Before The Walking Dead Season 1 came out, Telltale were all about classic point and click adventure games (Sam & Max, Strong bad, Monkey Island etc) but since the smash hit that was The Walking Dead they seem to be sticking to making games like it, heavily story focused, a lot of player decisions and not many traditional puzzles.

Now don't get me wrong, I love The Walking Dead, it's one of my favourite games this generation and while I haven't played The Wolf Among Us, it looks amazing as well.

The thing is, who will fill their shoes? Yes we have the double fine adventure game, but after that who will be the company to keep classic point and clicks going? Will Telltale ever go back to how they made games before?

I'm interested in your thoughts.

There are other companies doing point and click stuff. Deponia guys and Gemin Rue people.

Telltale may do some classic stuff when they stop being so hot and picking up big licenses.

I'm just about as big a fan of classic point and click adventure games as you're likely to find, and frankly I'm not sure I'd want them trying to go back, seeing as their last attempts resulted in Back to the Future: The Game and Jurassic Park.

As for who would fill the void? I'd love to see more from the team(s) that made The Book of Unwritten Tales and The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles.

I think they still own the license to the stuff you mentioned before so if they were to produce more of those license I couldn't see them apply this format to those games. As long as its not Jurassic Park's gameplay I'm cool with whatever.

Still waiting for Strongbad's Cool Game For Attractive People Season 2 and Tales of Monkey Island 2.

I don't think so. I think that formula was played out and almost consistently failed to keep up interest over the course of 5 episodes. The Walking Dead was not just successful, it was critically acclaimed and held everyone's attention for the course of the entire season. That's special.

If you want traditional adventure games there are smaller studios making them.

I'd say probably not. And I for one am glad. Not that I hate puzzles but more often than not the reason I've ever liked adventure games was everything besides the puzzles. The puzzles were usually nonsensical.

Once people get sick of this new style then they will probably try and go back to the old school stuff while they work on developing something new.

They ain't going back until their current operation completely crashes and burns.

I think that the market for point and click adventures is probably saturated by other, smaller developers right now.

I think they are happy they have developed something new in-house that seems to work. It makes it only better that they have previous franchises and the old way to do it in their portfolio. I'm sure they will eventually do something, just to stay in shape, and keep franchises relevant. I do not know about Strongbad, the humor there might be hard to replicate.

Jurassic Park was essentially the exact same game as The Walking Dead, if you haven't played it, you should give it a shot because it wasn't a terrible game.

Videogames are INCREDIBLY trendy. (They don't "evolve"). So, anytime there is success, you find everyone lean hard in that direction. I honestly think Telltale is going to experience what Bioware experienced. That is to say, Bioware was the darling of the games industry making one type of game that was very good. KOTOR, Jade Empire, Etc. Then Mass Effect 2 hit like a megaton and they went, "Okay! Everybody lean hard in this direction!" and it blew up in their face with Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3. Now they're trying to backpedal. I think Telltale will experience a similar blowback as people get tired of the formula of The Walking Dead toward the end of Season 2/at the end of The Wolf Unleashed.

I thought Dragon Age 2 blow back was due to the gameplay not being traditional D&D type stuff. While Mass Effect 3 was due to the ending.

Every franchise was different. Back in the early nineties, pretty much every game was an adventure game. Even then, when they were new, people hated the POOR ones. Now I feel like a lot of the poor ones get held up as examples of the genre as though ALL adventure games were like that.

Ironically, the LucasArts adventure games were some of the ones that had the most esoteric and terrible puzzles. LucasArts being the guys who started up TellTale. LucasArts games had the best stories, technology and art, but in terms of Puzzles, only Maniac Mansion 2 had decent puzzles. Sam and Max, one of my favorite games, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, etc. all had incredibly bizarre puzzle solutions that were usually supposed to be more funny than make any kind of immediate sense.

I hope not. Telltale never impressed me with their previous games until "The Walking Dead." Hell, Walking Dead didn't do it for me either, I watched Hannah over at the Yogscast play through it, but "The Wolf Among Us" is nearly perfect (imho). I'm super excited for "Tales from the Borderlands," and their Game of Thrones game, too.

However, I want to make it clear that their previous games weren't necessarily bad, just that they never clicked (teehee) with me. Except "Jurassic Park," I don't think that one impressed anyone.

Nah, Dragon Age 2 attempted to do what Mass Effect 2 did, which is to say, lean hard on the story and dramatically simplify the "game" aspects. It's the same thing they did to Mass Effect 1, which worked out well for them. Then they said "do that! But more-so!" The same with Mass Effect 3. People disliked the ending, but more than that, they disliked the lack of player agency in the course of the story. Story over gameplay.

Yeah pretty much. Huge LucasArts adventure fan and the puzzles were never a draw, even if some were enjoyable. The conclusion Telltale is arriving at now always seemed like the way for these games to go.

I haven't played Jurassic Park so maybe I'm wrong, but isn't it nearly the exact same gameplay as The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us?

To be fair, I haven't played Jurassic Park, so you're right that I should at least give it a shot. Though I did play Back to the Future. It felt kind of like a weaker version of all their earlier games.

I remember loving Full Throttle, but hating the gameplay. There weren't even really puzzles to speak of. It was like "click on this dumpster to hide in it". "Click on this ramp to pick it up and change the angle on it" etc.

Nah, well kinda. Jurassic Park was more like Heavy Rain where every little thing your character does is action timed with a button prompt. For example, some parts of the game just required you to be sneaking which required you to gently tap the LB and RB button (xbox 360 controller) in rhythm. Where compared to walking dead all you had to do was push the stick forward and it will do it for you. They streamlined it better in games after Jurassic Park where the action prompts made more sense.

@nekusakuraba: hmm interesting point there are some point and click games with a "clasic formula" but don't expect the same writing you get from a Telltale just hit steam and look up maybe you will fiind something interesting there

I think I could safely say point and click adventures could stand to disappear for another decade.

I think there's room for both. I still want a Tales of Monkey Island Season 2 in the vein of the 'traditional' adventure game.

The reason I'm not much of a fan of adventure games anymore is because Adventure Games used to be, to me, Roleplaying games where you didn't kill anything.

In traditional tabletop RPGs, you could fight if you wanted, but you could also talk your way out of situations or improvise solutions if you could think up a way to do that. When they started making game videogame RPGs, especially on console, they were limited to only have the combat options. If a door was locked, you said "who do I have to kill to get this door open?"

Adventure games took the opposite tack and said "okay, we're still emulating tabletop RPGs, but there is no combat system at all." Instead of "who do I have to kill to get this door open!" it was "where can I Find a key? What can I trade for it? Who can I talk to? How can I improvise a solution to unlock the door?" etc.

Now "adventure game" basically means "movie with random button presses in it" which doesn't seem at all like the genre I used to enjoy.

Although, I REALLY liked The Wolf Among Us because It felt more like an actual adventure game than The Walking Dead does.

I'd be surprised if they don't at least revisit Sam & Max once more at some point, but I think that era of Telltale is done. Once they got the Universal deal, everything changed. And as much as it kills me to say as an old-school adventure superfan, it changed for the better. Point & clicks needed a structural overhaul, and Telltale came up a great one.

I miss the days of small-time Telltale. But as a fan of them since Sam & Max Season 1, it's awesome to watch them grow and succeed.

I don't want to decide for you, but Jurassic Park is absolutely horrible. The characters and situations are insanely stupid. There's a couple highlights there and there, but the rest is pretty horrible. And this comes from a guy who bought it on day one and was super excited for it.

Hopefully they'll at least return to some to those games.

I would love another Sam & Max game. As long as they bring back Bosco this time around.

That was part of it (Dragon Age 2) ... but I think what hurt that game the most was the very obvious lack of time put into it ... repeating dungeons etc. ... To this day DA2 is the only Bioware game I only played once. Everything else they made I played at least two times :/

I really hope not, I thought their games prior to Walking Dead ranged from 'Sort of okay' to 'That was fucking awful'

The writing was worse, the production values were a lot worse, the engine felt incredibly clunky and their puzzles often fell into Illogical traps.

Tell Tale: Good Story tellers but pretty poor game designers... so less game please

I think many of the companies doing Point and Click now are much better at it then Telltale ever was. I'm starting to believe they were always a core Story company, and only wrapped their Stories in puzzles because, at the time, it was carazy talk to have a like Walking Dead that wasn't puzzle this and puzzle that, and those are among the worst moments of WD.

Maybe eventually, it seems hard to say, but for the immediate future they'll probably be way more focused on the story-centric stuff. Personally that's the way I prefer it, but as others have said there are some other companies out there who are making adventure games based more around traditional point-and-click gameplay if that's your thing.

Amazing what such a small change can do for a game, isn't it? I remember the Quick Look for Jurassic Park being loaded with stupid QTEs and such, but I didn't spend enough time with it to properly differentiate it from TWD and TWAU.

@bbalpert: They actually made a new adventure game not too long ago called The Raven if you want to check that out.

It kind of is, but there are FAR more button prompts. For instance, there are some chapters which are just you watching a little movie and pressing the buttons when you're prompted to do so and nothing else - no dialogue or anything. It also has some puzzles, one at the end of chapter 3 I recall being difficult due to you having to memorize a stupid chart to get this code right. Furthermore, the most crippling part of the game in my book was the lack of any likable characters. And finally, while some people like to claim that The Walking Dead is a very linear game with little difference depending on the choice, Jurassic Park is far more on rails - you don't get any choice at all except for near the very end you can choose whether a specific character dies or not, and it doesn't change the story one bit whether they are gone or alive because it's the very end of the game anyway.

In The Walking Dead, your choices will at least change future dialogue options, and may even slightly affect something later on, which made it feel that much more dynamic. Jurassic Park may be similar to The Walking Dead, but it has none of its strengths. Which makes sense, because Jurassic Park came out first, and they learned from their mistakes from that game and fixed almost every single one in The Walking Dead.

I guess? I mean, I agree, but at the same time I think it's hard to say. They keep bringing in people like Gary Whitta and whatnot to write for their games, so it's not really "TellTale" that's doing it. But, I don't know enough about them or their structure to really say anything about them.

Well I think the difference between JP and TWD, and even TWD and TWAU is a focus on actual gameplay. Each game being better than the last. I had actually resolved to watch TWAU on YouTube because I didn't enjoy TWD. I just found it frustrating that I was watching a movie while holding a controller. But about 7 minutes into watching the walking dead, I turned off the video I was watching and bought it because I was like "THIS I WANT TO PLAY."

That's are in games these days.

Telltale is a company evolving, they are people changing and their games will change with them. Just enjoy the ride, and the three months between episodes.