Today, Telltale Games has announced that its long-awaited sequel to The Wolf Among Us is being pushed out of 2023 in an effort to avoid crunch and team burnout, as well as accommodate a move from Unreal Engine 4 to 5.
Speaking to IGN, Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie explained that the team made the choice for a number of reasons, but primarily to avoid burnout or shipping an unfinished game.
“Making games is difficult and they need time to be right,” he said. “And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.”
Ottilie explains that like many other studios, the re-established Telltale Games had struggled with the challenges inherent to building a studio during the COVID-19 pandemic. After being resurrected by LCG Entertainment in 2019 following the shutdown of the original Telltale, Telltale unveiled The Wolf Among Us 2 at The Game Awards the following December. But the studio was still in its very early stages, with the game in pre-production (and explicitly not using any previously-developed material), and the new studio roughly two years away from being fully staffed. While at the time it made sense to announce early to help secure funding and support for the new initiative, Ottilie admits that had he known then about other coming factors like the pandemic, he may not have made the same decision.
Making games is difficult and they need time to be right. And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.
“The best game we could have made”
Since then, he continues, The Wolf Among Us 2 has been proceeding well. But recently, Telltale made the decision to switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal 5. It’s a move that Ottilie says happened because Unreal 5 has a number of interesting features that many on his team, specifically engineers and artists, feel are worth the effort. But he admits that means redoing “quite a bit of work” that was already done in Unreal 4.
With all that in mind, Ottilie says there would have been only two ways to meet the 2023 release window. One option would have been to ship something unfinished, which is (perhaps obviously) off the table:
“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds,” he says. “The expectations are pretty high, and we want time to meet those and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made.’ Let the world say what they will [once] it’s done, but at least we know that in these times, in these conditions, this is the best game that we could make.”
The other option would be to crunch — a problem that reportedly plagued the original Telltale Games before its shuttering. Ottilie is adamant that their version of Telltale simply won’t do it.
“I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it,” he says. “You can’t plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don’t want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labor markets and the growth in the games industry. So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It’s not how you build a business. And as an industry, we’re terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices.”
The Wolf Among Us 2 will be an episodic release as its predecessor was, but unlike many former Telltale titles, it’s being developed all at once — so when episode one hits, all other episodes will already be completed. It’s now on the docket for 2024, but Telltale does have one major release this year: The Expanse: A Telltale Series, which it’s making in partnership with Deck Nine Games. Telltale also has a third, unknown title in very early development.
In the meantime, it’s certainly worth going back and checking out the original The Wolf Among Us, especially as its sequel will pick up where Bigby Wolf and Snow White left off. We praised the first episode for its “well-written adventure” with “an added dose of stylish noir presentation” when it released way back in 2013, and had plenty of nice things to say about the four subsequent episodes, too.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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