[NEWS] Massive layoffs at Telltale Games put the future of The Walking Dead: The Final Season in dou

It's a hard pill to swallow on a lot of levels, but you could kind of see it coming. After the Sam & Max thing put them on the map, and they found their blueprint with TWD, they went a bit power mad and tried to do so much at once with rather middling results. They talked about scaling back this year, and it all looked god for a while, with TWD being concluded and a new Wolf Among Us in the works (the first of which was excellent, by the way). I was optimistic about them getting back on top of it. Sad to see it not work out.

It always sucks when this happens, but to go along with what EmP said, it was hard to not get the impression they were going for quantity over quality. I don't know if they felt under the gun to push out a lot of content to remain profitable or if it was just a case of letting their reach exceed their grasp, but when I heard the news, I had more of an "oh, that stinks" vibe than a "WHAT?!?! HOW!?!?" one.

I've never played their stuff because that isn't my sort of game, but because of how EVERY SINGLE DAMN ONE of these that EmP reviewed for a year or so came up during my RotWs, I got a very distinct impression that they'd been great initially, but seemed to be going through the motions as time went on to where their game engine was showing its age and how you didn't have the same freedom of choices as time went on, with all your choices basically funneling to the same outcome with it just being a different road to get there. The sort of thing that made me think that the same creative spark wasn't there with later stuff they did. I seem to remember comparing him going through yet another series by them to me continuing to play Kemco games at one point where you know it's not going to be great, but you feel this self-imposed obligation to see it through.

Yeah. I was disappointed to see this, too. I haven't played much of their stuff outside of a few Sam & Max titles and the Game of Thrones tie-in, but I still enjoyed it. I've been meaning to check out The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us, as those seemed the most promising out of their library.

I can see where the comment about their later games' choices just funneling into one outcome comes from. While I thoroughly enjoyed their spin on the series and had hoped for a sequel, as it left off where there could be one, I definitely got the impression that a lot of what I did didn't really matter in the long run. Sure, things might get there differently, but ultimately, your protagonist was going to get screwed no matter what you did.