the road in Russell's story was. I feel ill.

So I went Wyatt-Russell-Bonnie-Shel-Vince and the chronology was lost on me, but, here's what I did:

• Stayed in the car and left Eddie to the wolves. According to the WD wiki though none of these characters really matter or appear again, so eh
• Nate is a bastard. Moving on.
• I take it there's no way to not have Bonnie kill Leland's wife? Hmm. I kind of had Bonnie play along with the flirtations, and then cut it off for a bit. But later when Leland found his wife I lied to his face about what happened. Figured that had to be my second Heel moment for this campaign. So were the people hunting them just random bandits? I was getting the impression that they were somehow connected to either Nate or the people from Shel's campaign.
• I let the guy go at first and that got that guy from Shel's group killed. I almost went for the throat the second time around, but my hand twitched and decided to abandon Roman's group. Though I wonder if you can have Becca go through with offing Steph. I'll have to read up on that.
• Ah ha. Vince's chapter is the best designed of these vignettes I think. Short, contained, gets a nice intro to make me wonder about who I'm controlling without saying too much. Though the sudden zombie attack at the end felt a little contrived even for this franchise. I shot the rapist without really thinking about it. Seemed to be a voice line error because Danny asked me to shoot the chain immediately after Vince tried shooting the chain. I'm also quite surprised that a shotgun round wasn't able to break that chain, but whatever.

And in the end the one to stay at the camp was:

That big dumbie Russell. The schmuck. Trying to 1-v-1 the zombie apocalypse.

Edited by Soble on Nov 10th 2018 at 10:02:50 AM

What you're about to see in season 2 is the birth of the "Telltale Problem" many episodic games still suffer from this day.