Here's a fairly recent quote from Chuck Jordan (until 2010, he was with Telltale) on the failures of Mass Effect 3:
Quote:
|
Essentially, BioWare created the problem for themselves by, to be blunt, promising more than they or any other developer could deliver. They’ve sold the Mass Effect series on the premise that the player can completely customize his character and his character’s story [...]. But even the largest team of writers and content creators won’t be able to deliver an indefinite number of conclusions that all have the same level of impact, satisfying enough to conclude a multi-year, multi-game epic series. People have been spending years trying to come up with a way to create systems that generate compelling narratives, and no one’s cracked the problem yet.
|
I think that is still the key problem here in The Walking Dead. You can't have the story branching out too much because Telltale would never finish the game and tie all loose ends. Particularly not in the first episode: Too much branching out in episode 1 and the design trouble will rise exponentially for the future episodes. If they're bold, we might get a real branch-out kicker by episode 3. If they're not, we'd at least get 800% more ending diversity in episode 5 than EA's undisputed failure delivered.