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Tales from the Borderlands got me hyped by it's first episode, but checking out the trailer for this series I'm really wary of how many characters from the show are making an appearance. Hopefully it's just typical trailer bait and switch bullshit, but I was kinda hoping the series would stand on it's own, tying in to the show just by tangential politics. It'd be kinda annoying to be playing a spin-off game that has Cersei show up every episode or have Ramsay as the main antagonist. But again, that's just the trailer, which has no bearing on how the actual first episode will turn out. So hopefully I'm wrong and the series is just a backdrop to the story they want to tell here.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:05
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:15 |
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Just finished it. Yeah, that's about how long I think I would last in the GoT universe. 'bout the same way I'd expect to go, too. Also, holy crap that intro looked cheap as hell. Flat, untextured polygons raising out of black nothing to create something that kinda looks like a low ploy version of what the show does is what I'd expect from an early camera test, not the final release. It's looks really bad, if they were able to get the voice actors then I'd hoped Telltale would be able to get hold of the CGI department and ask if they could get the real deal, it wouldn't even look out of place with the aesthetic they have now. Actually most of my complaints this episode are on the technical and artistic aspects. I'm really tired of seeing characters that need to snap back to their default pose to start the next animation cycle, and the facial expressions feel like they're all taken wholesale from Walking Dead 1, which was good at the time but they haven't improved or expanded the facial animations in a meaningful way yet, it all feels like they're using stock assets that they only tweak when they break. And the matte paintings for some backgrounds are also really jarring to see for some reason, like they needed a wide shot but didn't have enough time to complete a render of any given city so they went with a cleaned up artists rendering. Otherwise the writing feels like GoT, maybe a little shallower since it's all about House Forrester and there's way more focus on politics then the book or show has, which are both more about characters with politics informing their choices, but it feels like GoT so it'll scratch that itch for the next season, but I imagine it will only confuse people who aren't into the series already.
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Dec 2, 2014 23:44
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Dolash posted:I have to say that this is the first of Telltale's tie-in games where I'd have trouble recommending it to people who aren't familiar with the source material. I'd never read or seen the Walking Dead, Fables or Borderlands and that didn't impede my enjoyment of those games but this one assumes a lot of familiarity with Game of Thrones. Probably because it's the largest base audience they've had for a tie-in title yet. I'd guess rather that it's because Game of Thrones is the most dense story they've adapted, where the actions of the series characters can have consequences for the entire world. It's a stretch but you can conceive of the Walking Dead games taking place in the same universe as the comics and TV series, if only because they're independent stories that are set in the same universe but don't cross over with each other at any point and consequences play out with small groups of survivors. With Game of Thrones, it felt like every book somebody does something that shakes up the status quo for the entire continent, so it's much harder to write a story concurrent with the events of the show because now you've got a really strict schedule of story beats to follow through with, can't just write your own thing within the setting because your characters need to be at the Red Wedding so we can see the Boltons kill a bunch of Northeners because that's more than a huge deal, that defines the entire state of the world for the course of your series run. We'd be dealing with a very different game if it was just one book earlier. This isn't even counting on us knowing future events now, too, so we know that Mira is gonna be at Joffery's Wedding and is gonna watch him choke on his pie and die because again, you can't leave that out of the story, it's just too huge a deal that completely changes the status quo for the world they're in. And the worst part is that the series never really lets up at all. Like, with Borderlands they can pick a point between two games to have their story happen and it fits in fine. Can't really do that in Game of Thrones, there isn't really a space in the narrative where things stay relatively stable for a long stretch of time, or at least not within a hundred miles of any given main character from the show. Maybe if they did a prequel series, set before the first book, they'd have more freedom to tell a fresh story. Because including too many characters from the show will ultimately make the main cast of this series sidekicks in their own story.
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Dec 3, 2014 09:23
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snodig posted:This is my first telltale game and I just realized I've made a huge mistake by setting myself up to wait 5ish months to finish this. Walking Dead is pretty much their best one, the quality can vary quite a bit beyond that. Like, the Sam and Max seasons are all pretty good, but nobody in their right mind would defend Jurassic Park. Walking Dead also notes a divide in the style of games they make, before that it was mostly adventure games but now they're closer to really well produced VN's.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:48
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Xoidanor posted:Here's the thing, Telltale have never actually done branching gameplay in any significant manner and anyone that came here expecting anything different this time around was naive as hell. They've always been lazy about it and as the original Walking Dead proved their games are good without it. I wouldn't call it laziness so much as "expensive". They don't exactly have Heavy Rain sized budgets for these games, and most of them are made in less than two years. It takes a lot of planning to get the branches we do have working together across multiple episodes, hell I'm pretty sure half the reason they do episodic content is so they can cut routes that only a very small fraction of the playerbase would ever see so they can complete the other ones on time.
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Dec 6, 2014 09:41
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Hakkesshu posted:I'm not sure what people actually want out of these games when it comes to branching narratives. Walking Dead season 2 had a number of drastically different endings. But those endings all spun off of two choices twenty minutes before the end, and nothing you did before that point matters. TellTale games are all all about the choice you make "in the moment" and the consequences of those choices are typically prewritten into the story, ie regardless of the choice you make the results are the same. Take the whole ending of this episode, the difference between meeting Ramsey at the gates with all of your men suited up ready to fight and welcoming him into the hall with bowed knee right off the bat is nil, you're still getting shanked. For most people it's fine, good even, when you're "in the moment" and have to make a split second decision with a ticking clock counting down, even the smallest choices feel big that way. It's an interesting way to make narrative into gameplay and it works really well, people naturally panic under time limits and not knowing the consequences of any choice you make just adds to the tension. For a purely story driven game, this is a system that works way better than any other attempt I've seen. But the second someone replays the episode to see what those consequences are, and the curtain is pulled back and the answer is "dick all", for almost everyone their response is "well then what was the loving point?!" Because every decision feels important, having the lie revealed and the illusion of choice shattered makes the gameplay feel worse, turns the ticking clock into an annoyance rather than than a tension builder, and makes the choices less rewarding. It's exactly the same as figuring out how a magicians card trick works, the magic's gone when you know the mechanics behind how it works, and since the gameplay itself is reliant on you not knowing how it works, that makes the game less fun to play through.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:50
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Hannibal Smith posted:I know people have said this game requires more knowledge of the source than Telltale's other games. Do you think I would be OK jumping into this game if I've only seen the first season of the show? I have read the first four books, although it's been awhile (and I know they don't line up with the show exactly). I'd recommend watching the show first. There's a MASSIVE spoiler in the very first episode for something that happens near the end of Season 3 in the show, and going forward it's likely events from Season 4 are going to play out during the course of the game. You'll either be completely lost, or missing key details so the importance of events doesn't sink in until you get around to watching the show, which can get pretty confusing.
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Dec 24, 2014 06:08
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Narcissus1916 posted:But I'm not sure how you would even attempt to make a game set in the game of thrones' world that is accessible to newcomers. Cover the war that happened before the books began. The one that drove the Targaryens out of Kings Landing and put Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne. There's a whole lot of cool poo poo they could have done with that and I'm assuming the only reason they didn't is because there's still some hidden history that has yet to be revealed in the books or show yet, or some other legal technicalities like needing to negotiate contracts for the prequel books rather than the main series, are preventing TellTale from using that material, while stuff that's directly tied into the show is a bit easier to fuss out the rights to.
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Dec 26, 2014 07:20
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:15 |
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jivjov posted:Oh trust me, I am; but death in the GoT universe tend to be really unambiguous, and this one had just enough ambiguity to make me question it. Uh, no. No I'd say a knife through the throat is pretty drat unambiguous.
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Jan 1, 2015 03:01
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