Telltale plans 'The Walking Dead: Season 3' for a 2016 premiere
WARNING: If you haven't played the first two seasons of Telltale's Walking Dead series, there are spoilers ahead.
Did your Clementine honor Kenny's wishes and settle down in Wellington? Or did she end up back at Howe's Hardware 0r cover herself and Alvin Jr. with zombie guts before strolling through a zombie horde?
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Either way, she may be back for more in Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season 3 later this year.
The Walking Dead: Season 2 felt as final as any Telltale game ever has. It capped off Clementine's story in a way that provided closure, but also featured a stunning diversity of possible endings.
There are so many branching possibilities in those final minutes of Season 2 that it's hard to imagine Season 3 picking up where the story left off. Which thread would it choose? Selecting just one to exist as "canon" would rob the other choices of their meaning, and that's not what Telltale is about.
"It is not from the bag of tricks that we've ever shown anybody before."
"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," Telltale Games CEO Kevin Bruner told Mashable.
Season 3 will take an "unexpected" approach, according to Bruner. Lots of people in the fan community are expecting something that neatly ties together all the possible threads, but Bruner promised that it won't be nearly so obvious.
"From a role-playing, interactive storytelling point of view, it is not from the bag of tricks that we've ever shown anybody before," he said.
"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."
The goal for Telltale with Season 3 is to bring in a wider swath of fans. People that love The Walking Dead may not be invested in two previous seasons of the video game, and Bruner hopes to welcome them in.
The challenge lies in figuring out how to do that.
"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, honors and facilitates all of the various end points that Season 2 had."
Carrying your earlier progress forward is another matter entirely. The first two seasons of The Walking Dead pre-date a lot of the work Telltale has done -- and continues to do -- to rope all-important player choices and saves into the cloud.
"We've got a strategy to help Season 3 players ... collect all their data from the previous games. [W]e didn't have the cloud services in Season 1 that we have now," Bruner said. "So we're going to have a solution for everybody that we're not talking about it yet."
Expect to hear more about The Walking Dead: Season 3 around Comic-Con International this summer, with a premiere to follow later in 2016.
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Topics Comics Gaming The Walking Dead
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.
