So, I'm pretty sure we've all heard the news. TellTale Games is experiencing internal problems and is cancelling Season 4 of TWD. Emotions are at an all time high from what I've seen - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, just to name a few. As someone who has been a fan of TellTale's TWD since Season 1, I feel like it's only necessary for me to make this thread as a place where we can share our thoughts, feelings and memories about the franchise.
We can all agree that Season 1 was by far the best season. It featured some of the best characters (Clem, Lee, Kenny, Omid, just to name a few) and the best storyline. Like the other seasons, choices don't really matter in that you always get the same ending, the only things changing are some voice lines and perhaps another path that leads to the same place. However, when I played the game, I didn't notice this at all. It was some sort of illusion where I thought that choices mattered based on things like "Clementine will remember that". The game was so good that it was one of the few games that actually made me shred some tears when Lee died, with whom I was somewhat bonded with, only for Clementine to shoot him. It just felt like a kick to the stomach, as if I had a harder time breathing. I would only get so close to that emotional level when you see David die in S3E5.
Then came Season 2, and to me, I still can't decide whether it was worth buying or not. I quickly got the taste that choices didn't matter due to the fact that if you chose to save Pete in episode 1, Nick will still be alive, as if he's important to the story. Which brings me to another point, what was really the point of Nick? I personally liked him as a character because at the time I wasn't the most emotionally stable guy and so, I would naturally relate to a character who is somewhat depressed. But to just see him die in E4 made me quite angry at TellTale for throwing away a character with so much potential. And that seems to be a recurring theme in Season 2 and later on - throwing away characters with potential. When playing the game, I was genuinely mad when Pete died so early. I also wished that there would've been more Alvin, but we didn't get that. The problem with S2 was that the characters you met really didn't matter as they all died - literally everyone who appeared apart from AJ later died or became unknown. There were however a few things I liked about S2, for example Carver and Howe's (which imo should've gotten more development) and my quilty pleasures tingling when Kenny came back because "he was lucky". Overall, Season 2 to me was messy, but not bad per se.
When it was revealed in Season 3 that the main focus would be Javier and his gang, I was disappointed at first, but later on I grew to not dislike him. Javier was fine, the other characters were fine as well, but the thing that S3 ruined for me was the lazy explanation of Clementine appearing in the first place. When I saw Kenny and Jane being killed by the most stupid things (Jane is understandable, but Kenny, really??), I was salty and literally thinking in my head "How dare they!" because of how they killed Kenny, a fan favorite since the moment he appeared in S1, to then have him killed in a car accident seems silly. This is also the first season that I didn't buy (I only bought S1+400 Days and S2), but I had watched more than five playthroughs of different YouTubers, with my biggest focus being Pewdiepie's playthrough (who isn't the screaming man-child as of lately, and someone who I will mention later on) as he actually knows what he likes and dislikes (and because I've watched him since 2012, but that's besides the point). In Season 3 came a lot of ups and downs - starting with the downs, the graphics really sucked, which is weird considering that they had "upgraded" the engine. This is mainly due to 2 things - my personal taste in graphics and the objectively bad engine. Characters disappearing in the background, the bad lip syncing (which was an issue since S1 imo) and the overall style just wasn't appealing to me. I did however have some guilty pleasure moments however, namely David's death, and E4 as a whole. Back to the downs, Jesus' appearance was a huge question mark to me, as he had the same appearance pre-AOW, but was present in a post-AOW world. Besides that, Season 3 was the season where I really distanced myself from the series, and the Walking Dead franchise as a whole, including the TV show and the Comics which started to suck more and more.
Then, at last, Season 4, the only season where I'm genuinely not interested in. I haven't seen a playthrough of it simply because I don't care anymore. Perhaps the thing I noticed most about S4 was the return of Lilly, which didn't suprise me at all, as they needed a character that would bring the old-school players, like me, back. And then came the news about the whole TTG drama, which again, didn't suprise me.
TellTale Games hasn't aged well (just like their engine lmao), and now, they can finally be put to rest. The first season of TWD was the kick off that TTG needed, but ironically also turned out to be its downfall, like how Ceasar started expanding Rome, which led to its downfall and -insert other historical comparison-. While the story of Clementine is a book that finished mid-sentence, the story of TTG has been written to its last page. I don't see it rising again like a phoenix from the ashes. TWD now remains as just a memory of my younger self, someone who was enthusiastically editing the pages of the TWD characters back in the day, a relic of my past self. It could always be the case that the remaining episodes will be released, but to me, the game has seen its end after six years. Although I'm not even that interested in the whole TWD franchise as a whole anymore, I still check up on the latest scoops to fill up the whole that was created by the constant let-downs of the franchise in my heart.
Now, for the epilogue of this thread, I'd like to mention that Pewdiepie's video about the subject summarises this thread really well and has inspired me to write this in the first place. The death of TellTale isn't necessarily the death of story-telling games, but just simply the death of a company. You have Quantic Dreams who released Detroit: Become Human a few months ago, which became an instant succes and is one of my favorite games, even though I've never played it myself. But to see the potential of story telling games, to see how many different endings it really can have, it made TT's TWD look like a joke when it comes to making decisions.
RIP TellTale's The Walking Dead, a game that has shaped my interests for the past six years. 2012-2018.