Telltale Discuss the Future of The Walking Dead – TV Crossover A Possibility?

Up until now, Telltale Games’ take on The Walking Dead has only loosely tied into the series of comics, with characters Glenn and Hershel appearing in the first episode before the story went along its own path.

That’s absolutely fine – there’s plenty of stories in the walker-infested world of The Walking Dead to tell and to pretend that the whole Universe revolves around Rick and co. would be absurd. Of course, how your Season Two of The Walking Dead Game plays out will depend on where your characters were left at the end of the first season – the choices should carry over.

Dan Connors – Telltale’s CEO – speaking to Polygon, has said that at the moment they’re “working on it and trying to figure out how to continue the story,” and “That’s the main point. From there everything else will make sense.”

Although he went on to say that “Anything is possible,” they’re still talking through different scenarios, though he doesn’t “think we’ve talked through one where we just start with a new set of characters.” So that’s good news – depending on how your playthrough of the first season went, you should still be seeing returning characters.

Connors continues by saying that a “huge goal” is keeping people interested, even between episodes – which is something that he admires the TV show for, as well as their own efforts with the game.

You have to make a piece of content that is so compelling that people are waiting for it to arrive. That was the beauty of The Walking Dead game — when an episode arrived people put down what they were doing and played it. That was very powerful. That required a very strong execution.

He wants to keep people engaged and talking between episodes, too. Having people “engaged and talking” is very important for Telltale’s vision. There might even be some sort of crossover with the television show – “There’s nothing saying our characters couldn’t cross over with their characters at some point in the timeline,” Connors said, ending with “It’s a very interesting concept for us.”

I have absolute trust in Telltale – they really care about the series and it doesn’t look like they’ll go as far as The Walking Dead FPS game Survival Instinct if they decide to tie Season Two into the TV series – hopefully it’ll retain the quality of the first season.

Dan Connors also held a speech at the 2013 DICE Summit, which amounted to twenty minutes of extremely spoiler-filled but very interesting discussion of the game and it’s episodic delivery. You can see that in the video below.

Source: Polygon

4 Comments

  1. I didn’t pick up at all, that it was Glenn and Hershel from the TV series. Quite like that tie-in, would have liked it a lot more if I’d actually picked up on it.

    • It was their comic incarnations, rather than the TV versions, though they’re much the same.

  2. It would hold a lot of advantages like enhancing personal relationship and and being self referential. The problem I see is that of linearity and also the fact that I don’t want to recognise characters from somewhere else as much as I would rather explore new characters for myself and become attached/pissed off to their attitudes and mannerisms.

  3. Much as I enjoyed the walking dead, I was one of the many who had a broken save file so the final episode was a bit disjointed from the others, but I did appreciate what they were trying to do. I will definitely buy into the second series (although, I may wait until its finished and play in one go to avoid a repeat of the save corruption), but I don’t think they should tie into the TV series at all. Both mediums stand well enough on their own, crossing them serves nothing for me and risks cheapening them both.

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