Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series is starting its final season today. The latest installment is Telltale’s most ambitious game yet, building upon and expanding their storytelling approach with segments of unscripted combat, a new player-controlled orbital camera, and a slightly more open structure.
When Telltale debuted their first The Walking Dead game in 2012, it was met with enormous critical success, garnering numerous “Game of the Year” awards from various publications such as USA Today, GamesRadar, and Complex. It put Telltale Games on the map and rejuvenated the adventure game genre.
Since the release of the first season of The Walking Dead, Telltale has worked with other major franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones, and Batman. Each game has been released to critical acclaim, demonstrating a consistent claim to quality and proving that there are still sizable audiences for narrative-heavy adventure games. So why, you may ask, change it up now?
For one thing, The Walking Dead’s leading protagonist, Clementine, is a character that has seen quite a few changes of her own. When players met Clementine in season one, she was a frightened little girl who had been separated from her parents. When players left her in season three, she was a teenager who had remained resilient through her own fair share of loss, experienced enough in the skills of survival to even take on the responsibility of another orphaned child, AJ.
According to Chris Rebbert, The Final Season’s season director, many of the major changes made to The Final Season were implemented as ways of allowing the player to feel more immersed in Clementine’s story. “We wanted to align Clem the character with Clem the player,” he explained. “We wanted to give the player more opportunities to explore her environment the way she would.”
For instance, one of the most striking differences between this season and previous installments of The Walking Dead is the introduction of open-ended combat sequences. Unlike previous seasons of The Walking Dead in which action was mostly limited to simple, timed button presses during scripted encounters, The Final Season contains scenes in which Clem is given more of a choice about where and how to strike a walker. These encounters also might happen more randomly depending on how players choose to navigate the space.
“We thought that free-form, open-ended combat sequences were essential to making it feel more like there are walkers all over the place,” Rebbert said. “You can be attacked at any time, and that's a big part of the world that Clem lives in — you're vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.” This is especially palpable as players are given a bit more freedom in navigating the game world, which feels even richer and more explorable with the addition of a 360-degree orbital camera.
That being said, the game will still feature a few of the on-rails, adrenaline-inducing cinematic sequences that have served as a hallmark of Telltale’s extensive oeuvre. “We don't want to feel like we're abandoning something that we were good at or that fans appreciated,” Rebbert said. “We're just trying to blend that sense of gameplay and immersion into the game’s narrative cinematic sequences.”
As Clementine’s story comes to a close at the end of this season, Telltale is parting with a character that they have watched mature over several years. “It's been emotional, to say the least,” Rebbert said.
Though Rebbert wasn’t present at Telltale during The Walking Dead’s first two seasons, he understands the gravity of saying goodbye to a character that is so important to the studio. “We just want to make sure we do right by her and not take her in directions that we don't feel are organic to her character,” he said. “We're rooting for her, and we care about her and want to make sure that we service her story the best way.”