Nukezilla Review: The Walking Dead (Xbox 360)
Back when I gave my impressions of the first episode of The Walking Dead I talked about how this was a crucial game for Telltale. Now that it has been both a critical and a commercial success, it’s clear that they’ve done what they needed to do.
For as long as they’ve existed Telltale has been wrestling with some important questions about adventure games. How can they be made more accessible to a wider audience without making them dumb? How do you deliver episodic content without compromising on quality? Can adventure games provide a sort of challenge that isn’t traditional inventory puzzles?
The Walking Dead feels like the start of a proper answer to all of those, if not a complete answer. It marks the first time they’ve broken free from a traditional puzzle structure in a way that feels truly successful. The usual scavenger hunts, item combinations and lateral thinking are largely missing, replaced with dialogue choices, the occasional timed event and very little else. At first it might seem like they’ve taken out the game. But you’d be wrong to think that.
You come to realise that the game is alive and well, but it’s happening in your head, whenever you have to make a difficult decision about what to say or do. Of course, then you will eventually realise that your decisions don’t make a huge difference to the plot. Whatever you choose, the story is going essentially the same way through the five episodes. Even the hardest choices will have little impact on the where you are by the end of chapter five.
But you still care, and the reason is that no matter the precise details of the plot, by making those decisions you are defining the protagonist Lee as a person. You are changing, sometimes in quite subtle ways, how other characters will react to you in the future. It’s not plot-shattering stuff, but it feels important and somehow appropriate for a game where the story deals in so much despair and hopelessness. You may not be able to change where things are going, but what you can do is grab hold of that one small aspect of the story, the story of Lee, and own a small part of it.
You’ll care when you have to decide on whether to do something while the girl, Clementine is there to see – not because you think it will change very much, but because you care what she, as a character, thinks of you. You’ll care about whether you lie or tell the truth, not because you expect it’ll come back to haunt you but because that is the kind of person you’ve decided to be, and your principles are all you have. That is a remarkable thing for any video game to achieve: for you to feel strongly about your choices not because of mechanics of reward or some sort of binary morality meter that you can track, but just because the writing and characters are good enough to make you want to respect them.
The only problems that are too big to ignore are many of the the same things that have been complaints in almost all previous Telltale games. The engine seems to be showing its age especially on consoles, with frequent long loading times, and the occasional visual glitch or slowdown that makes me wish they’d had more time to clean it up. And I often feel like if they had a little more time to work on animations, these scenes would come to life so much more.
For all there is to love about The Walking Dead (and there is plenty), I couldn’t help but wonder what it could have been like with higher production values available. Now that a second season is essentially guaranteed, and Telltale has been able to expand into bigger offices, I’m looking forward to playing a Telltale game that is as technically competent as it is successful in other areas.
This review is day twenty-six of the December 2012 Nukestravaganza
Wow, it looks like the recently released disc version of the game may be near unplayable for many customers:
http://www.polygon.com/2012/12/27/3808790/the-walking-dead-disc-version-360-ps3-issues
“I couldn’t help but wonder what it could have been like with higher production values available.”
There’s a movie reviewer out there by the name of Harry S. Plinkett and he does scathingly accurate reviews of episodes I-III of Star Wars (these are not fanboy rants but detailed dissections of how these are bad films). During the reviews he points out how all of the advanced technology in the prequels actually bogs down the whole affair. By contrast, a lot of what happens in the original trilogy (especially Star Wars) was dictated by what could effectively be achieved with existing tech.
Essentially, this forced the people working on the film to utilize discretion when using tech and also forced them to be creative in order to achieve the effect they were looking for.
Essentially, Plinkett says, the limitations of the technology ended up making the film better because they couldn’t rely on it to move the film.
This is a long way ’round of saying that’s what I think the reason is that The Walking Dead is so damned good in the writing department (in fact, I think it surpasses both the comic and the television show in many respects): Because they knew they couldn’t rely on the aging game engine to make an impact with the game.
Who knows? With more budget and tech at their disposal, this might not have been the emotionally gripping game it actually is and would look more like the Walking Dead FPS they just released some footage for recently.
@Jack Frost: Sure, as far as it goes. I’m all for the notion that having limitations actually boosts creativity in many ways, and having too much to work with can actually be a drawback.
But I don’t think the game could have been worse with fewer bugs, shorter load times, a little more time paid with the animation and little things like that. I’m not talking about anything big. I’m talking about little things that make the game seem a little bit shoddy, I think the over-all look is great, the voice acting top-notch and so on.
I’m really talking about the final layer of shine, rather than the difference between old and new Star Wars.
I think the guys at Telltale would have cared about the writing whether or not the engine was better… They’re just good writers who took pride in their job. I don’t think paying attention to other areas would do anything to hurt that, and in fact it would have supported that. For example, it was hard for me to get emotionally invested in episode 3 as I wanted to be when half the time Katja was looking after an invisible Duck, and I felt that the animations throughout didn’t do justice to the voice performances and lines being delivered.
None of this was dealbreaking, but it definitely left room for improvement.
It’s funny, I just DL’d this on 12/28 (during the steal of a sale on XBLA) and the only glitch I’ve come across is a short section where a character’s line would start, they’d say about a syllable or two and the sentence would start over from the beginning. But that’s it…
I’ve played episodes 1-4 and have none of the issues you bring up, knock wood. While I realize I might be lucky in that respect, perhaps it kept me from what you were getting at because I haven’t experienced a lot of the glitches.
But honestly, I found that at the very least a lot of the facial animation is very good considering, especially the eyes. The expressions and reactions the characters have are remarkably done given the overall “cartoony” nature of the graphics.
Sorry about the Star Wars thing, I was trying to help illustrate my point and I ended up making it more than it needed to be. :D
A few bugs we experienced at home during our playthrough(s):
-Clementine dialog, “LEE! Why aren’t you answering, Lee?” playing over dramatic sequences, which had the effect of scaring the shit out of my wife and her sister.
-Clementine’s lips moving during scenes when other characters were speaking (this was especially creepy as she seemed to be fixated on the person speaking as the lipsync animation had her doing copy cat).
-At least a half dozen situations where the camera completely took holiday, one on a train where it disappeared into the space under the rendered scene (-IDNOCLIP). Each one of these required us to reload the game from the last checkpoint.
We didn’t experience any of the corrupted save nonsense that others have reported. I’ve suffered a complete loss of all PS3 saves this last year, so save files are precious to me. If that happened to us I don’t think we would have gone back and played through the game a second time.
Since it didn’t though, we have done a subsequent playthrough with my sister in law, making different choices at every chance. While it does ruin some of the magic, there are some extraordinary diversions with major characters and at the end of the fourth episode the game shows you all of the eight different configurations your party could be composed of leading into the final chapter. Mind blowing stuff from a development standpoint.
@Jack Frost: It’s definitely true that most issues are minor, and the visual flaws are minor, too.
But they’re definitely there – even that voice glitch you mentioned is a poor show for a game that relies on the delivery of the dialogue. And yes, the animation is good ‘considering’ (as in, considering that they are making the games under tight deadlines with a pretty small animation team and not much time for testing) but I’d rather they were just plain good by any standards.
Bear in mind that I thought a lot about the game was very well done, hence the high rating, but kind of like with all Telltale games there’s a little bit of it that I feel like I have to apologise for when I’m recommending it. “Yeah, you should play this but bear in mind that due to the episodic schedule of their releases you’ll find some issues slipped through, it’s maybe not quite as polished in some spots as you’d expect, etc.” I’m just looking forward to being able to recommend a Telltale game without that disclaimer, and the success of this series should help them get there :)
@Brett Parsons: Regarding the diversions, this is something I wanted to go into in more detail but didn’t quite have space in 26 sentences, but I touched on.
There are diversions and part of me hoped episode 5 was really gonna go crazy with them (because there wouldn’t be an episode 6 where they all had to be reconciled with the over-arching plot). So I was sort of hoping you could end the game in a wildly different state to someone else in 5. That didn’t happen, and it very quickly steers back on course when you (SPOILER!!!!!!!!!) reunite back with the whole team a short way through regardless of what happened at the end of 4 (END OF SPOILER!!!!!!!)
But while most of the choice in the game is an illusion in terms of plot, as I mentioned in the review, it still feels important that those choices are there, because essentially it is you deciding what kind of guy Lee is going to be. Not in a black and white moral sense, but in a more nuanced way. Even if he can’t change anything, you can console yourself that he acted in the way you thought was best.