From The Wolf Among Us to the recent launch of Batman: The Telltale Series, developer Telltale Games has carved out a remarkably successful gameplay format that has injected a new lease of life into the point-and-click adventure genre.
Following the launch of Realm of Shadows and with The Walking Dead season 3 set to premiere before the year’s out, Telltale’s Head of Creative Communications Job Stauffer spoke with GameSpot during Gamescom regarding the developer’s seemingly unyielding template – and why it isn’t set to change anytime soon.
Presiding over a number of high-profile IP, Stauffer believes it is this tried-and-tested framework that allows Telltale to push the envelope with narrative storytelling across its episodic series.
The familiar framework and format is intentional. It is fully our intention to develop a way of interacting with stories that is common between everything we’re doing. Batman, Walking Dead, Minecraft, there are younger audiences now learning how to play a Telltale game micro-story mode and moving on to things like Batman. They’re coming of age in the other franchises. We talk about this from time to time, but looking at what we do, that format that we developed has allowed us to become a multi-genre studio. When we think about the games that we’re making, we don’t think of them as adventure games. For the games industry it always has to find games better mechanics. For racing games, RPGs, fighting games, it’s common and easy for the games industry to put games into pocket space and how we’re interacting.
Batman: The Telltale Series made its premiere earlier this month with Realm of Shadows (our review), while Telltale is teasing the arrival of The Walking Dead season 3 before the year’s end.
