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RIP Telltale

Started by Rev+, September 23, 2018, 04:15:09 AM

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The Culture Bunker

Quote from: Consignia on September 23, 2018, 09:02:46 PM
It's kind of hard to make your decisions matter in a linear episodic storyline. To make them truly matter, they'd have to have massive story branches for each decisions, and make things different accordingly. You can almost do that within an episode, but they always have to end at the same point.

To really do the decision thing correctly, you really need to ditch the episodic approach.
That's true enough. There was a game years back, on PS3, "Alpha Protocall" was in terms of gameplay was pretty average (if I'm being kind), but it at least did the " pretty well. Think there was about 10/15 variations of the ending depending on who you allied with/bounced off. It probably wasn't anywhere near as complex as I make out, but at least it gave the impression that my approach/choices in the game had some saying on the ending.

Z

Quote from: Consignia on September 23, 2018, 09:02:46 PM
It's kind of hard to make your decisions matter in a linear episodic storyline. To make them truly matter, they'd have to have massive story branches for each decisions, and make things different accordingly. You can almost do that within an episode, but they always have to end at the same point.

To really do the decision thing correctly, you really need to ditch the episodic approach.
Alternatively, find ways to avoid making the illusion of choice be a part of it. I didn't like That Dragon Cancer much at all, but the fact you had no options for huge chunks of it worked very much to its favour.

Probably doesn't work in an episodic system though, I don't think.

Z

Quote from: Consignia on September 23, 2018, 06:22:20 PM
The writing has certainly been on the wall for a while. I remember reading an article in the last year on Eurogamer (which I can't find right now), which detailed how shit the management were, and how awful the working conditions were. Wouldn't be shocked if there were even more.
Yep, I suspect a lot of their staff are people who joined around 2013/2014 as (very very talented) graduates and juniors who haven't yet gotten a grasp of how toxic the environment was and thought it was a privilege to be working there

The former CEO sounded really shit, no management skills and rather petty about the idea of anyone other than him getting creative credit. Get the impression the company was more or less dead a year ago

madhair60

Quote from: popcorn on September 23, 2018, 07:33:55 PM
I really thought when I posted up there with my criticisms I'd get the usual replies of people telling me I was playing it wrong etc.

You probably were

Moribunderast

I'm hoping Jim Sterling or some decent games journalist/youtuber does a good, thorough post-mortem of Telltale because I find the story quite fascinating. To hear it from employees, it's long been a miserable place to work with a perma-crunch mentality, no paid overtime and now no severance for all those suddenly fired. How the company overextended itself to such an extent is just insane. Why did they keep buying up licenses if the games weren't making money? Why did they just keep pumping out the same game with a different coat of paint if the sales weren't there? Why were they making so many games simultaneously when the demand clearly was not there? It just all seems really dumb to me. They were a small, decent company when making yer Sam & Max games and Monkey Island - it sounds as if the success of The Walking Dead S1 made their CEO and/or execs go insane and think they'd found the goose that laid the golden egg. But surely by the time Wolf Among Us and Tales From The Borderlands and Game Of Thrones had come out and not made money, they'd realise their strategy wasn't working? Why go on to then buy the license for Batman and Minecraft and Guardians Of The Galaxy? It all seems like staggering mismanagement and sadly it seems to have come at the expense of employees who were treated like shit for years only to then have their face spat on as they were forced out.

As for their games, loved TWD s1 and Wolf Among Us. Borderlands was good fun and I thoroughly enjoyed the Sam & Max games. I'd been desperate for them to change up their style for years though, as it really was just choose-your-own-adventure stuff and they could've easily added in a few more adventure game elements (like, ya know, puzzles) to break things up and make it feel as if you were playing a game rather than occasionally pressing a button to keep the movie going.

I love that this was clearly a passion project for the devs and senior management. Fuck the profits, just make the best games you can possibly make. Heart-warming stuff. People power.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: Moribunderast on September 24, 2018, 09:32:26 AM
I'm hoping Jim Sterling or some decent games journalist/youtuber does a good, thorough post-mortem of Telltale because I find the story quite fascinating.

Here you go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mjFlxMAUlo

wooders1978

Feel very very sorry for the hard working devs that are out on their arse with no severance - what a horrible situation for them
I did however get very frustrated at the length of time between episodes of the last walking dead, which I had prepaid for, so they had my money, only to be told the delay was because they were working on other things basically - the leadership there appears fucking clueless

Moribunderast

Quote from: wooders1978 on September 25, 2018, 07:10:58 AM
I did however get very frustrated at the length of time between episodes of the last walking dead, which I had prepaid for, so they had my money, only to be told the delay was because they were working on other things basically - the leadership there appears fucking clueless

I'm frustrated that I paid for the final season. First time ever I've paid for an episodic game before all the episodes were out. That'll learn me.

wooders1978

Surely you'll be refunded? Ep1 was free as well wasn't it?

Z

Quote from: Moribunderast on September 25, 2018, 09:15:25 AM
I'm frustrated that I paid for the final season. First time ever I've paid for an episodic game before all the episodes were out. That'll learn me.
Meanwhile I paid for Kentucky route zero in full around the release of episode one and I'll finally get the last one some time early next year I guess.

They must be living on fuck all the last few years, nearly a decade of their lives buried under the obligation of finishing that stuff.

Moribunderast

Quote from: wooders1978 on September 25, 2018, 12:38:15 PM
Surely you'll be refunded? Ep1 was free as well wasn't it?

As of yet, Steam say no - but I guess it's not "officially" canceled, so who knows if the refunds will swing through once they say definitively that the season won't be completed.

MojoJojo

Hmmm, I'd be surprised if refunds get paid out before staff severance pay.

Bhazor

Wait they've actually cancelled the final season? I thought for sure Telltale finished the whole series by the time they release the first episode.

brat-sampson

Basically US employment rights are fucking barbaric, so no severance, one week of healthcare... some of these sods had been working there less than a month. Looks like a case of a decent to good studio with flashes of brilliance being over extended, over-indulged and slowly bled to death by upper management fuckweasels. It's a shitty situation for consumers but an even shittier one for employees.

Awful news all round really.

Quote from: Bhazor on September 25, 2018, 03:23:09 PM
Wait they've actually cancelled the final season? I thought for sure Telltale finished the whole series by the time they release the first episode.

No, in fact it was unusual for them even to have a complete schedule of episode release dates at the start of a season as they'd still be working on production of later ones as they went along. At times, this has led to long stretches between episodes, but the idea that things got so bad financially that they just had to stop working in the middle of one is insane.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

How do you even make a story game based on Minecraft anyway? I've only tried playing it (Minecraft) for about ten minutes, but from what I can gather it's a game without a plot, and nobody speaks. How did they get a coherent narrative out of that, and what is point?

Because of Mienecrafts Blank slate and the fact you can customize skins has meant that Children find it quite easy to use it for role play. Youtubers have also devolped role play series. So its the next logical step from that.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

Well that sounds shit. No wonder nobody bought it.

One limited idea stretched over about twenty licenses and shit series based on other cunts' stories and characters. More fool the mugs that bought these fuckin 'games'.

Rev+

Quote from: MojoJojo on September 25, 2018, 02:46:09 PM
Hmmm, I'd be surprised if refunds get paid out before staff severance pay.

For the PC version at least any refunds would be from Valve, who would join the list of creditors to get jack shit when Telltale formally go bankrupt.

I've not been arsed to look at the EULAs for their games but something changed with the way they sold them some years back:  the episodes used to be completely separate games, but more recently it's been a case of buying the whole thing or nothing.  The change was related to the console versions I think, but it applies to the Steam versions too.  What I suspect is that the buyer only actually buys the first episode of any series, and the rest are technically classified as free DLC.

Moribunderast

Quote from: The Boston Crab on September 25, 2018, 05:46:06 PM
One limited idea stretched over about twenty licenses and shit series based on other cunts' stories and characters. More fool the mugs that bought these fuckin 'games'.

Yes, yes, you are superior and anything that doesn't fit your definition doesn't count as a game.

Rev+

We kind of had this out recently.  Telltale games mainly appealed to people who liked adventure/point-and-click games, which almost always had a rigid plot and didn't even offer alternative endings, much less plot branching.  That anyone's ever enjoyed this kind of thing pisses some people off for some reason.

It doesn't piss me off in the slightest, I'm just offering a counterpoint. Take it with a pinch of salt.

popcorn

Personally it annoys me tremendously that anyone thinks Telltale games were good, what obvious bellends.

brat-sampson

Turns out I may have been wrong about this employment laws, and the ex staff are fighting back, though who knows if they'll win or if the company even has the funds to cover any settlement...

colacentral

Quote from: Rev+ on September 26, 2018, 01:01:25 AM
We kind of had this out recently.  Telltale games mainly appealed to people who liked adventure/point-and-click games, which almost always had a rigid plot and didn't even offer alternative endings, much less plot branching.  That anyone's ever enjoyed this kind of thing pisses some people off for some reason.

Except that point and click games were actually games. I see no connection between Grim Fandango or Sam & Max Hit the Road and the Telltale catalogue, so I bristle at the defence that it's for people into adventure games. Maybe there is, by coincidence, some crossover appeal, but they're not adventure games - they're barely even games. They're the equivalent of an interactive DVD. Completely worthless.

It's a shame because I don't see what's wrong with the point and click format. They instead were hellbent on this branching path illusion, possibly because of last decade's obsession with player choice - the proliferation of open world stuff and infinite but ultimately inconsequential player customisation, another thing I hate. I don't know why point and click adventure games have not entered the indie game world in a big way yet, as they are easy and cheap to make. A good writer with a good set of puzzles could make a killing.

bgmnts

Point and click just doesnt work in the industry anymore, we are used to fluid controls and brilliant graphics, physics and AI. Point and click just isnt great anymore.

A couple of point and clicks have come out in the past few years i've played and I just dont have the patience for it anymore. I imagine most gamers are similar.

Point and click was OK when you were impressed by cartoon graphics in a game but now they're absolutely nothing.

popcorn

In their 90s heyday, point-and-click games hit a demographic that otherwise didn't play games. Like Myst and The Sims, they were non-threatening and safe - you couldn't go wrong or die or lose progress, there were no time limits or pressures, and didn't require dexterity to control the characters. My sister, who otherwise wasn't interested in games, played hours of Monkey Island and DOTT.

I think the point of fuckup was Grim Fandango, when suddenly you had to manoeuvre the protagonist around with tank controls and it was all fiddly and annoying. I think that alienated a huge chunk of their demographic. (Again, I'm thinking of my sister here.) Escape From Monkey Island was even worse.

And then as colacentral said, for some reason when companies have made adventure games since, they've built these weird half-formed confused interactive movie things instead. The formula in terms of format was perfected with Curse of Monkey Island. The rest is just good art, good writing, and good puzzle design. You should be able to slot these things right into that format, relatively cheaply. It's baffling why it has eluded devs since.

Bhazor

Why does no one ever remember The Quest For Glory games? Or the hundreds of Sierra games? Why is the entire history of point and click games reduced to five Lucas Arts games?