The news of beloved video game developer Telltale closing their doors took the internet by storm the other day. The cancellation of the ongoing fifth season of the Walking Dead, the upcoming Wolf Among Us season 2 and Netflix’s Stranger Things hit fans like a bullet train.
Telltale may have been popular for their for their narrative adventure games and garnered a lot of criticism for staying within the confines of that particular genre. So this may come off as a surprise to know that Telltale was planning to make a procedurally generated zombie-themed strategy title.
In an interview with VG24/7, Alexis Kennedy – a freelance writer who worked on Dragon Age 4, among other games – mentioned that Telltale had approached them for consultancy on a strategy game similar to This War of Mine, with Fallen London being a major inspiration.
“It was a project that had been ongoing for years, with a variety of different people coming and going, to try to find a way to do something different to the usual Telltale approach,” Kennedy explains.“It was something that didn’t require hand-tuned content but allowed room for stuff that emerged naturally from procedural generation,” said Kennedy.
The game, planned for mobile but possibly also considered for other platforms, would be built around base management and resource gathering. It was supposed to stick to Telltale’s iconic art style, but the stories were to primarily stem from its systems interacting with one another. Players were supposed to manage various resources, including their manpower, and the drama was then to come up organically through gameplay.
It would have been good to see Telltale trying something different for once, but sadly that ship has sailed. Renowned for their storytelling skills and iconic characters, the legacy of Telltale would surely live on.