The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Minecraft, Borderlands, Guardians of the Galaxy… the reign of Telltale Games, at its peak, was actually one thing to behold. Between 2010 and 2016, the studio churned out numerous video games that outlined the dialog in gaming. You couldn’t open a gaming magazine (or navigate the homepage of a gaming website) with out one thing from Telltale making itself identified. Its video games had been in all places, all the time.

Until they weren’t. The studio hit important mass, and the standard of its video games suffered: from 2017 onwards, after a restructuring of the studio that affected the cadence of its releases, the studio fell from grace. In attempting to recreate the magic of The Walking Dead, Telltale creatively suffocated its workers and homogenised its output. A sequence of gaffes dirty the corporate’s repute. As rapidly because the world fell in love with the studio, it forgot about it. The second season of the Wolf Among Us, in addition to a deliberate Stranger Things sport, had been cancelled.

But that’s to not say there’s something fallacious with the system: actually, fairly the other is true. During its top, individuals beloved Telltale as a result of it harkened again to an period of basic, narrative-focused journey video games. You don’t promote 28 million-plus episodes if there’s one thing basically fallacious with the best way your video games work, do you? To that finish, you possibly can see why Gearbox Software partnered with “key alumni” of the unique Telltale Games narrative staff revisit probably the most cult titles within the studio’s again catalogue: Tales From the Borderlands.

“Working with some key alumni from Telltale, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about his genre. We asked ‘how does it work? What are the best practices?’ But, also, then, we want to do something that is special and unique to Gearbox,” says Lin Joyce, head of writing at Gearbox Software. “How are we going to scaffold on to that – keep what works, push this genre forward into places it hasn’t yet been? To show what more it could do?”

Joyce tells us that, to this finish, the staff made some fairly large revisions to how the Telltale system works. Perhaps the largest change that she outlined was eliminating the textual content immediate within the nook of the display that tells you ‘[a character] will remember that’. It simply didn’t match with Gearbox’s imaginative and prescient – even when it’s a key trope for video games of this ilk.

“We went away from a dialogue from saying ‘so and so will remember that’ because we now have access to [better] technology,” says Frédéric Scheubel, producer at Gearbox Studio Quebec. “We shot everything using performance capture. So, the intention was that the impact should be felt through acting, not prompts: if you offended a friend, or if you made a friend joyful, you’ll see that through acting.”

Scheubel concedes that this implies extra work for the participant; you have to be invested extra emotionally (or at the least extra actively) within the sport to see what impacts your selections are making, this time round. You can’t simply inform an obnoxious lie and have the sport say “you probably shouldn’t have done that”. You’ll want to make use of widespread sense and emotional intelligence as an alternative.

“It gives some work to the player, to understand ‘okay, what choice did I make? And what moment will this influence?’ It’s something we’ve intentionally focused on to improve the user experience.”

And you’ll must ask your self this fairly regularly on this, the non secular sequel to the primary Tales From The Borderlands title. You’ll management three brand-new characters to the universe; the altruistic scientist Anu, her formidable, “streetwise” brother Octavio, and the pissed-off, capitalism-weary Fran. They’re every having the worst day of their lives, they usually’re all losers. The interaction between them is central to the sport – as you’d count on from a title on this style, on this franchise – and also you’ll must handle their relationships in case you don’t wish to turn into simply one other useless cog within the unstoppable megacorporation machine.

New Tales From the Borderlands truly looks like a breath of contemporary air for the sequence; by specializing in the ‘little guy’ fairly than the superpowered Vault Hunter or the wise-cracking CEO sociopath, Gearbox has the chance to inject a bit extra humanity and humility into the sequence – while nonetheless attending to pop a joke or two in that now-traditional Borderlands fashion.

Telltale video games ran their course within the 2010s, however in discarding the tropeiest little bit of the system in favour of one thing altogether extra human, we could see – as soon as once more – why the style grew to become so influential within the first place.

New Tales from the Borderlands releases on October 21, 2022 for PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Switch.