5 fan questions about The Walking Dead answered for July 17, 2017

#2. How much does it really matter?

Rocky J Manero on Facebook asks: “TWD games are always stated to be impacted greatly by choices you make in the previous game, but it never amounts to anything more than brief mentions of a character or situation, it never really impacts the story in any way, is it time that Telltale just stop advertising the games like they really do have such great and impactful choices, or should they stop making them altogether as each season doesn’t tend to follow a great deal on from previous one with insane time leaps.”

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE the games from Telltale. Not only have they introduced some rich and interesting characters but they have told powerful stories involving those new faces, which is very hard to do.

That said, it is disappointing how little the choices made throughout the game really impact the direction it takes. The cutscenes for A New Frontier where the decisions the player were basically wiped out before the game even started were a little slap in the face for those who were passionate about the story they wanted told.

Telltale Games has gone on record as saying they want the story to be more adaptive to the players going forward, but this is one situation that could be very difficult to execute going forward while telling a story that depends on certain situations.

My advice is to just sit back and let Telltale tell the stories and not focus so much on the ‘unique’ playthroughs. The games are so popular and are like interactive movies, so they should be treated that way instead of like video games such as Fable where seemingly every choice has an impact on your story.

Developing a game that makes that kind of storytelling possible would take a HUGE amount of time, and sadly that isn’t something that would be very profitable for Telltale or beneficial for players in the long run, even though it would be cool to have our in-game decisions matter more.