What went wrong?

What went wrong?

It became obvious that your choices don't matter

Taking too many projects than they can deal with.

They have been stuck using the same formulae and everyones bored of it.

They peaked at Walking Dead 1, and borderlands was a complete fluke.

They're just snapping up any licence and pushing out their 'games' to the nostalgic casual gamers out there. Now they're going after the kiddies too with Minecraft. They're unstoppable. The ultimate money making machine. At least the CSI games actually had some sort of challenge to them. Now you are just in an interactive choice making movie. It's almost impossible not to earn all achievements in their games now.

No Poker Night 3

Poker Night was such a comfy game
who would you want to see if a 3 was made? Pic related

they stopped making sam and max games

Well, they stopped making adventure games.

It never went right in the first place

they never put any effort in the animations and the graphics of their games didn't really improve at the rate they should have. I think they are still using the same engine they created back when they first started too.

Also as other mentioned they've pretty much thrown out any desire to make anything beyond the interactive movie style games.

too many projects

removed point and click/puzzle elements and stuck with mostly story

lost literally every writer they had that made the episodic format work, rendering every game into a segmented mess

One trick pony. Every single "adventure" game they do is exactly the same with all the same non-choices. The worst part is that somehow they can't manage to fit more than 6 characters on screen without the game shitting itself even though the graphics aren't that good and there's almost no gameplay.

Never really went right.
> point and click stuff that seemed to be almost ported from the Wii interface instead of the other way around
> finicky character movements
> episodic format sucks, not even the "seasons" attempt to patch them together for one semi-cohesive experience
> no real puzzles, the engine doesn't even allow for combining items
> dubious writing
> episodic content means they can get away with only releasing a fifth or two fifths of a game (Penny Arcade, Bone)

They haven't improved the formula at all since the first walking dead, in most cases they've gotten worse. I'd be lying if I didn't get some enjoyment out of a few of their series but its really starting to wear thin, even for someone who likes this sort of interactive movie shit. From a quality standpoint they should cut down on the number of projects and focus on delivering one game that improves their current formula, and injects some new ideas into it.

They need to overhaul their engine. The level of interactivity the game allows for is extremely limited. Compare telltale games to david cage games, or even life is strange and it really makes clear how boring, and static it's systems are.

Make some sequels to their existing properties.
>wolf among us
>batman
>GoT
>Tales from the borderlands
All should get a sequel before they make a guardians of the galaxy game.

Quality is all over the place. For instance their Batman game was pretty good, the Guardians of the Galaxy game that just got shown off looks like complete and total shit.

>we will never, ever get Season 4
>even if we did it would just be movieshit and not a point-and-click adventure

It hurts so much, dammit.

Tales of Monkey Island had combining items.

They kept creating new projects instead of making a sequel to Wolf Among Us

TWaU is one of their best and deserves a god damn sequel instead of making new IP's nobody cares about or fucking up TWD even more than they already have.
Not gonna lie I bought a new frontier exclusively for the Clemservice.

They are not actually games, even less so than walking simulators or visual novels are.

The Walking Dead S1 got more praise than it deserved because the reviewers all thought it was going to lead somewhere where their choices would actually matter. They then patterned EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. they've made since around that format, but now people are smarter than to believe the hype.

See also: Mass Effect.

borderlands was the best thing they ever did

>Telltale was literally the final pillar of Sam & Max
>They killed the fucking franchise off without a second thought, despite the fact that S&M literally made the company

Telltale is fucking scum

>The Walking Dead S1 got more praise than it deserved because the reviewers all thought it was going to lead somewhere where their choices would actually matter.
that's false though
TWD season 1 stands on its own as a great game.

Too many games too quickly, talent stretched too thin.

I thought somebody else made the Penny Arcade game.

>best Borderlands final boss is from a Telltale game

They made the same game 10+ times in a row. They had a good run but the curtain they put up started becoming obvious the 4th or 5th time. Their formula became all too clear.

>Telltale was founded in the first place because they were pissed LucasArts abandoned Sam and Max for Star Wars just because it was more popular
>Telltale abandons Sam and Max for The Walking Dead just because it's more popular

POETRY
O
E
T
R
Y

This. Some games like Batman and Wolf Among Us really had no differences at the end of the game.

That Guardians of the Galaxy game looks like legit shovelware

it's actually pathetic

You should probably fold, buddy.

...

PLEASE

People hyped the shit out of The Walking Dead despite its faults and half-assed ports, letting Telltale coast on its success instead of improving their shitty game engine or writing.

>Carl from ATHF
>Sam & Max sharing a seat
>Soldier
>Rick Sanchez

It's the equivalent of a pic related except these were actually good. In all seriousness though, they have started over saturating their own shtick and will go the way of Guitar Hero eventually.

You can only paint a wall so many colors and continue watching it dry before you realize, "I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and...I like to kiss my own butt."

Lets face it. This is probably gonna happen

They stopped making Sam and Max games.

People forgave it cause it was their first effort into that style of game and hoped they would improve. Instead they just stuck with the same formula for every single game.

...

they take too many projects at once resulting in months delays between episodes of some games because of their talent being stretched too thin

They don't have enough resources to actual improve their engine or don't want too
considering their engine already works on moible devices and they don't want to risk improving their graphics with a new engine that might not be compatible with mobile immediately and take a hit in profits, and it could also take too long with the way their staff is stretched thin for them to see it as worth it

Gameplay Keeps getting scaled down and is pretty close to being a visual novel
Seasons of say walking dead feel isolated and disconnected from each other they start and end the same way, and the choices throughout the season almost don't matter because they don't affect the next season in any significant way because the next season wipes the slate of the critical choices you made last seasons
the quality of writing is declining at an alarming rate
Walking dead is what put them on the map and now that they are on the map they can coast out making cheap budget "VN"s and bean count the fuck out of the budget to increase the profit margins and bank on big brands, minecraft must have been a fucking gold mine for the miniscule amount of work they had to put in to make that much money

>People forgave it cause it was their first effort into that style of game

It wasn't, though. Jurassic Park was and that was even worse.

long story short
Declining quality and same old song and dance fomula

I was happy with season 1, wau, and tales, and didn't find the faults to be all that distracting. This was entirely because the characters were good enough that I wanted to see what happened to them, but the later seasons of walking dead and the game of thrones game just had no particularly interesting characters. Plus that contrived as fuck conflict at the end of season 2 has put me off enough to not buy season 3 yet, is it worth it?

I really like Wolf Among Us desu, but that was my first exposure to the Fables universe

this, Walking Dead s1 might be my favorite game of theirs, but Tales from Monkey Island and S&M Devil Toybox were both excellent, they should really get back to that.

This and ignoring The Wolf Among Us

When was it right. Their games are all feel no substance, feely scene after feely scene after feely scene. Absolutely nothing else to their stuff.

They've become the Funko Pop in the game industry: it's obvious to everyone on the outside looking in that they're cheap cash-ins for nostalgia and may have some merit in the short run of their release but are quickly filling up shelves and STAYING there (IE: in this case, way too many licensed projects that all look and act the same way).

Those that love them already don't see what their flaws are to those that say that you can find better things of the exact same thing elsewhere (in this case, Life is Strange for one example)

The problem with TWAU is the comic it was based on ended. Not to mention it fucking sucked

TWAU was set decades before the comic, they could have continued doing their own thing with plenty of breathing room.

I can't wait for Funko Pops to crash like Beanie Babies

Not really comparable, there aren't any Funko Pops which go for thousands of dollars.

>Medic from TF2
>Bigby from TWAU
>Rick from Reddit and Memey
>maybe Rhys from Borderlands

What makes Rick and Morty a "Reddit" show?

Why are all their games buggy as fuck? I can't believe programming these kind of games is that difficult.

They took the progression of game design a little too far and filtered all actions down into "Interact" starting with Walking Dead, resulting in very little necessary thought for any adventuring.

Choices not mattering killed all hope for them
>playing TWD season 2
>look up guide when I was not sure about how to save a character I really liked
>no way to save him
no way to save any of them except the two that live no matter what
Fucking bullshit

The Fables comic fucking sucks and I have absolutely no idea why people love it. It's literally, and I say that without hyperbole, LITERALLY one of the worst comics I've ever read in my life and the prime example for how bad the whole "edgy fairy tale reimagining" can get if you don't have a good writer to sort it out.

Call TWAU whatever you want, but at least it stayed grounded by taking itself seriously instead of breaking the tone every five seconds to make shitty jokes about Pinocchio unable to get laid or Goldilocks taking Baby Bear's dick. Telltale fucked up by trying to tie it to the comic's canon to the letter instead of establishing it as its own separate universe like they're doing with the Guardians of the Galaxy game. Maybe then we'd get a sequel because they'd be able to try new things instead of staying shackled to the source material.

like all choices games nothing you do matters

7 days to Die is pretty fucking good.

The Fables comic was okay up until he knocked up Snow and she had a ghost baby. The concept was very neat, at least.

They captured lightning in a bottle with TWDs1 and have been riding off it ever since, at the cost of creativity.

And they got too popular for their own good. Before, Telltale would take on projects just for the passion of it; the Strong Bad game, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park are examples of this. Now it's obvious that the licenses they pick games to make out of are clearly just meant to be glorified commercials for the companies they belong to. Why else would we have Guardians of the Galaxy and Game of Thrones?

The first few arcs were pretty good, and the first arc was really good. After that tough it quickly went to complete and total shit, yes.

Sam and Max and the homestarrunner games were a lot of fun. The Walking Dead was okay for what it was, then I stopped buying Telltale stuff because they kept making games of franchises that don't interest me at all. From what I can tell I made a good decision. Why would I want to play a Borderlands or Game of Thrones visual novel? Mind-boggling, clearly an attempt to draw in a certain crowd that I'm not a part of.

To be fair their Borderlands game is pretty fucking good. I really enjoyed it and I hate the Borderland games.

That was the point I stopped reading. I couldn't take it anymore.

The concept itself IS interesting, but the guy who writes it can't world build for shit, and even when I was playing the game I was wondering why the Fables even stay in New York City when they can go just about anywhere or why they don't just live upstate if they don't want to be bothered by humans. Why don't they just turn the Farm into Fabletown, that way they never have to worry about being found or being glamoured?

Also,

>obsess over keeping a low profile and hiding the fact that they're magical beings
>willing to murder a fucking reporter just to stay hidden
>willing to punish their own by banishment or worse if they don't adhere to their rules on being hidden
>still name their fucking town Fabletown, like that's not going to raise any questions

And that's just off the top of my head.

I can't help but think that a Borderlands Telltale game would be the humor of Borderlands 2 with the gameplay of The Walking Dead. Plus Borderlands never had an interesting story or concept or world to begin with, so even if the story was written by not Gearbox, I'm skeptical on how it can be any good at all.

It doesn't have Borderlands 2 humor at all, which is why it works.

I always hear people say this. What exactly about the first half was good? Was it how Snow White gets knocked up by the Big Bad Wolf and has literal flying dog babies? Was it the romance that has absolutely no build up and relies on an actual deus ex machina magic spell to work? Was it the weird attempts at trying to blend so many different genres together like satire and parody and some epic dark war drama and urban fantasy to appeal to all these different audiences at once?

And before anyone shoots me down for this, I really, really tried to like this comic because I adored TWAU, which is one of my favorite games of all time, flaws and all. I love shit like Sandman and think White Wolf's urban fantasy tabletop games are amazing. But all Fables felt like to me was the comic equivalent of some guy going "Dude, what if, like, Snow White was a bitch and Prince Charming was an asshole and, like, Goldilocks was into bestiality and shit? What if fairy tales were MATURE?"

I didn't say the entire first half was good, I said first few arcs were. Snow White and Bigby having babies was the beginning of the long downward nosedive into the trashheap.

>your choices don't matter and characters you save will die no matter what
>went from making stories based on cult IPs to doing whatever normiecore shit will give them the most money
>takes on so many projects at once and can't balance any of them so the quality suffers
>TWD is still chugging along despite getting progressively worse with each season
>TWAU still doesn't have a sequel
>but Minecraft, Batman, GoT and Marvelshit all get games

Was anyone really surprised it would get like this?

Abandoned the vita

Anyone else think the third season of Sam and Max was absolutely terrible compared to the first two seasons?

>get rid of puzzles and shit as time go on
>replace them with combat qtes
>not even entertaining ones, literally just mash button

I kinda like New Frontier, desu. It has almost zero gameplay, but I really dig the story and dig playing as Latin Thunder.

They also helped make it obvious by flat out saying that multiple endings just can't work.