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The Wolf Among Us, and also The Walking Dead Season 2 (No Spoilers)

Started by Old Nehamkin, October 29, 2013, 05:40:19 PM

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Spoiler alert
It's funny you said that because I was very protective over Arvo, but thats potentially down to me having robbed him previously. No one deserves to get kicked when they're down as much as he was though. Imagine the closest person to you being killed, but also the person speaks your first language.
[close]

Moribunderast

Gar, I'm so close to the end of episode 5 and the game keeps freezing just after I
Spoiler alert
have the Lee flashback/dream.
[close]
Have played through that bit three times and it's crashed at the same point straight afterward. How frustrating.

AsparagusTrevor

I didn't get the stats at the end, quite disappointingly, just a blank screen. I felt some loyalty to Kenny for some reason so I ended up with him at the compound, and also stuck with him rather than letting him leave alone. I think I just admire his immense beard.

Old Nehamkin

Episode 5's meant to be out on PS3 over here by now, isn't it? My game still lists it as "coming soon".

Thursday

Go to the PSN store, it should be listed under the Games>DLC section

Old Nehamkin

Quote from: Thursday on August 29, 2014, 07:09:10 PM
Go to the PSN store, it should be listed under the Games>DLC section

Cheers, I'll try that out.

Has anyone played the new Walking Dead board on Zen Pinball 2? It's actually pretty decent and well thought-out with some great touches, definitely worth it for £2.50 anyway. And it's got Lee in it!

Moribunderast

Telltale support were very prompt and helpful so I got to finish up the game this morning. Thought it was excellent and my ending gave me goosebumps.

CHOICES:
Spoiler alert
I saved the baby because I was feeling somewhat guilty for having shot his mother right in front of him. Poor kid's probably going to grow up all damaged and start dressing like the Batman or something.

I went to help Luke even though I knew it was probably a bad idea because Bonnie, the Queen of Bad Ideas, was begging me to do so. Still, my Clem had a vague crush on Luke and couldn't not try to save him. Especially with Bonnie and the others being so cowardly.

Didn't ask to leave with Mike - To be honest, his preoccupation with defending that little cunt, Arvo, was getting right on my tits. I let Arvo keep his bag of meds and defended him from Jane during ep4 so for him to turn around and lure my group into a trap, resulting in all sorts of chaos had my version of Clem thinking "Fuck him". I was quite vocal about how Kenny should be allowed to beat and kill him whenever he felt like it.

Shot Kenny - I think the game was very clever, as has been mentioned earlier in the thread, with how they re-introduced Kenny. You're so excited to see an old character you'd thought was dead, so you forget how bloody annoying he was in the first season. Gradually, he reverts to type, being loud, aggressive and stubborn. I was prepared to leave with Jane anyway so whilst it was a little heartbreaking, I was ultimately okay with shooting him to save Jane.

I refused to forgive Jane and walked away with the baby, forging a new path on my own. In my playthrough I'd seen Jane as somewhat of an idol to Clem so I/she was disgusted at her deceit, even though I actually believed 'til that point that Jane had willingly sacrificed Alvin Jnr. to save herself in the snow. In the moment where I had to choose to forgive Jane or storm off, I chose the latter, as I believed Clem's anger and emotional state (the double of killing Kenny and then finding out it wasn't totally necessary) would not allow her to forgive Jane immediately.

As far as the season goes, while it wasn't quite as good as Season 1 (the Clem and Lee relationship caught lightning in a bottle) it was still an excellent story, with acting and writing that is much better than most videogames. I particularly liked the ending I got (and I hope it is the end of Clem's story, in this series) as my first season concluded with Lee opting to allow Clem to stay somewhat innocent, not asking her to shoot him. I felt like this second season was about her shedding her innocence in a world where you simply have to make tough choices. She still tried mostly to help and be kind but she regarded people with more suspicion and was stronger in her conviction, more willing to speak up. I like the idea that her arc ends with someone she looked up to letting her down and forcing her to rely totally on herself. It's a painful irony too, as it leaves Jane abandoned when she has finally decided to let others in.
[close]

Top stuff from Telltale. Given the expectations were high after the first series, I thought they did an excellent job with the follow-up. Choosing to continue Clem's story was a ballsy move and one that could have tarnished the first game if not done right. Instead, they really added more depth to her character and I feel like she's a character I'll long remember and I'm satisfied that my choices brought out the conclusion they did.

chand

Done. Choices:

Spoiler alert
Saved the baby - one of those slightly weird choices because I knew that the baby surviving or not surviving would be predetermined whether I went for him or not. But ultimately I figured I'd like to be the sort of person that would try and save a baby from being shot to pieces.

Covered Luke - he was asking me not to come closer and he had a better position to assess the situation than Bonnie, who is a pretty flaky character. Figured that shooting zombies is a good thing to do in a zombie apocalypse.

Didn't ask to leave with Mike - Mike seemed okay, but ultimately the only characters left to feel any loyalty to were Kenny and Jane, so I wasn't going to abandon them with a baby. Plus it was a fairly fucking huge betrayal by them, taking all the supplies and deserting two actual children. I get that everyone was furious with Kenny for his hair-trigger temper, but it seemed like the sensible thing to do was for us to all get somewhere decent in the truck and then go our separate ways.

Shot Kenny, forgave Jane - this was a strange one. I'd already clocked from what Jane said before Kenny attacked her that the baby wasn't actually dead, and having seen Kenny progressively losing it through both seasons and watched him sadistically murder Carver I was already aware of what he was capable of, so I didn't really need her to orchestrate this situation. But ultimately she was right to feel threatened by him, and for Kenny just to try and murder Jane without even attempting to establish what had happened to the baby was insane. Jane was probably my favourite of the other characters.

Let the family in - I dunno, just felt I couldn't turn anyone away.
[close]

Rev

Spoilers upon spoilers

Quote from: Moribunderast on August 30, 2014, 01:45:09 AM
I hope it is the end of Clem's story, in this series

The only thing I'm confident in predicting about the next run is that this won't be the case. 
Spoiler alert
I'm expecting a jump of a good few years, and for Clem to play the role that Lee did in the original for the kid.
[close]

I'm not sure about this one really - I enjoyed it, but there's a definite case of second album syndrome going on.  At the end of the third episode, I couldn't help but think of where we were at that point in the first series - a bunch of characters who had been well-established quite quickly, so it felt major when things went wrong for them.  By the end of episode 3 of this run, I was struggling to remember some of their names, let alone what little we'd been shown of their personalities.  The group is essentially ballast throughout, which the game seems to admit at the end, given the characters who make it to that point.

Spoiler alert
I shot Kenny and agree that his re-introduction was well handled; the old friend you've not been in contact with for a while, slowly reminding you of why you didn't stay in touch.
[close]

Jane was originally supposed to be Molly from the first game, right?  It's just a suspicion, but she struck me as a re-written version of that character, possibly because the voice actor wasn't available.

wooders1978

I have to admit the ending choked me up a bit
Spoiler alert
I saved Kenny but left him at the gates
[close]

I have seen all the endings on youtube and i am pleased with the path i chose, i got the best ending
I too wasnt sure about playing as Clem but the way they developed her charecter in this series was fantastic
Will she return for season 3? I am undecided as the endings went in very different paths, but walking dead is all about Clem - i think fans of the game are too emotionally invested in her to end her story...




Hank Venture

So fucking done with this.

Spoiler alert

Saved the baby.

Tried to pull up Luke.
Why the fuck does no one in this game use their heads? It's obvious to me that when you try to help someone up from a hole in weak ice, you don't run over, you crawl/slide so you spread your weight over more area. That's what you're supposed to do, that's how people who go ice bathing get themselves up again. The ice around the hole is the weakest, so you crawl away from it and stand up when you're safe. One of the plethore of stuff that winds me up about the things that people do in this game, Clem should know better. Doesn't even take her soaked clothes off after, it's just dumb.

Did not ask to leave with Mike.
What on Earth was that all about? Not having Arvo getting the shit kicked out of him was fair enough (although he was guilty of Luke getting shot and eventually dying and alround being a dick even though I protected him from Jane, so who cares really), but picking him over Clem when trying to escape? Why would he bring Bonnie and not Jane? Fuck off Mike, you dick.

Shot Kenny
Yes, I hoped I got to shoot them both, the game was desperately trying to make me sympathize and agree with Jane, who was ruining everything more than Kenny was. First of all, she fucked off after shagging Luke on watch, she constantly undermined everyone who disagreed with her and tried to manipulate me into leaving Kenny, which I didn't want to do - Wellington was the plan all the way, no way was I to change my mind now. Winding up Kenny about his family was out of order as well, completely pointless. Which leads me to...

Told her to fuck off
She was a complete sociopath. Yeah, way to prove your point - that a man on the brink of utter meltdown will react badly to losing a baby. Piss off.
[close]

I don't know how much more I'll be playing of this, if there are more released.

My problem is two-fold:

1) Choices don't reflect what I actually want to do/say at any given time, and people do so much dumb stuff all the time.

2) This might be because I played through the first season and four episodes of the second season on the trot, but the build-up and the structure of the plotting become way too predictable. Here's how it goes through all of it: Someone in the group is trouble, you do stuff to appease them or whatever until it boils over, killing the troublemaker in some sort of way and maybe dragging someone else down as well. The group is now a few people short, including Troublemaker. An up until now perfectly reasonable background character turns into a Troublemaker completely out of the blue. Rinse and repeat.

Mister Six

Bah, wish I'd been able to play Walking Dead alongside youse lot. Finished episode five today and was left feeling a bit underwhelmed. As others have said, the characters make too many boneheaded or outright illogical decisions throughout the game, undermining the fictional world and player agency. Clem leaving her gun at the start; the nice Indian dude not looking at you at all while you're cutting flowers, so that things end up fucked up; Jane's absurd scheme at the end, which makes no sense at all especially given how logical she's been to this point (for the record: shot Kenny in the hope that I might wing him; told Jane to go fuck herself after).

The first season of The Walking Dead really impressed me because all of the characters acted plausibly at all times. If they flipped out it was because they were stretched to breaking point (whatserface shooting the supporting character by the roadside at the peak of her nervous breakdown) or because they were Kenny, for whom stupid, hot-headed decisions are a regular character trait. This time around people acted like they were in a stupid horror movie purely so that the game could move on to the next big dramatic scene.

The lack of attention even crept into the set dressing; the ski lodge was a nice place, but why were those big glass windows not boarded up? And why did nobody get those wet clothes off Clem as soon as she was inside the lodge?

I also thought Carver was a wasted opportunity. Between him, The Governor and whoever was running that city located in a school in the first season (you know, the one overrun with zombies when you arrive), this franchise has hammered the 'psychopathic leader rules a community successfully but with an iron fist' concept into the ground. Making him so vindictive and cruel made the decision to rebel against him far easier than it should have been, and there wasn't nearly enough consideration given to the fact that you're basically endangering hundreds of people just so you can get away.

But I think the biggest issue is that the designers never found a way to replace the Lee/Clem dynamic of the first season. That was such a brilliant move, because it instantly placed the player in the same headspace as the protagonist - it's a rare person that doesn't instinctively want to help the kid[nb]I hope, at least.[/nb] - so the differences between what Lee's circumstances and character allow him to do and what the player wants to do are less pronounced. This time around Clem has no responsibilities, so the limitations on her agency feel more forced.

And sure, she's a kid so she's inevitably going to be pulled in the wake of others - no possibility of becoming the leader like Lee - but there are also a bunch of scenes where she's expected to make the deciding vote, or sent out to do some covert ops shit and it doesn't ring true. You can feel the game pushing and pulling in these episodes, whereas the first season - with the exception of the binary 'who to save' choice in the first chapter - felt like a single coherent, cohesive story with no obvious points of divergence. I almost couldn't believe that there were any other endings, because everything concluded perfectly with no visible joins.

Both of these factors also make the game feel rather aimless, unfortunately. Both seasons had groups trying to get to some distant place and then being frustrated and moving on, but the first season had the search for Clem's parents and Lee's attempts to prepare Clem for/protect her from the apocalypse, both of which paid off nicely at the end, and gave a sense of closure. This season only seemed to end because they ran out of characters to kill, and there wasn't much sense of anything being enormously different at the end than at the beginning. Well, my Clem ended up going solo, covering herself in corpse guts and carrying AJ through a field of zombs, so I guess there was some development on her part, as she decided to give up on groups altogether. But it only happened in the dying seconds of the episode, and felt rather tacked-on.

Sorry. Lots of complaints. I actually did enjoy this game, believe it or not, but I hold the first season up as one of the best examples of video game writing I've ever had the pleasure to enjoy, and this season fell pretty far from that target. I hope for season three the writers learn to plot more carefully and rely less on contrived character decisions, and also that they think of a more interesting story arc than 'some survivors go from A to B and fight with each other along the way'.

BritishHobo

Season 2 of The Walking Dead is on sale on Steam at the moment. I absolutely loved the first game[nb]unfortunately, I played it on a mate's PS3, and since the idea discussed in this thread of a decisions checklist, randomised decisions seemed to be the only option aside from replaying the entire first game, which I think BoC flagged up as something that just doesn't seem worth the effort[/nb] - really intense and gripping, far more successful than the show about investing you in the story. Some of the decisions I had to make really made me feel uneasy, there were a lot of difficult choices that had to be made, and no clear good way out.

Ehh. The first two episodes were okay, but I just finished episode three, and I had no role in that story. I'm surprised I didn't see more comments about it in this thread, but that episode was almost entirely cut-scene based. Fifteen minutes in I realised that I'd literally done nothing beyond a couple of minor dialogue choices. By the end, I'd made a couple of small decisions, and been given the chance occasionally to walk across the room and click on something to then re-activate the cut-scenes. It's always been a decent mix of gameplay and video, but the balance in this episode was heavily off.

What happened to being left alone to speak to everyone, go through various options of discussion with them, scope out their backgrounds and motivations and plans? Whenever I get to talk to people now, it's a very specific conversation on what's currently happening, where I get to choose a response, and then it's over.

As a result, the rigid nature of the choices is far more obvious, and I no longer feel like I'm making difficult decisions, because anything bad that happens seems inevitable on the game's part.

I'm basically watching a movie. I really hope it picks up.

Mister Six

Quote from: BritishHobo on November 02, 2014, 04:14:23 PM
What happened to being left alone to speak to everyone, go through various options of discussion with them, scope out their backgrounds and motivations and plans? Whenever I get to talk to people now, it's a very specific conversation on what's currently happening, where I get to choose a response, and then it's over.

As a result, the rigid nature of the choices is far more obvious, and I no longer feel like I'm making difficult decisions, because anything bad that happens seems inevitable on the game's part.

This is a very good observation, and I think in part it's due to you playing a child in a group of adults, but it also seems like a huge oversight on the parts of the developers. There's a bit more of that in the fourth episode, but by that point it all feels a bit too late.

BritishHobo

Hmm, really not fussed with that ending at all. I basically have to echo your thoughts, Mister Six (got the exact same ending as well - shoot Kenny, tell Jane to jog the fuck on).

The ending to season one felt perfectly seeded. Of course it was going to come down to Lee and Clem, that was the core of the season, that was the reason you pushed on through the story. Season 2 really didn't have anything like that - there was such a quick turnover that there really wasn't any one thing to zero in on. Jane's vacillation between independence and allowing herself to be part of a group was pretty major, as was Kenny losing it, but jamming the two together in the way that they did felt super contrived. I felt as if I had no impact whatsoever during either the car argument or the fight at the shelter. I was just a child on the sidelines shouting 'Stop! No! Please!' and being ignored. Then suddenly at the end I had to choose one to die. One or the other, fifty fifty. An extremely rigid choice that comes out of nowhere, and didn't seem to have any real relevance to either Jane or Kenny's journey.

Perhaps what made it seem so bad was that I didn't particularly feel any stronger towards either of them. I shot Kenny because he had the upper hand - he was on the verge of stabbing her, and I wanted to calm things down rather than let things get worse. But the choice was 'Kenny dies' or 'Jane dies', and that was that. So I killed Kenny and I told Jane to fuck off because her baby plan was absolutely mental, a really contrived way of backing me into that one-or-the-other choice. Sod all of 'em.

Was Christa really just a red herring? What was the point of saving Nick or making any effort regarding Sarah[nb]Although attempting to say the right things to draw her out of her panicked shell while zombies approached the mobile home from every angle was a season highlight for me.[/nb]? What was the point of any of the Russian McGuffins, when all of them died immediately except the kid, who got no development and hung around purely as Kenny's punching bag? It would have made more sense for Kenny to turn violent against Mike or somebody, which would have given him and Bonnie more reason to feel frightened enough to jump ship[nb]But not enough to take the eleven-year-old and the baby with them.[/nb].

All felt very piecemeal. When my Clementine walked into the zombies at the end, AJ in arms, she felt like a Clementine who'd just wasted several weeks of her life. I wanted to prove Jane wrong and buy into community over isolation, but the game seemed to want to force drama on me at the expense of that.

Lost Oliver

Just finished this and agree with the majority of the comments. It was still pretty bloody emotional but nothing on the first. That said, I nearly did well up when deciding whether or not to leave Kenny. I did leave him by the way but only after 90 seconds of agonising. I figured that it truly is/was what he wanted and that he could live the rest of his life in a slightly less mental state knowing that he did one good thing.

When Kenny was atop of Jane, I froze and instead of shooting Kenny I watched him stab her. There were times when I wanted to replay scenes because I'd misinterpreted the choices or decided in hindsight I was wrong but then I realised that that's life and you have to deal with your decisions, even if they are shite.

And as for Kenny, what a turn around. I spent the entire first series hating him and then within ten minutes of our reunion I hated him again. Christ knows how we ended up together but that's typical me. Decide not to act and end up getting the shit end of the stick, or do act but get misunderstood and still end up with a shit stick.

It's actually taught me a bit of life this has. I feel like Sartre's young woman on a first date, acting in bad faith. Making no decision is still making a decision. I just wanted everyone to be happy but by not acting, nobody was happy.

As for the game, it definitely missed the conversations from the first series that went nowhere. Those were so important. I hope they bring this back for the third series (you're lying if you say you're not going to play it) and give you the opportunity to have a gander round another war museum.

R.I.P. Luke by the way. That was fucking gutting. And I DID try to save him, I tried to save him by covering him you telltale twats. All that art history knowledge, gone in a second.