You Tell Too Much

Adapting their work from movies, comic books, TV shows and even other games, it's interesting to see how many stones Telltale Games won't leave unturned. Telltale was still a smooth running machine years back when they released Jurassic Park and Back to the Future but it wasn't until their interpretation of The Walking Dead in 2012 when the machine went into maximum overdrive. Now we've got the developer working on all sorts of projects in a manner that both draws my interest and raises some red flags. It's great that they want to try their hand at so many franchises but there's a point where you can spread yourself too thin. Assassin's Creed has fallen prey to this overeager marketing strategy and have found themselves shooting out constant yearly releases.

That's all well and good but how much is too much? Surely this could be solved by splitting the labour fairly amongst the developer so each project gets a fair amount of development. Again, like Assassin's Creed, these games will probably all be well and functional but it's still entirely possible to suffer "Telltale Burnout". A lot of the Assassin's Creed games aren't that bad but there's just so many of them. Look at Lego and their excitement to stick their fingers in all the pies. (Although if Lego want to make their own Game of Thrones video game I would totally be up for that.)

I am intrigued but proceeding with caution. Am I buying the first episodes of Game of Thrones and Tales From the Borderlands when I get the chance? Of course, so Telltale have already done their bit selling me on this. When we play so many of these games though, it's easy to grow tired of the typical Telltale issues such as awkward choices and sticky action sequences. Perhaps like platformers, military shooters and music rhythm games, the genre of interactive story drama will become the new popular thing to sell (which isn't a particularly bad idea). It'd be nice to see some competition against Telltale actually - before anyone mentions David Cage, I meant "good" interactive story dramas.