Telltale hasn’t been in the most enviable position of late. Their recent games haven’t performed well–critically, commercially, or technically–last year they laid off nearly 100 of their staff, and they are currently embroiled in a legal battle with ousted co-founder and former CEO, Kevin Bruner. Once revered for their point-and-click, choice-based adventure games, the studio has suffered from a lack of innovation and follow through. The big “super show” project announced back in 2015 seems to be vaporware at this point and gamers are suffering fatigue from games that lack any kind of evolution.
One of those problems is the elephant in the room, a flagging game engine that simply can’t keep up with demands. People have been criticizing Telltale’s game engine since the last generation of consoles, but the studio has insisted on using Telltale Tool for the long haul. A report by Variety today hints that Telltale may finally be moving past their dated engine in favor of Unity for future releases. According the the Variety piece, The Walking Dead: The Final Season will be the last game to release on the Telltale Tool engine, with the recently announced Stranger Things game shifting workflow over to Unity. Most surprising is how good The Walking Dead: The Final Season looks in the leaked gameplay footage, despite being on the older engine. Of course, new engines come with their own growing pains, and the studio will need to learn ...