Post by Crooked Christa on Oct 31, 2014 17:02:51 GMT
www.ibtimes.co.uk/telltale-games-interview-steve-allison-walking-dead-game-thrones-tales-borderlands-1472550
IBTimes UK: How successful do you think The Walking Dead Season Two has been both in its own right, and as a follow-up to season one?
Steve Allison: We're very happy with the continued success we've had with The Walking Dead: Season Two. It's on pace to do slightly better than what The Walking Dead: Season One did in its first 12 months digitally β and that was a good initial 12 months.
Next gen tech opens up new possibilities for all developers. How has it helped refine Season Two and how will it help future Telltale games? Particularly when it comes to the issues of frame rate and load time that have been fairly common in previous games.
We are continually and incrementally evolving our tools and tech that provide the backbone for our games. We build games a little bit differently than most other game companies in that our games are ubiquitous and platform agnostic, so it's always important for us to provide the same experience across a wide range of platforms.
The new next-gen systems by virtue of their increased power certainly provide some performance benefits organically that we are happy about. We have also added asynchronous loading to our upcoming Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones series that significantly improve our loading times versus some of our older game series on all platforms from mobile to next gen consoles.
Steve Allison: We're very happy with the continued success we've had with The Walking Dead: Season Two. It's on pace to do slightly better than what The Walking Dead: Season One did in its first 12 months digitally β and that was a good initial 12 months.
Next gen tech opens up new possibilities for all developers. How has it helped refine Season Two and how will it help future Telltale games? Particularly when it comes to the issues of frame rate and load time that have been fairly common in previous games.
We are continually and incrementally evolving our tools and tech that provide the backbone for our games. We build games a little bit differently than most other game companies in that our games are ubiquitous and platform agnostic, so it's always important for us to provide the same experience across a wide range of platforms.
The new next-gen systems by virtue of their increased power certainly provide some performance benefits organically that we are happy about. We have also added asynchronous loading to our upcoming Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones series that significantly improve our loading times versus some of our older game series on all platforms from mobile to next gen consoles.
Season one fell somewhere between story-driven game and old school point and click. Season Two was closer to the former with fewer puzzles, why is this?
We always have to balance storytelling and interactivity in what we do but the storytelling will always win. When a puzzle can be organic and really make sense within the context of our fiction we are always going to present that to our audience. What we won't do is shoehorn in puzzles to fill time or check a box. The story that we took players through in Season Two just didn't have as many natural moments to build puzzles around, like starting the train to Savannah gave us in Episode 3 of Season One.
We always have to balance storytelling and interactivity in what we do but the storytelling will always win. When a puzzle can be organic and really make sense within the context of our fiction we are always going to present that to our audience. What we won't do is shoehorn in puzzles to fill time or check a box. The story that we took players through in Season Two just didn't have as many natural moments to build puzzles around, like starting the train to Savannah gave us in Episode 3 of Season One.
The Walking Dead has really changed everything for Telltale, and with Game of Thrones, Borderlands, and Wolf Among Us it really feels like you're approaching the height of your powers. Do you feel the same?
Getting to work on all these amazing franchises is a blessing and very exciting for all of us. Do we feel we've reached the height of our powers? No. We're just getting started and we're excited to share news soon about our unannounced projects.
Getting to work on all these amazing franchises is a blessing and very exciting for all of us. Do we feel we've reached the height of our powers? No. We're just getting started and we're excited to share news soon about our unannounced projects.
How far will future games branch out from the Telltale template already set, or do you believe that template is strong enough to sustain multiple game series as it is?
We always will evolve our story telling toolkit from game to game based on the needs of each franchise and the creative decisions we've made. For example, Tales from the Borderlands adds multi-protagonist storytelling for us layered into the tailored narrative design established with The Walking Dead and it works amazingly well with two playable characters.
In Game of Thrones we're taking that multi-protagonist design even further with five playable characters from the same family whose choices affect everyone in the family, and that adds a whole new layer to things that we're really excited about.
We feel like the core tailored narrative template is very strong and supports multiple IP executions while also being extremely flexible in [taking on board] new narrative designs that I've mentioned here. It will continue to evolve from game series to game series.
We always will evolve our story telling toolkit from game to game based on the needs of each franchise and the creative decisions we've made. For example, Tales from the Borderlands adds multi-protagonist storytelling for us layered into the tailored narrative design established with The Walking Dead and it works amazingly well with two playable characters.
In Game of Thrones we're taking that multi-protagonist design even further with five playable characters from the same family whose choices affect everyone in the family, and that adds a whole new layer to things that we're really excited about.
We feel like the core tailored narrative template is very strong and supports multiple IP executions while also being extremely flexible in [taking on board] new narrative designs that I've mentioned here. It will continue to evolve from game series to game series.