I am trying to play “Game of Thrones – A Telltale Games Series,” but it is a visual novel with quicktime events. If there are two things I have never enjoyed in gaming: visual novels and quicktime events. I am led to believe that all the popular Telltale Games games are basically this same thing, plus or minus some quality, thematics, and how much your choices affect the game.
Is this wrong? They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves and getting popular IP. What do you like about these games?
: Zubon
Telltale Games’ games very much stand on the quality of their stories – their theme, the atmosphere the aesthetics evoke, their characters, and what the (illusion of) choices you select say about you and the protagonist that you’ve decided to create.
I hedge with illusion of choice because most of their games I’ve played do not actually significantly shift plot as much as say, other interactive fiction or other branching story games. But Telltale Games’ stuff has a style of their own, they’re pretty good at following the theme of whatever IP they’ve picked, with some pluses and minuses here and there.
Walking Dead is very dreary, hopeless, no-win choices as befits a world overrun by zombies. Game of Thrones, I hear, but have never played is pretty similar as befits the IP – brutal, violent, bad things happening left and right in a land of squabbling kingdoms.
The two that most people seem to like/enjoy are A Wolf Among Us (the urban fantastical Fables universe lends itself to a bit of fairy tale drama, it’s a blend of magic and detective noir and very stylistically sexy) and Tales from the Borderlands (a very jovial comedy replete with Borderlands style humor.)
Never played them. I think Visual Novels and Interactive Fiction are incredibly underexploited forms, though. They may not be to your taste but they seem to me to have the potential to appeal to an audience larger than that of games, movies or books individually.
Perhaps the technology isn’t quite where it needs to be or, more likely, the form doesn’t attract the best writers yet and hasn’t had time to develop its own superstars. Come back in 30-50 years though and it may well be the primary storytelling mode in the culture.
I like the visual novels and QuickTime events. :)
I’ve played a few – the first walking dead one was great, same with the Wolf Among Us – but didn’t enjoy TWD follow ups as much.
Most games lack story and the ability to impact it in ant meaningful way, which is why I think these games have an opportunity to be a niche success.
PS – I was lying about the QT events – but believe they are there as a time filler / pace-change mechanic.
Not a fan. Their games are more like visual novels. This is fine but I do not want QTE as part of that experience. It seems like an amateurish attempt to shoehorn gameplay elements so it can be called a game. At best the QTE events disrupt the flow of the story. Their games just come across as watered down experiences of the old school PC adventure games with any gameplay elements stripped from them and QTE as a lazy substitute. I also have yet to see any original content from them which leads me to believe they don’t really have the capability to innovate in the visual novel space.
Telltale games i play mostly for the story. I also play narrative games like these only once. This is the MY story then. This also preserves some of the choice concept since i never find out what the other choices do.
That said. I have to say DontNod and Deck Nine with the two Life is Strange games ruined the Telltale formula for me. These two games are just way ahead in every sense. I have yet to play the second episode of Before the Storm because the ending of the first episode was so powerful i fear they will ruin it afterwards :)
But then i like narrative games a lot. To the Moon is still one of my favorite games of all time.