The Walking Dead Season 2 Is Coming, But What Can it Do … · The Walking Dead Season 2 Is Coming,...

The Walking Dead Season 2 Is Coming, But What Can it Do To Be Better Than the First?

Written by Christopher GrouxThursday, 28 March 2013 11:36 - Last Updated Thursday, 28 March 2013 11:37

Keep Telling the Story

A massive part of the lore that will surround The Walking Dead The Game for years to come isits excellent use of story and characters. There are plenty of videos on YouTube with playersopenly weeping at the game's sad ending. When reactions like that happen by a gamer's ownfree will, we would all have to agree that as players there is a real strong sense of connectionthere. That being said, it would be a real shame to see the developer take the sort of risky leapand ditch the plot that we loved so much from the first batch of episodes.

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In an attempt to give away as few spoilers as possible, there also needs to be a continuing storygiven the last bit of footage we see after the game credits roll. There are a small amount ofsurvivors left in our group, and some of our focal characters become separated from the rest.Clementine does see some strangers in the distance, but who are they? Is it Omid and Christaor someone else entirely? Will Clem be able to actually survive in the kind of environment she'sin? These are just a few of the major questions we are left with at the end of season one. Sincethere is no real way to resolve them that well on our own, we need to see what happens byletting that plot continue on. Even if new group members come into play, we need to see howthat process unfolds. There are plenty of ways to breathe new life in while keeping the sameplot in tact. I'm hoping Telltale is smart enough to agree.

As much as we loved season one, there's a lot to be said about its lack of difficulty. I'll addressthat point on the next page!

Kick the Difficulty Up a Notch

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Because The Walking Dead had such an incredible story to tell, there were plenty of aspectsabout the game that players and critics alike were willing to forgive. One of these was of coursethe very easy default difficulty for the title. Even though I am a writer here, I confess that I maynot be the best game player in the universe. That is why I was so shocked that I was able to flythrough this one as quickly as I did. Point and click games can have a tendency to be easybecause you don't have to actually perform the key actions. However in this case manydevelopers offset that by adding in difficult puzzles to solve. Other than a few small stumpmoments that never really happened with The Walking Dead.

As a true believer in their vision, I kind of understand that the ease in play was probably more oftheir choice to put the story at the forefront of the experience. I still think that should be the casewith season two, but there's a decent chance that you could still make that happen even if you

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added a few more difficult sequences throughout the series. I don't want to be bogged down byany stretch, but a little challenge never hurt. After all, if you do have trouble there's always thesimple option of letting YouTube show you how it's done. I suppose turning off the object hintgoes a long way in changing the game as well, but I personally liked having those turned on.Regardless, I think the game could stand to be a bit more challenging.

Another aspect keeping season one from sheer perfection status was the lack of polish. Myresponse to that is just one click away!

Fix All the Glitches

In many ways, The Walking Dead season one was almost a true gaming masterpiece. Otherthan the possibly easy difficulty, one of the biggest things that put a slump in the experiencewas all of the little glitches you would have to deal with while playing. When you were switching

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from scene to scene or there was a decent amount of action going on there would be plenty oftimes where the music would loop or the speech would not line up with the way the charactersmouths were moving. I don't mean to be a stickler here and I understand that it's hard to publisha game, but when you've done so well to make an incredible base product, there has got ti be alittle more attention paid to ironing out all the little kinks involved.

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Part of the reason many folks forgave Telltale this time around is that the entire season woundup being something of a surprise hit. Sure the team had been making titles for quite some time,but almost all of them fell victims to mediocre ratings. In part this has historically been due to alack of polish in presentation, but that is a trend that needs to be taken care of. It's taken a longtime, but now we see these guys as a bunch of true industry innovators. Now it's time to take allthat extra cash you made on the first run and hire some of the best quality testers you can.Doing that will at least be a major step in making sure we see a marked kind of improvementwith season two.

Telltale made a huge point to tell us that all the decisions we made mattered, but did theyreally? Let's look at the evidence for that next!

Allow for More Liberal Decision-Making

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One of the most important reasons that so many folks were attracted to The Walking Dead wasthe repeated suggestion that the decisions and choices you made throughout the game had theability to impact how the story unfolded, but I would argue that Telltale could have done a betterjob at making that idea ring true. In its present iteration, there were certainly some times whereyou felt the stress of having to solve a problem, but more often than not the end result would bethe same regardless of which option you chose. Didn't want to kill that character? They'llprobably end up dying anyway. Didn't want to steal those supplies? Then someone in the groupwill be bold enough to do it for you. Truths such as this made the title a lot more disappointingon a second play through.

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The real hardcore fans will probably say that your choices had the most impact on how the maincharacter develops, and as a writer I can say that there is a grain of truth to that. However Ithink the majority of people probably weren't willing to look that closely. To remedy this, Telltaleshould try to offer more actual paths of plot and discovery. If it's possible, maybe makecharacter killings something that can happen to anyone at any time. That is after all the reality ofa zombie apocalypse. There's also the option of giving you more liberty to separate from yourgroup with different characters to explore unique areas and learn new things. To keep the seriesuniform I understand that the ending probably has to be partially static, but there could beseveral ways to get there.

With next generation consoles on the horizon, game saves could be an issue too. I'll close withsome thoughts on that!

Transferable Saves is an Absolute Must

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Having been released towards the end of the console generation, there is a huge problem whenit comes to the philosophy of The Walking Dead. Obviously there's a whole lot of emphasis onchoice to be had, and all of those decisions are probably saved in that little file on your harddrive. What's going to happen though if you want to play season two on a PS4 or Xbox 720.Sony has already said the system won't be any kind of backwards compatible other thanthrough the cloud, so how is the new hardware going to be able to read the old file and continuethat story? If it can't, then our choices don't really matter anymore do they?

While a lot of my previous pages talking about things that Telltale can do, I think this one ismore about the console makers than anybody else. As far as I know, the developer is already intalks with Sony to work on a solution and they might be doing the same with Microsoft as well.Given that I think games with more choice that will need a fix for this kind of issue are part of thenatural progression of this industry, I don't think it would be that hard for any hardware producerto include some kind of optional save file codec as part of the development tools. There areplenty of business reasons why total backwards compatibility is fallen by the wayside, but lettingus use old saves would only really be a benefit in this kind of scenario. All the more reason itcould and should be ironed out.

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Those are my bug suggestions, but what do you think? Are you as excited for season two ofThe Walking Dead as I am?

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