“Change the engine.” It’s one of the most frequent quips, albeit in various forms, about Telltale games these days. The graphics are janky. The models are old and dated. The animations look out of place. Change the engine.
As it turns out, that’s precisely what Telltale are doing.
The company recently held a panel at the South by Southwest (SXSW) convention in Texas into their latest property, Batman — The Telltale Series. At the panel, which took place over the weekend, some of the studio’s executives outlined the motivations for making another Batman game, how they plan to flesh out Bruce Wayne in their game, and the potential to choose whether you want to address situations as Bruce Wayne or Batman.
But perhaps one of the most important admissions, particularly for those who have a degree of lethargy with Telltale’s titles, was the revelation that the engine would be updated. “We’ve got a whole lot of new technology that’s going in that you’ll start to see in Batman and Telltale games going forward,” Kevin Bruner, co-founder of Telltale, said.
“So expect something more [The Wolf Among Us] direction than [Rocksteady’s Batman games],” he continued.
You can watch the panel in full below. It kicks off from 2:54:06, or you can automatically jump to the start via this link.
Watch live video from SXSWGaming on www.twitch.tv
“But we’ve really embraced this kind of 75-year history, the comic history, the printed history of the franchise and really wanted to bring that to light. We have a bunch of new engineers that have been working on rendering technology and non-photorealistic rendering technology,” Bruner added.
“It’s very much upgraded from the kind of things you’ve seen from the Telltale games in the past … it’s still a Telltale game, it’ll be evolved from what you’ve seen before, but a more significant step than you’ve seen from any of our products in the past.”
They added that the Batman series will launch in the American summer, otherwise known as our winter, although it’ll most likely be some time before all the episodes are released.
Comments
15 responses to “Get Ready For Telltale Games To Look Better, Starting With Batman”
I kinda hope it’s tonally quite different to the Arkham games. I’d love a dark but not gritty take- shadowy, but not violently “oh look how adult we are”
I’d say it’s a chance to do something entirely different and make something a bit more fun with the Batman franchise.
Kind of like how Batman: The Animated Series often managed to feel quite mature and interesting without breaking any of the kid-friendly cartoon rules?
Yeah, something a bit more operatic.
When you’re telling stories cinematically like telltale, you can make some comic book leaps in logic, unlike Arkham where the logistics of how Batman got from A to B were important
Already confirmed to be rated M in America so MA15/R here
Doesn’t mean much yet. US ratings are assigned differently
I hope Telltale do something radical to really change their games, because these are all stating to look and play exactly the same way. I couldn’t even finish the second ep of Walking dead because it was so boring.
Maybe drop the episodic format for a while? Or change up the gameplay? Do something.
That should be second ep of walking dead season 2.
My big issue with TT games, and one of the main reasons I stopped buying them, has always been that they basically avoid gameplay. It’s about the experience of working through a story, and they carefully remove any elements that may prevent you from reaching the end of that story.
From my point of view that just meant boring gameplay that padded out what could have been a fairly short episode of a TV show.
That doesn’t mean that I think they’re necessarily bad or need to change. I think they just appeal to a very different crowd than your typical “gamer” crowd. Episodes and accessible interactivity are what they do. I don’t see them ever changing that.
That is what I personally love about them though, they aren’t full games, just something to play when you don’t feel like going too deep. I treat them like watching a movie really, if I’ve had enough gaming for the night, I will chill with a telltale ‘movie’ to slow things down a bit
I stopped playing tt games a while ago. I prefer to watch them now, as both my gf and friends still play them.
Apart from the lack of game play and how the story just comes out the same (or cery similar) no matter what you do, my biggest gripe is the hitching that happens seemingly at random across every platform I’ve played them on. I honestly dont care about graphics at all just fix those damn hitches!
I love them personally, never had a bad thing to say against them. They are just nice and easy, something to play when I want to just chill out and not get too involved
Don’t any of you DARE touch Telltale games format, style or substance. They are perfect, interactive stories that I don’t want to interact with more than the balance they’ve struck now.
We need more episodic games, so don’t touch the format (just buy them when they’re all out if you really want to play that way), but I’m absolutely on board with an update to the graphics.
Everyone stop telling Telltale how to make games – they are perfect as-is. Bring on Batman.
The graphics are fine and work well with the mediums they are emulating, it’s the next-to-minimal gameplay mechanics that need improvement. I think the idea of barely interactive storytelling (Turning the game into more of a TV episode rather than a game) is wearing thin on a lot of people; which is why people are playing the game less and just watching them on Youtube instead.
Honestly how these games look is the least of my problems with Telltale games.
You say it starts at 2:54:06, /sxswgaming/v/55165431?t=254m06s is 254 minutes not 2 hrs 54 minutes. 4:14:03 is start