Telltale Troubles

[Henke]

I figure many here might be interested in this Verge article: Toxic Management Cost An Award-Winning Game Studio Its Best Developers

 

It's about conflicts between the creatives and the higher-ups at Telltale, but it also takes the time to heap some praise on Vanaman and Rodkin for their success with TWD.

 

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Internally, multiple sources pointed to a specific locus for the success of The Walking Dead: lead developers Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. Vanaman wrote several of the game’s episodic chapters, and Vanaman and Rodkin directed the first chapter and guided the overall first season together. If Telltale’s financial woes had one positive creative impact on The Walking Dead, it’s that the poor reception for Jurassic Park meant the studio had little time to slow or halt development. The game had to come out, which gave the Walking Dead creative team leverage to ignore or skirt around feedback from upper management that they vehemently disagreed with. Rodkin and Vanaman developed a reputation as personalities strong enough to challenge the founders on creative decisions, and pushed over and over again to create the game the way that they wanted, says a source familiar with the project. “They won, and it ended up being this huge success.”

 

And how that success set the template for every subsequent Telltale game:

 

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“They just wanted to put butts in seats,” one former employee says. “The folks at the very top never really understood what made Walking Dead work. They were given a recipe book, and they just followed the recipe because they don’t really understand why the recipe tastes good.”

 

After The Walking Dead, to describe one Telltale game was to describe all of them: an episodic adventure game that unfolded across sequentially released episodes, where players make difficult choices with emotional consequences. This became the creative mold at Telltale, where former employees say every new game was — to some degree — trying to recapture the spark of The Walking Dead. “Every game was held up to that standard, regardless of how realistic that was,” one source says.

 

[Vainamoinen]

I'm discussing this article in some other forums (while trying to keep out of the actual Telltale forum thread – I still have that moderator badge there), and it really only gives shape to what we've suspected for many, many years.

 

It would have been wrong for Telltale to continue making traditional point & click adventure games (sadly!!), but it's no less wrong for Telltale trying to make The Walking Dead into a success recipe that tastes more stale with every new batch. It's either formulaic or innovative, not both at the same time. Innovation was what drove Telltale forward, and it hasn't really shown innovation in years, all the while churning out new games and making employees insane.

 

Back when Telltale cut down on traditional p&c mechanics, it was seen as merely reductive by the fanbase, and that was an incorrect assessment. The Walking Dead pushed the limits of what a heap of 'life and death' choices mostly without any kind of relevant consequence could achieve. In my opinion, the game laid bare like no game before how strictly linear a supposedly interactive story really is. And form followed function: You were in (the very same) deep shit whatever you chose, which perfectly illustrated the desperate scenario of The Walking Dead. I surprisingly liked The Walking Dead, but I think that its form practically forbid another Season. The Walking Dead debunked its own game mechanics in crystal clear terms. In what world could a game company have made a formula out of that?

 

Sean & Jake have repeated their success with Firewatch, and they did it without relying on a previously established IP,  without a formula. I hope they can repeat that success a third time. And maybe even inspire their old employer in that respect.

 

[Henke]

18 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

It would have been wrong for Telltale to continue making traditional point & click adventure games (sadly!!), but it's no less wrong for Telltale trying to make The Walking Dead into a success recipe that tastes more stale with every new batch.

 

Yeah, tho I think initially it worked well. I did like Wolf Among Us and TWD S2, but GoT and Batman left me cold. I'm glad to see that they might finally be able to break out of the mold and innovate a bit.

[Roderick]

3 hours ago, Henke said:

Batman left me cold.

 

 

What an article though. It is invariably saddening to hear how studios are mismanaged and collapse. The Games Industry, ladies and gentlemen. On the other hand, if this pushes the most creative people into the indie sphere to make truly interesting things... we all benefit in the end.

[Henke]

That's aN ICE picture!

[Merus]

What's interesting to me that what I consider their strongest post-TWD game, Tales from the Borderlands, was also the one that was seen as a dead end by the studio and thus didn't have a lot of meddling. It probably could have pushed the game mechanics a lot further, but the writing was sharp and they clearly believed in the project.

 

My feeling is that the LucasArts style adventure games died for a reason: the constraints on the mechanics meant that the only thing you could make with them were comedies, and when you didn't make a comedy, you end up with tonally weird games like Full Throttle that shoehorn in action sequences because the story needs a raise in stakes and you're not allowed to punish the player. Telltale knew they were a creative dead-end (not to disparage Thimbleweed Park, but it makes very specific creative choices to keep the formula relevant for one more game). The Walking Dead was a reinvention, but like you said it's a reinvention that is thematically appropriate only for a game as nihilistic as the property. While there are other games that can work with that approach - Game of Thrones, as a tragedy, probably could have, and Borderlands mines nihilism for comedy with a thin veneer of inclusion - being locked into making tragedies isn't really any better than being locked into making comedies. Probably worse, actually, because audiences don't have as much of a taste for tragedy.

 

It seems like there's two directions to go in terms of evolving the adventure game. The first is developing better ways of handling interaction; the standard for verisimilitude is way higher than it was in the 90s, but the tools we have are a lot better. Games like Scribblenauts have thousands of nouns that can interact with each other (handwaving that the behaviour was all hand-authored) but in a smaller possibility space you probably could feasibly use the toothpaste on the cat and get a reaction that wasn't 'I can't use those two things together'. We've seen fairly sophisticated attempts to model deduction and contradiction in games since then. Games like Her Story and The Shivah use text parsing, simulating a search engine, to check if a player actually is making an informed inquiry and isn't just randomly guessing.

 

The second is handling narrative better. I'm enamoured with the system Failbetter Games uses for narrative in Fallen London and Sunless Sea, despite the game design deficiencies, because, with careful writing, they're able to create beautifully textured narrative beats delivered in a unique order to each player, without needing to violate the game fiction to allow players interactivity. The secret is that they explicitly write their fragments as being moments surrounded by everything else you're doing, even if it's driving your boat in a circle for 15 minutes, and use game mechanics to sequence them. This makes it much more feasible for them to offer choices that would split the narrative in half, because they've optimised their model so that these kinds of choices are as cheap as possible. (They also work entirely in text, but other than pronoun or title swapping, you probably could record the game.)

[Ben X]

EDIT: actually, my reading comprehension failed me here, never mind

[Vainamoinen]

On 28/03/2018 at 1:47 PM, Merus said:

It seems like there's two directions to go in terms of evolving the adventure game. The first is developing better ways of handling interaction; the standard for verisimilitude is way higher than it was in the 90s, but the tools we have are a lot better. Games like Scribblenauts have thousands of nouns that can interact with each other (handwaving that the behaviour was all hand-authored) but in a smaller possibility space you probably could feasibly use the toothpaste on the cat and get a reaction that wasn't 'I can't use those two things together'. We've seen fairly sophisticated attempts to model deduction and contradiction in games since then. Games like Her Story and The Shivah use text parsing, simulating a search engine, to check if a player actually is making an informed inquiry and isn't just randomly guessing.

 

The second is handling narrative better. I'm enamoured with the system Failbetter Games uses for narrative in Fallen London and Sunless Sea, despite the game design deficiencies, because, with careful writing, they're able to create beautifully textured narrative beats delivered in a unique order to each player, without needing to violate the game fiction to allow players interactivity. The secret is that they explicitly write their fragments as being moments surrounded by everything else you're doing, even if it's driving your boat in a circle for 15 minutes, and use game mechanics to sequence them. This makes it much more feasible for them to offer choices that would split the narrative in half, because they've optimised their model so that these kinds of choices are as cheap as possible. (They also work entirely in text, but other than pronoun or title swapping, you probably could record the game.)

 

"Serious" P&C adventure games have been made, some where even great, but the point is well taken. "Interactive joke generators" was what Jake – possibly frustrated by a community that just refused to follow that strain of thought – called them in a discussion on the Telltale forums back in 2011 or 2012, if I remember correctly. The game mechanics i.e. genre conventions are strictly speaking not more or less absurd than in other genres, it may just be that the stronger storytelling focus makes the ludonarrative dissonance all the more apparent. Increasingly, the stories were too good to be 'interrupted' by item/inventory based puzzles, and the designers that attempted to create puzzles that "fit" the scenario and story usually ended up making repetitive, crazy boring and totally unambitious games (like King Art's "The Raven").

 

I weep for the P&C of course, I love it dearly, and since Daedalic has announced that they've buried my one great hope for a modern, technically advanced, graphically stunning and shamelessly gameplay focused P&C adventure game: The Devil's Men.

 

The "simulated search engine" has been done to death in the Blackwell series, and I never understood the appeal really. I'm googling in real life all the time, why do I need a google simulator in my games? That's not the way those games evolve for me, sadly. I also don't see much hope in interactive storylines. As soon as they get ambitious, neither the journey nor end of the story seem to matter any more. I love choices in games, but to me they only seem to work if they're a total sidenote, accompanying and complementing a strictly linear story with a generally rather different gameplay.

 

 

[Merus]

17 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

The game mechanics i.e. genre conventions are strictly speaking not more or less absurd than in other genres, it may just be that the stronger storytelling focus makes the ludonarrative dissonance all the more apparent. Increasingly, the stories were too good to be 'interrupted' by item/inventory based puzzles, and the designers that attempted to create puzzles that "fit" the scenario and story usually ended up making repetitive, crazy boring and totally unambitious games (like King Art's "The Raven").

 

100% agreed here.

 

17 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

The "simulated search engine" has been done to death in the Blackwell series, and I never understood the appeal really. I'm googling in real life all the time, why do I need a google simulator in my games?

 

Same reason why Her Story does it: so you can have a puzzle where you have to infer a solution where your clues never actually represent that solution, something that no-one's been able to do successfully with a inventory, but is trivial with a parser. Imagine if Her Story's key puzzle was in a traditional inventory-based game. Would each interview be an inventory item? Would you combine them to demonstrate you realised the big secret? Players would just be combining everything until they got a new result.

 

Ace Attorney does have an inventory, but its cross-examination system doesn't let you combine inventory items, only inventory items (evidence) with statements, and there's a cost to doing so that would disgust Ron Gilbert. Even then, because of the linearity of the games, it doesn't support situations where you realise a piece of evidence is flawed and that flaw is relevant, but the story isn't quite ready for that piece of evidence to come up. (I think this is an obvious place for people to take the Ace Attorney system further, by finding smart places to branch. You'd need to allow for the story to be a bit more about courtroom strategy to make up for it; it'd be very difficult to actually write a branching court battle where the player can always win by spotting every contradiction, but it'd be a lot easier if writers had the room to say 'if you expose this lie while it's a minor point, the prosecution quickly adjusts their case and you'll lose. If you contradict this witness some other way, the prosecutors will have to rely on this lie more'.

[sclpls]

I think Telltale is a perfectly cautionary story about the sort of Faustian bargain that happens when a company takes VC money to succeed.