If you were worried Telltale Games had put The Walking Dead Season 3 on hold in favor of spinoffs and other, unrelated projects, worry not – the studio is still very committed to giving fans of the interactive story game a follow-up to 2013’s Season 2.
Confirming the news to Mashable in an interview, Telltale Games CEO Kevin Bruner also goes into great detail about some of the changes fans can expect to see when Season 3 begins, including placing more emphasis on “validating” the many different outcomes that can arise in the narrative due to the multiple choices given to the player on how to proceed through each episode.
Note: Bruner doesn’t mention any specific story events in either season, but there may be minor spoilers below.
On the subject of how Season 2 panned out and how the team plan to upend player expectation for Season 3, Bruner said:
When we got to Season 2, we had a plan in the back of our minds of how we would make all these endings keep those threads going forward. From a role-playing, interactive storytelling point of view, it is not from the bag of tricks that we’ve ever shown anybody before. The way that we’re dealing with and validating and retaining all those different playthroughs is really cool and unexpected and, I think, pretty innovative from the storytelling point of view.
Bruner also briefly mentions some form of “strategy” to help players collate all of their playthrough data from previous Seasons, but says more news on the system will be revealed at a later date.
However, he does state his desire to make Season 3 – who perhaps haven’t played either of the series’ previous seasons – more accessible, while also stressing the importance of respecting those who have been with the story since the very first episode.
How do we go back and make sure all Walking Dead fans can get in while still keeping all of our storylines going? I think where we’re landing with the story for Season 3 does a really good job of both of those things. It allows people who maybe haven’t people who maybe haven’t played [the first two seasons] to come in and get up to speed really quickly. But it definitely respects, honours and facilitates all of the various end points that Season 2 had.
The first episode of The Walking Dead Season 3 will be available at some point in 2016, but Telltale are yet to say whether previous characters will be returning, or if we’ll be introduced to a whole new cast of characters. We definitely can’t imagine Clementine being left out, she’s become far too popular to be excluded, but what are you expecting to see? Let us know what your hopes for Season 3 are in the comments below.
