How Telltale Games is taking steps to fix its creaky, old engine
Telltale's episodic adventures kind of suck sometimes.
The stories aren't the problem. Telltale Games has an ever-growing stable of storytellers and story facilitators. It's constantly improving and redefining the notion of how player choice can influence a story.
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The problem is the tech powering those stories. It's old. It's been stretched to run on the stunning range of hardware that still supports new Telltale releases. The cracks are easy to spot, and they've been showing for a long time.
"There's been a really long effort to upgrade most of the engine," Telltale CEO Kevin Bruner told Mashable.
"There's been a really long effort to upgrade most of the engine."
In video games, "engine" refers to the software developers use to assemble a game; Unreal and Unity are two of the more popular ones. Telltale, however, has a custom-built engine that's been in use for more than a decade.
Around 150 people have joined the studio over the past year, and many of them are committed to upgrading the tech. But what does that mean for you, the player?
"We've done a lot of work on non-photorealistic rendering, which is like comic book-style rendering," Bruner said. "So we're going to see [the upcoming Batman series] with a much more evolved, higher end graphical look."
With the upgraded engine, Telltale's art directors have more of a free hand in creating "painterly" interactive scenes. Bruner points back to The Wolf Among Us as a comparison, promising that Batman will be "highly evolved from that."
For most games, improving the underlying engine often means new features and new ways to play. But Telltale's products are fundamentally the same in terms of gameplay. Here, story is the key differentiating factor.
"From a design point of view, Telltale in general is really interested in expanding role-playing and making better stories and making choice matter more. Increasing the agency in the game," Bruner said.
"Most of our energy is spent on figuring out how to make the storytelling richer and more customized to each user."
Evolving the stories and the role-playing is something Telltale's been working at all along, well before the engine updates began in earnest. The Walking Dead: Season 1 set the studio on a certain path, but it was also just another step in the process.
"Telltale is really interested in expanding role-playing and making better stories."
Earlier Telltale games were cut from the mold of classic LucasArts adventures, like the Monkey Island games. They placed equal focus on story and puzzle-solving.
Walking Deadstruck out in a different direction, emphasizing player choice above all.
The various series Telltale has worked on since then carried that idea forward, prodding it in different directions. We might not know what Batman or The Walking Dead: Season 3 will look like, but there's a loose roadmap of sorts leading up to this point.
The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us were singular character stories. They were locked into one person's perspective. Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands both stretched that idea to include a larger "starring" -- i.e. playable -- cast.
"That was a very tricky thing to figure out, how [we could] tell stories from multiple perspectives," Bruner said. He then pointed to the Borderlands finale as a notable achievement in that regard.
For those that are unfamiliar (light spoiler alert), Tales from the Borderlands ends with a significant showdown between the story's big villain and the large assortment of characters that come to join your group over the previous four episodes.
What's neat about that sequence is the way the game drops all pretense of you controlling one character over another. Everyone is in on the fight, so everyone's perspective matters.
"You have complete control over the game," Bruner said of the Borderlands finale. "Everything that comes out of the screen [happens] because you have it come out of the screen."
What all of this means for Batman, The Walking Dead: Season 3 and beyond is unclear. But when you step back and look at the progression of Telltale's games from a macro perspective, patterns emerge.
"When I look back at all the games that we've been doing, there's little pockets of experiments that have been going on, and those get rolled forward into our new games," Bruner said.
"The refining of role-playing is a really iterative process, and it really is just getting better at the craft of interactive storytelling."
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Topics Gaming
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
