The Walking Dead Message Board older than one year ago

#thewalkingdead Aah! Holy crap! Look out Lee! It's a motorcycle zombie! More »

Things go from bad to worse for Lee and Clementine as they decide to try and escape from Macon.

The second episode of Telltale's The Walking Dead comes to iOS next week, available as an in-app purchase for $5. Episode Two: Starved for Help launched on June 27 for XBLA and on June 29 for PS3 and PC, and ended up proving once and for all that there is some hope for humanity. Some.

Individual iOS episodes cost $5, or after purchasing one you can buy the multi-pack for $15, for access to all five episodes.

Like many of you, I’m eagerly awaiting news on the release date of the third episode of Telltale Games’ superb PSN series The Walking Dead, a game that is intimately connected to the grim world of Robert Kirkman’s celebrated comic series.

I’ve long wondered just how involved Kirkman was with Telltale’s hit game series, so when I got a chance to interview him during Gamescom in Germany last week, I dropped by bratwurst and Kolsch and picked up the phone. I first met Kirkman during an interview for the late, great GamePro and, as always, the man is nothing if not humble about his considerable creative achievements. He modestly described The Walking Dead’s surge into mainstream pop culture as “a wild ride,” and expressed great satisfaction with Telltale’s work on the game.

My chat with Kirkman was short (he’s a busy man!) but it yielded some fascinating insights into the creative processes behind one of the biggest properties in comics, TV, and gaming.

PlayStation.Blog: Why did you choose Telltale Games to adapt the world of your comic to a video game series?
Robert Kirkman: The Walking Dead is a lot of things, but at its core it’s a dramatic human story that’s very emotional. Telltale came in with a proposal that involved doing a very different kind of video game. A video game that didn’t focus on shooting zombies or hiding from zombies or being chased by zombies…they focused on the emotional, dramatic component. It was a very keen focus on decision making and how that affects your characters, and also how those characters evolved over the course of a narrative. Telltale wanted to focus on the storytelling as opposed to the action, which I thought was really cool. They really got The Walking Dead, and they’ve done it justice.

PSB: Did you intend The Walking Dead game to be serialized from the start? If so, why?
RK: The serialization model Telltale does they do very well. The comic book is a serialized story, and I think it’s a cool thing to transition into a game. Being able to play a two-hour chunk of game and end it on a cliffhanger, with a period of time between chapters that builds anticipation for the next story is a cool aspect for the comic. I don’t think there was any “plan” to be serialized, but I think it was a cool carryover to Telltale’s business model.

PSB: So how much input did you provide into the type of game Telltale made? Did you have key creative mandates?
RK: We had a lot of macro meetings early on about what this game would be. In the very early stages, it was very important to me that this game would be something that mattered to the fans. So this game very much takes place in the world of The Walking Dead comic book, and it deals with things that exist there. And you can’t really tell a story like that if Rick Grimes is the main character. Because [the implication would be], “if this story is so important, how come we never saw it or talked about it in the comic? This is clearly a side thing!”

So very early on we decided to focus on a different character and a different story that would weave in and out of the comic book story in interesting and meaningful ways. But we also wanted it to be a standalone story so that the comic and game can complement each other without contradicting each other. We wanted you to experience them both and get a fuller, richer experience. So yeah, those meetings were something I was very involved with.

Talking with the guys at Telltale, I said, “The Walking Dead is sad. If you can make players sad, that’s really what we’re after here. You want to drive the emotional impact of what it would be like to live in this world, and if you can achieve that in a game, that would be amazing.” And that was something the Telltale team was already striving for — making this a really emotional experience, not just scary or exciting. Those were the kinds of decisions we made very early on. But the type of game it is, and the way the gameplay works, is all Telltale.

PSB: Did you have a broad vision for this game, story-speaking? Did you help write any of it?
RK: A lot of it was stuff Telltale came to the table with. They had Lee Everett, they had the storylines and other things. They were working with Gary Whitta — who’s a friend of mine and wrote The Book of Eli, as well as being a huge The Walking Dead fan — to craft this story. One of the things I’m so proud of as The Walking Dead expands is that I’m able to say, “okay, the comic book is mine.” I can make a good comic book, I’m a comic book writer.

But when it comes to making a television show, I don’t know anything about television. So I’ll work with someone like Glen Mazzara, who is our showrunner and knows TV, to make the best the best show possible. I’m not a novelist, so if I want to work on a novel I’ll work with someone like Jay Bonansinga to write it so I know it’ll be good. I like to work with people who know what they’re doing.

So I’m able to step back and say, “Telltale knows how to make good video games.” I’m not going to come in and say, “we should do this and that” because I don’t make video games. Allowing an expert to come in and do what they do best, I think, is the secret to The Walking Dead becoming as big as it is.

PSB: Speaking of the novels, I recently finished The Rise of the Governor. And I understand the next book Road to Woodbury will focus on Lili, an infamous character from the comics. Will there be any tie-in to the game? Is there any chance Lili appear in future episodes of the game, for example?

RK: There will definitely be a character named Lili in the game. Whether or not that ends up being the same character we know and love from the comic and the upcoming novel remains to be seen. But yeah, the new novel comes out in October and I’m excited about it. The novel series, the comic series, and the video game all are intertwined in the same universe. Keeping that continuity straight is something that’s been very important to me, and yeah, we’ll definitely see them continue to connect in a lot of interesting ways moving forward.

PSB: Here’s a question from @iLLeGaL_sKiLLz: on Twitter: “I wish they would delve into the backstory of how the infection happened.” What’s your take on that? Is that a good idea?

RK: Well, I don’t ever really plan on doing that just because I feel like The Walking Dead is set in a very real, grounded world. Once you go past the fact that zombies are walking around trying to eat people, you’re gonna get more and more into the realm of science fiction. Any kind of explanation for why the zombies are walking around, to me, is just going to make it less grounded, less dramatic, and less real for the readers. I like keeping that as an unknown backstory that is really completely unimportant to our characters as the story moves forward. It’s not something that I definitively want to tackle.

PSB: Here’s a question from a Twitter user whose handle I misplaced: “Why do you hate us so? Why must you build up our love only to tear it down? Did someone hurt you?” I think he’s referring to the fact that you have not been shy about killing characters in this series.

RK: [laughs] I don’t know, I’m really just trying to entertain! I understand that it can be frustrating at times. I love the readers and I love the fact that they’re as invested in the characters as they are. I’m just trying to write a compelling and interesting story. When people are upset that a fictional character dies, it’s just telling me that I’m doing my job.

#thewalkingdead Nicola Adams, a boxer and freshly-minted Olympic gold medalist, is currently facing Britain's media answering countless questions about her preparation, training, state of mind, reaction to winning, blah blah blah. More »

According to these stats from the second episode of The Walking Dead, not all of you are cold, calculative survivors - the majority remained calm and made moral decisions. Well, as moral as possible in a post-apocalyptic nightmare, anyway.

#thewalkingdead More »

AMC The Walking Dead Social Game, a Facebook game set in AMC's Walking Dead television universe, which isn't to be confused with Telltale's Walking Dead universe or Image Comics' Walking Dead universe, has entered open beta.

The game (playable here) features all the prerequisite expendable resources of a Facebook game, requiring the player to spend energy to move, attack, heal themselves, etc. Weapons can either be purchased with in-game currency or with in-game currency purchased with real-world dollars, also just like you'd expect.

Some of the zombies out and about in the world have pictures of your Facebook friends floating above them, and upon death will prompt you with the option to post an automated invite on said friend's wall. Now that we think about it, Facebook games and a zombie pandemic actually have a lot in common -- first it happens to someone you know, then someone you love, and then, when all hope is lost, it happens to you.

#thewalkingdead I adore The Walking Dead. So when I heard about this drag of a Facebook game Kate wrote about, I worried. This is a game that represents one of my favorite graphic novels, so I worry that the experience of the franchise will be tarnished for a horde of perhaps non-gaming Facebook users. We can do much better than just a series of microtransactions that neglect one of The Walking Dead's strongest features: interactions. More »

#thewalkingdead There is an excellent game out there based on The Walking Dead. It's a five-part serial, of which the first two chapters have been released, and it's made by Telltale Games. One by one, many of us here at Kotaku have become fans, each for our own reasons. More »

Yeah, yeah, I'll be going on at least one LOST tour while walking around in Hawaii later this month.

Hard to believe I’ll be married a week from now, and it’s why Worth Reading will have a two-week hiatus. I’ll still be filing a few stories for Giant Bomb next week (including a big one about Darksiders) while preparing for the wedding that’s nearly planned, but the big day is on Friady, and I’ll be spending the week after in Hawaii.

(If you have any last-minute recommendations on things to do there, now’s the time to let me know!)

For whatever reason, my saved game for The Walking Dead hasn’t uploaded to PlayStation Plus’ cloud saves (I'm on a friend's machine), so I haven’t seen the conclusion of episode two yet.

Instead, as I mentioned last week, I’ve been pushing forward in Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, and I finally saw the “twist.” The twist itself? Overrated but understandably noteworthy for the time period, and admittedly I still didn’t see it coming. Unfortunately, the twist did nothing to stop Stranger’s Wrath from quickly pivoting to a Rambo-style shoot out for the remainder of the game. Though combat is the focus of Stranger’s Wrath, it’s a combat that encourages tactical, strategic play with the creative ammo types, and that mostly goes out the window in the last few hours. Instead, it’s just blowing dudes up, and while I understand the tonal shift behind that move, it’s simply not very fun. Bummer.

So many games seem to fall prey to his problem, and I wonder why that is. Maybe I should interview some developers about that, eh?

See you guys in a few weeks!

Hey, You Should Play This

• CLOP (Browser, Free) by Bennett Foddy

If CLOP sounds familiar, it’s because it sounds awfully similar to QWOP, another game by torturous designer Bennet Foddy. QWOP tasked players with manipulating the thighs and calves of an Olympic athlete, an objective much more difficult than it sounds. There’s a reason the game warns you QWOP is not about winning or losing, and that’s a sentiment shared with CLOP, as well. CLOP is fundamentally similar to CLOP, except that players are now trying to move all four legs of a unicorn back and forth, in the hopes of reaching a fair maiden on the other side of the hill.

Good luck?

And You Should Read These

• "Confessions of a Middle-Aged Games Writer" by Keith Stuart for Hookshot

As someone who expects they’ll be writing about video games for some years to come, it’s difficult to imagine what that life will be like when I’m in my 30s and 40s, and how others around me will perceive that decision. There are very few games writers within that age range, especially ones that have stayed in games writing. Keith Stuart is one of them, though, and his piece brings me comfort. It’s not uncommon for games writers to explain their career decisions to non-games folk, and I can’t imagine that gets easier as you get older. As he rightly points out, it’s not a problem with critics in other fields, and as video games continue to become ingrained in our culture, it will cease being a worrying question mark.

I am aware, when I go on press trips now, that I am old enough to be the father of some of the other journalists I am with. I mean, that can’t be right. Increasingly often I reference games they never played, or that exist for them as dim childhood memories. I am ancient enough to remember playing games in black and white, on old Grandstand consoles; I played Pac-Man in a Blackpool arcade when it first arrived in Britain; I even remember when Sega was a serious force in the industry. That stuff makes me feel like Rutger Hauer as the majestic yet dying replicant in Bladerunner – I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. And I have, and they are part of me.

• "Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform or Reality Show?" by Ian Bogost for Fast Company

It’s still early enough in Kickstarter’s life that anything taking off generates headlines, but we’re also in the phase where pitches, especially ambitious ones like Ouya, are under intense scrutiny. Academic Ian Bogost has tried to re-frame the reasoning behind Kickstarter excitement, and one that might help explain why so many critics have trouble giving the thumbs up to so many projects on Kickstarter, yet players have no trouble opening up their wallets and saying “hell yes.” In short, Bogost believes individuals want to be one the ground floor of A Good Idea, and tell friends they were their first, and helped make it happen. That Kickstarter donations don’t usually require much money makes the impulse to be part of a potentially (potentially) market-changing idea all the more appealing.

Kickstarters are dreams, and that's their strength rather than their weakness. People back projects on Kickstarter to fund the development of a new creative work or a consumer product that might never see the light of day via traditional financing. But what if Kickstarter is more about the experience of kickstarting than it is about the finished products? When you fund something like OUYA, you're not pre-ordering a new console that will be made and marketed, you're buying a ticket on the ride, reserving a front-row seat to the process and endorsing an idea. It's a Like button attached to your wallet.

If You Click This, It Will Play

I Don’t Know About This Kickstarter Thing, But These Projects Look Neat

• Balance of the Planet is from Chris Crawford, a gaming legend you probably, sadly don't even know.
• The Other Brothers doesn't look like the best platformer ever, but there's an enjoyable charm to it.
• Gaymercon is a noble idea, and it's great they're underscoring how everyone is invited.

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• Edge went back and pondered whether its most controversial reviews were actually wrong.
• The next game from the Dear Esther developers is about the Rapture? Sign me the eff up.
• The similarities between a video game and piloting a military drone are...disturbing.
• Here's your weekly reminder why Suda 51 is so interesting, even when he fails.
• The process of returning your work iPad may be more emotional than you think.
• This is a one-sided account of developing the newest Lumines game, but it's a fascinating one.
• Is it really possible we haven't heard from the designer of No Russian before? Now, we have.
• We've been waiting a while for Silent Hill: Book of Memories, and here's an interesting breakdown of its history.
• Learn how Mass Effect 2 actually turned someone into a gamer.
• In the midst of anti-Zynga sentiment, here's one perspective on why that may be off-base.
• Please let these quotes about photorealism being needed to achieve new game genres be out of context.
• If you want a better understanding about how GameStop does business, read this interview.

PlayStation Plus members get a pair of games gratis in August - well, a pair of episodes for one game, anyway. On August 7, PS Plus members can snag the first two episodes of Telltale's The Walking Dead, the PlayStation Blog reports.

The Walking Dead will have a total of five episodes, the first two of which have received excellent reviews - you can read ours here and here. Each additional episode in the five-episode arc will cost $4.99.

#thewalkingdead Many of us here at Kotaku are fans of Telltale's episodic Walking Dead game. It's been one of the most welcome surprises of the year—a zombie game that's less about killing zombies and more about dealing with living in a world without laws or hope. More »

If you've been holding out for the iOS version of Telltale's The Walking Dead, this Thursday sees the debut of the first episode on the App Store. The Walking Dead's "A New Day" will be available on your compatible iDevice on July 26 for $4.99 - fourth generation or greater iPods, iPad 2 and 3, iPhone 4 and above.

Once you purchase the first episode, you can either purchase corresponding episodes individually for the same price or reserve episodes two through five for $14.99. There's no launch date currently set for the second episode, "Starved for Help."

#gourmetgaming When I play Telltale's excellent The Walking Dead game, I rarely get hungry. There just aren't that many appetizing things in the game, particularly in the ghastly second episode, "Starved for Help." More »

#thewalkingdead Last spring, I read a novel called The Passage, and I'm re-reading it again now. The book posits a scenario that in its broad strokes should be familiar by now to any gamer: a secret military science program goes horribly wrong and creates a race of man-eating, once-human monsters that more or less doom humanity. Civilization crumbles; the world goes to hell. Close to a hundred years later, a group of survivors struggle to continue life and maintain order in a wild and dangerous, mostly-collapsed world. More »

#thewalkingdead I'm all out of faith. This is how I feel. I'm cold and I'm alone, bound and broken on the floor. Oh, AMC's The Walking Dead. I gave you so much of my time and energy. I believed in you. And yet you frustrated me to no end with leaden performances, boring writing, and slooooowwww paaacccinnngg. More »

#thewalkingdead The value of social capital, to put it simplistically, lies in the collective. You've probably heard it before: "we're stronger as a group." More »

Terminal Reality is the latest company to take advantage of the franchise opportunities in The Walking Dead, hired by Activision to create a first-person-shooter for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC due out next year. Rather than drawing from the source material of Robert Kirkman's graphic novels, Activision wants Terminal Reality to create a game from the AMC television series based on the comic, separating it from Telltale Games' episodic, action point-and-click installment of The Walking Dead.

"When Activision approached us to help them make The Walking Dead game based off the AMC's TV series, the whole team went crazy," Terminal Reality creative lead Angel Gonzalez writes on the PlayStation Blog. "We are all fans of the show and couldn't wait to get our hands on it. Immediately the team knew that an FPS game based on The Walking Dead was something we wanted to help bring the fans." We assume he means fans of the television series only, since fans of the comic aren't necessarily the same people who enjoy the TV show.

The Walking Dead FPS will focus on the zombies as "walkers," as they're called in the show, and will require players to be specifically aware of the sounds they produce, whether when firing weapons or traveling through an area.

"In the game, you'll need to carefully sneak into and out of some dangerous situations and you may meet a few Walkers along the way," Gonzalez says. "If you show up with guns blazing, you'll quickly find yourself dealing with a much larger crowd and you could easily become overwhelmed."

Walkers will also track humans by their scent. The longer a player stands still, the larger his scent radius becomes, eventually traveling outside of buildings and down streets to lure in masses of the undead. Just like McDonald's does.

I almost reached the point at which it seemed prudent to board up every possible data point through which new zombie media might break into my computer or television. Zombies were dead to me for a while. Things have changed. The most surprisingly engrossing corpse to shamble into sight has been Telltale’s Walking Dead series. The first episode was bleak, character-driven drama and I found myself unblocking the entry points and actually waiting for more ghoulish guests to arrive. It took a while but the second course is here and so is wot I think.

(more…)

#opinion Last Friday, I heard that Activision and Terminal Reality would be making a first-person shooter out of the Walking Dead. Shortly afterward, I witnessed people (read: co-workers, folks I follow on Twitter, etc) freaking out. More »

Telltale confirmed that more games in its The Walking Dead series will be developed after the launch of the fifth and final episode in the current season.

The company's Senior VP of Marketing Steve Allison said the "first episodic game series based on The Walking Dead has sold nearly 1.7 million episodes to consumers in just our first 8 weeks with no signs of slowing down," in a statement to Polygon. Telltale plans on launching the third episode of its current The Walking Dead season in August.

Allison added, "Following the digital release of our fifth episode we will also be coming to North American retail shortly thereafter and this will not be the last The Walking Dead game series that we do."

At the end of the day, zombie hordes are unstoppable, but they can be impeded – for instance, by tricky doorknobs, flamethrowers, and their most well-known nemesis of all: the pulse-pounding perils of game development. So it was with Walking Dead Episode Two, which managed to stumble and moan its way into the very end of June. Telltale assures, however, that the wait for Episode Three won’t be quite so lengthy. Well, kinda.

(more…)

As a franchise, The Walking Dead has taught me plenty: Don't use a gun when you can use a crossbow, you can't trust anyone (especially your friends), and everyone you love will die, probably violently and with little dignity. Telltale's The Walking Dead: Episode 2 - Starved for Help has added to that wisdom with one more important, life-altering lesson: Don't reformat your computer without backing up the save files of a game that is heavy on story and individual choices.

When I finished Episode 1 on May 1, I was proud of myself for choosing all of the minority actions, ready to set off on a unique storyline for the four following installments. When I reformatted my computer on May 12, it failed to cross my mind that maybe I should check my Steam files first.

This is a lesson I won't soon forget.

Luckily, unlike many of the characters in The Walking Dead, I get to live and learn, and to begin a fresh story with random choices in the second episode. I have a pretty terrible memory, so I figured I'd be able to assimilate any arbitrarily generated choices with reality fairly easily - any of them except one. The climax of the first episode presents players with a high-tension, life-and-death (literally) decision, and I knew that I had ended the game with Doug, the robot enthusiast, by my side. If Starved for Help didn't start me with my little robot-loving, nerd buddy, I'd flip. Fortunately for my blood pressure, I got Doug on the first boot-up, and all was well.

As well as surviving the zombie apocalypse can be, anyway.

It turns out the mythology of The Walking Dead is enough to support more than one game. Activision announced its own game based on the franchise - the TV show, specifically - a first-person shooter developed by Terminal Reality. It's due next year for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

Players take the role of Daryl Dixon, traveling with his brother Merle toward Atlanta, attempting not to get zombitten on the way. An IGN post about the game suggest that players will have the option of using stealth to avoid the zombies, and will have to manage scarce resources. In addition, other characters will appear, and you'll have the choice to have them travel with you or not. Our tip: if they're zombies, don't invite them along.

#thewalkingdead Telltale Games may have a hit on their hands with an adventure-game take on The Walking Dead. But Activision wants to go in a different, more combat-oriented direction with the just-revealed Walking Dead first-person shooter. More »

I'm torn between my hatred of racists and my love of Michael Rooker...

Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic series has certainly proven to be a pliant property over the last few years. On top of the hit TV series prominently featured in AMC's blockbuster lineup, Telltale has been delivering one of the best episodic video game experiences to date in its own Walking Dead video game. That game is far more rooted in the comic series than the TV show, which means that any opportunistic video game publisher could theoretically make their own game based on the TV series' canon and feel totally well and good about having another game called The Walking Dead because it's kind of a different deal, sort of.

Enter Activision. Yes, the Call of Duty publisher has teamed up with developer Terminal Reality to turn The Walking Dead TV series into, what else, a first-person shooter. However, this isn't a fast-paced zombie target shoot, but rather a survival oriented game where the player will have to decide how to manage scarce resources and whether or not to engage the zombie hordes that stand between them and survival. So, Dead Island then, or thereabouts.

Or should I say Dead Island with massively over-the-top racist protagonists. The game will follow the prequel story of Daryl and Merle, who you may remember as the pair of survivalist brothers who also kinda sorta hate anyone who isn't white. Well, that's more Merle, I guess, and in the game you'll largely be playing as Daryl, who is handy with a crossbow (Year of the Bow!) and also less racist. Other characters will enter the mix and you'll have to decide whether to take up with them or go out on your own. Making important character decisions that will have grave impact on how your story plays out? Sounds familiar.

I don't want to be overly dismissive of this game, because hey, Terminal Reality has made some fine products over the years, and it's not like they've shown any actual gameplay yet. I just question the need for another Walking Dead game when we already have a perfectly good one courtesy of Telltale. Then again, I imagine the Venn diagram of people who want the slow-paced, character-heavy adventure of Telltale's game, and people who want a first-person zombie shooter where your best buddy is a guy who hates black people is probably pretty close to two circles standing entirely apart. I bet I know which one will have higher Xbox Live numbers!

IGN has the first full trailer up, if you want to check it out. Again, no gameplay, but there are some pretty graphics that remind you of things that happened on the TV show. Like that goddamn farm...

#thewalkingdead First, the good news: the next installment of Telltale's five-part series of The Walking Dead has a release target. Episode three, "Long Road Ahead," is due out in the middle of August, roughly a month from now. More »

Despite some launch setbacks with its last Walking Dead episode, Telltale Games wants to reassure fans that the third episode in the series - "Long Road Ahead" - launches in "the middle of August." The company's blog announced as much in an apologetic letter, where a company rep said, "Although we can't give you an exact date at this time, we can say that episode three will be ready in the middle of August, and that we and our partners will do all we can to release all platforms and regions as close together as possible."

The Walking Dead's episodic series received critical praise and commercial success since the first episode launched earlier this year. The game's third episode is set for launch this August, with two more planned episodes launching in subsequent months.

#thewalkingdead I know this dance. I've been here before, I've seen this play out. I know how it's all going to end, and for that, I hate this game a little. More »