Before I get into this, I would like to make it clear that I enjoy the games that Telltale makes immensely. This is not meant to say that their games are awful, they are some of the best stories I’ve ever experienced while playing games, but they do all suffer from the same problems due to the engine that they run on.
All of Telltale’s games run on the Telltale Tool, an engine that they developed. While it’s received improvements over the years, it does not run at the quality that it should by this point. All of their games still suffer from horrifically long loading screens, lag, and character models not loading correctly. Occasionally they might just freeze entirely.
Telltale’s major releases rely on the players timing while making decisions during the course of the game. If there is any game where you don’t want it to lag or freeze during your playthrough, it’s a Telltale game. During conversations you’re given a limited amount of time to respond appropriately to any NPC’s. During any action sequence you need to make sure that you are paying attention and quickly react to any button prompts that pop up, or you’ll find yourself replaying the same scene over and over due to multiple deaths.
When Telltale released The Walking Dead Season One back in 2012, it became a major success despite the technical issues that it suffered from. It was critically acclaimed for its wonderful characters, emotional story, and its emphasis on player choice. It won several game of the year awards, and people for the most part over-looked the technical problems that it had. That’s not to say that it didn’t have any, because they were there, but it was easy to forgive at the time when Telltale had created such a beautiful game despite those issues. The Walking Dead was basically Telltale’s first big hit. They had made over a dozen games previously, but none that garnered the attention and love that The Walking Dead did. It was easy to ignore whenever the game lagged or you had to sit through another painfully long loading screen because it was a new and fresh experience for a lot of people. Now, over 3 years later, that experience can be extremely irritating when it’s marred by several and frequent technical issues.
When you think about a lot of Telltale’s newer games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, and Game of Thrones, you wouldn’t think that it would take a particularly powerful engine to make them run well. They run on mobile devices, so you’d assume they’d run beautifully on a console (I played each game on an Xbox 360 or Xbox One). Visually, the graphics seem very simple. The art style is definitely unique, but it isn’t realistic at all. The gameplay in each of those games is fairly basic as well. Normally it just requires you to walk around a small environment and look at or pick up certain objects. When it involves some more interaction, it’s in the form of quick-time events, where all you need to do is simply press a couple of buttons at the right time for the scene to play out. None of that seems like it should be taxing on an engine, yet somehow each of those games still suffer from various technical issues that should have been fixed by now.
While playing The Wolf Among Us, I remember just staring at my TV screen waiting for the game to load after I tried to start the first episode. I couldn’t imagine why it would be taking as long as it did. Even between scenes, the game would somehow stutter and lag when it was just showing the outside of a building. There were times when Bigby, the playable character, would just freeze as I tried to walk across a room. It was ridiculous, but I figured whatever, I’m sure it’ll be fixed eventually. It hasn’t.
Once Telltale announced that they were going to make games in the Borderlands and Game of Thrones universes, I immediately knew that I was going to buy those games, as I’m a huge fan of both series’. I also figured that hopefully they would rework their engine and fix it so I wouldn’t get frustrated at the game again. Those games released in 2014, surely Telltale would have had the time to at least make sure they would run well. I was wrong.
During my playthrough of Tales from the Borderlands, I even felt that some of the problems were worse. There were several instances where text wouldn’t load, characters would freeze during a cutscene (while the audio would still continue), and the game would lag so that I’d miss crucial timed decisions. I found myself actually needing to replay certain scenes because I’d miss what had happened due to lag.
Game of Thrones suffers from the same issues, except for some reason I feel like the visuals are also slightly worse in it as well. Most of Telltale’s games have pretty distinct clear lines and sharp visuals for the most part, but a lot of the character models and backgrounds in Game of Thrones look almost blurred or smudged. Maybe it’s the look they were trying to go for, although I can’t imagine why, but it doesn’t seem like it’s at the same quality of some of their other games. There were also several instances where the character animations came off as stiff and unnatural. I’ve seen Telltale do better than that, and it’s disheartening to see them regress in some ways.
It’s 2015, and they’ve launched several games since The Walking Dead in 2012. It was easy to forgive Telltale’s mistakes the first time, but it’s something that should have been fixed by now. They can’t keep releasing games like they are just because they have a track record of crafting amazing stories. As I said as the beginning, this isn’t meant to say that their games are terrible. I think that Telltale has made some amazing games that I absolutely love, but that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect, and they don’t get a free pass just because they have fantastic stories. Overall, I even think that their strengths outweigh their faults. But when their faults happen quite frequently, it’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. It’s completely unacceptable for them to be launching games like that. Telltale needs to go back to the drawing board and rebuild their entire engine. Whenever they announce a new series, I find myself wishing that they’d focus on their current projects first.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.