A few weeks back when it was announced that Skybound Games would lead the charge to complete Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season, there was talk of reaching out to now former Telltale employees to finish the game. And in a recent lengthy AMA on Reddit, Skybound CEO Ian Howe revealed that Skybound’s goal is to build the entire development team out of ex-Telltalers.
“The plan is for it to be staffed 100% by former Telltale staff, the only time we’d look elsewhere is if we can’t fill a particular role from former TT people,” Howe wrote. “I can’t go into details but the team will be working directly for Skybound to complete game.” That’s good news for those employees who were unceremoniously terminated following Telltale’s collapse.
It won’t be an entire team transfer, however, as “people roll on and off of projects” as their development progresses. “That means there are people who were on the team who were close to rolling off onto something else,” says Howe. “It’s unfair to ask someone to come back and do a couple of weeks work, especially if that would get in the way of another job offer, so this is just one example of some of the challenges we face.”
As for the story, Howe says that the story won’t change because of the switch in companies, and that “there is a long standing collaboration between the writers and Skybound over story approval and all the same people will still be involved.”
As to when this all gets underway, Howe explains that development hasn’t yet resumed, nor is there a date for Episode 3 (or for the resuming of sales of the previous episodes). However, Howe said he expects Episode 3 to be out before the end of the year. “I’ll be very disappointed if we can’t make that happen,” he said.
And in an interesting twist, there may be more to come out of this whole deal, including potential DLC or more Telltale-style games!
“Our first priority it to complete the story, once we feel that we’re in good shape to do that, we’ll look at all the other possibilities and we love hearing the ideas and suggestions. There [is] nothing in active development yet, but we’re always talking about how we can tell interesting stories in games. I’m really spending a lot of time at the moment looking at new technologies and how that can allow us to deliver strong narrative based games.”
Hey, if this means that we can get The Wolf Among Us back, I’d be all for it!