Telltale Games: The Necromancy Among Us

[ShineCero]

I see, so the final season is on board of finishing... hopefully the team will get reasonable work hours and not an hellhole some of the employees suffered through.

 

[LoopyPanda]

After almost a year of being laid to rest with its last breath being the conclusion of TWDFinal, Telltale Games had risen up from its ashes and no widespread coverage of it had really taken place until the 2019 Game Awards (which may or may not have been a flop). At least, nobody really talked about it until December.

However, it's not quite the same Telltale: it has acquired a second life upon its "assets" (whatever was left of it anyway) being bought by a new company called LCG Entertainment. Not much is really publicly available about them other than that they're a holding company who decided to invest in TTG after it went defunct (there is a website of the same name but it's an unrelated music company).​

Blurb from Telltale's official press release section: [Credit to u/ThirdComingOfKenny on the Walking Dead TTG subreddit who posted this link]​

About LCG Entertainment/Telltale Games 

LCG Entertainment is a privately held company, headquartered in Malibu with a satellite studio in Corte Madera, California. LCG Entertainment owns the brand, assets and various IP from the original Telltale Games company. Formerly an award-winning independent developer and publisher of both original and licensed IP games for every major interactive platform, Telltale Games pioneered the episodic delivery of digital gaming content. Initially founded in 2004, Telltale won numerous accolades for its best-selling game series, including The Walking Dead, Batman: The Telltale Series, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, and more. LCG Entertainment will be operating and marketing games under the Telltale brand going forward. For more information on the new Telltale Games, please visit www.telltale.com.

Beyond that, I didn't find much about who is running it other than people professed to be industry veterans. However, what apparently sets them apart from their predecessor is that they are promising to host a "non-crunch environment" under the new management (source). They seem fairly aware of the skepticism but are determined to do their employees right.

The main announcement at the Game Awards was an official Wolf Among Us 2 -- but it is NOT the canned sequel Telltale had cut off in order to divert their skeleton crew towards finishing Walking Dead's Final Season. Apparently it's been completely rebooted and they're working with some ex-TT members. Which is a bit confusing considering they didn't rebrand the name, so we basically have OLD and NEW Telltale to refer to.

Source:
The first major game out of the new Telltale is The Wolf Among Us 2. Details are sparse, but Ottilie says that this is a “complete reboot” of the game. It will not be associated with a previously announced Wolf Among Us sequel that was announced by the old Telltale. Which, again, adds a layer of confusion to Telltale’s current situation.

As announced, The Wolf Among Us 2 will be on a new, Unreal-based engine. But the company says it is “in the process of recreating the most important aspects of the Telltale tool for the new pipeline." To help, Telltale hired Zac Litton, the former VP of Engineering at the former Telltale and head of the Telltale Tool, as CTO.

Telltale also reached out to AdHoc to develop The Wolf Among Us 2. Adhoc is a separate company made up of ex-Telltale developers including The Wolf Among Us 1 directors Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart and The Wolf Among Us writer Pierre Shorette.

On working with Adhoc, Ottilie says:

"We approached AdHoc. We started the conversation very early on in the process because we really wanted The Wolf Among Us 2 to be a faithful sequel to the original and to be the first new game to enter development at the new Telltale. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the project with the team and AdHoc, making sure that this would be a good partnership The team at AdHoc was always our first choice to lead the narrative and cinematic direction for this game, and we are thrilled to be working with them."

I'm not quite sure how they can actually reboot something that got canned though, especially if people who directed the original are on board. Maybe changes to the style of gameplay on the new Telltale Engine? (whatever this means... It better not mean the barebones "click to choose an action that ultimately won't matter" format that everyone's sick of by now. Give people actual gameplay. lol)
Or maybe they even scrapped the proposed story altogether since they have the final say now, but they ultimately intend to make a faithful adaptation.

For the purposes of simplicity, I'll just be changing the thread name. Even though the original "The Closing Among Us" was a pretty good thread title. But this one is still punny.