TellTale Fatigue

I, along with countless others, love the Telltale games. They are king when it comes to storytelling and have spread across many different franchises while maintaining their charm. As the popularity of their titles has increased, so has their number of titles. So far we have received two seasons of The Walking Dead, a fantastic game in The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, and Game of Thrones. Telltale is currently releasing episodes of Minecraft: Story Mode and recent announcements revealed Telltale Batman and Marvel games in the works. The question is, are we receiving too much of a good thing?

Telltale games used to be magical. They offered you an experience that you could only get from playing their titles. But, with so many games coming from their studio, I feel that Telltale is losing its magic.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead filled me with emotion and I loved The Wolf Among Us, it is probably my favorite game from them. When Game of Thrones was announced, I was absolutely stoked. But when it finally came out I was disappointed with the blandness of the story. The magic from previous titles was lost. Furthermore, the season took over took a year to come to a conclusion. By the time I reached the end I had already forgotten what happened in the beginning and didn’t have it in me to replay the earlier episodes.

Telltale fatigue is also showing through the studio’s game engine. Season 1 of The Walking Dead was released in 2012 with a variety of bugs that took me out of the game. Three years later the engine is still broken, in my opinion. There are times when the games will just halt or slow down to the point that it is like watching a PowerPoint presentation.

Telltale has continued to churn out games without actually fixing these issues. Though you would think that the jump to next gen platforms seemed like the perfect time to put some time into optimizing their games, the issues of last gen seem to be worse on the newer systems. As a fan of their games and a consumer, I personally believe Telltale should take a year off and put some R&D into their tools. With some work Telltale should definitely be able to offer a smoother experience than we are getting now.

I think Telltale is great, don’t get me wrong. But they need to make us want their games. Games like Uncharted and Fallout are so special because we aren’t constantly having them shoved down our throats. Though I think Telltale games are just as good, we don’t are not getting the opportunity to yearn for more. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing and I thing Telltale needs to learn this lesson.