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Coming off The Walking Dead, its most successful and widely acclaimed graphic adventure to date, Telltale Games has finally found its stride. While previous titles like Tales of Monkey Island and Back to the Future only found niche audiences, The Walking Dead brought Telltale’s episodic storytelling into the mainstream. Though it was light on gameplay, it lured in gamers with its interactive narrative, gripping its audience emotionally by giving them power over the story and allowing them to forge bonds with the characters. What do you do for an encore after creating such a captivating formula? You build on it, of course.
Telltale is ready for this challenge with a new project: The Wolf Among Us, based on Bill Willingham's Fables comic book series from Vertigo. In Willingham’s world, classic fairytales collide with reality. Every character is real, but lives in a separate world. Once an evil entity named the Adversary threatens their homelands, they flee to a place he would never look: our world. They hide among us with their powers intact, living an everyday existence, hoping to keep their secret under wraps. These famed characters also have a darker edge than the stories we’ve heard about them. Happy endings? Forget it. Prince Charming is a womanizing cheater, and Cinderella uses her good looks to exploit information as a spy.
Telltale prepped for The Wolf Among Us with as much precision as possible. Lead writer Pierre Shorette absorbed himself with the comics and lore as soon as he was on the project, going as far as making James Jean’s illustrated covers for Fables the wallpaper for every device he had. Shorette wanted to make sure he knew the personalities of the characters to a tee, which meant going back to the original source material: the fables themselves. Shorette’s goal was to create a story that felt like it was written by one of the comic’s writers. “I think that Fables fans will be happy and think that we are filling in some of the gaps and opportunities opened up by the comic,” Shorette says.
The Wolf Among Us is a prequel to the comic books focused on a time when Ichabod Crane ruled as deputy mayor. It follows the headstrong sheriff of Fabletown, Bigby Wolf, formerly known as the Big Bad Wolf, as he embarks on a murder investigation.
Telltale chose to create a prequel to benefit both newcomers and longtime fans. Everything should line up to the first page of volume one of the comics, answering questions about how characters got to their respective positions and giving deeper insight into their motivations. “It’s a way for new fans to get into the story, but it’s also a way for longtime Fables fans to be able to look at that first issue in a slightly different way,” says lead designer Ryan Kaufman.
Choice and consequence is at the center of The Wolf Among Us. Telltale monitored data from The Walking Dead to discover what choices ended up being most meaningful. “We like that 50/50 divide when we look at stats,” Bruner says. “If everyone goes down one direction, then it really wasn’t that interesting of a choice.”
Making choice matter in so many different ways has been one of the biggest challenges during development. “Sometimes it’s a lot of work to make all the possibilities interesting...you get to a point where one really interesting thing could happen and one really lame thing could happen and you just have to cut that,” Bruner says. “If we were making a movie, that one interesting line would just rock, but we’re not making a movie. We’re making an interactive experience, and if we can’t make all paths lead to an interesting place then it’s not a good interactive story.”
To further drive replayability, The Wolf Among Us gives you the choice of when you go to certain locations in the story, which allows players the chance to see the story unfold in completely different ways. Two events will happen at the same time, and the timeline of the other event continues no matter what you choose to experience. Once you show up to the event you put off, it’s happening under a different set of circumstances. “To experience [the story] from a lot of different perspectives [and] to see what’s happening everywhere, all the time, you’re going to have to play the game multiple times, which is something we didn’t do in The Walking Dead,” Bruner says.
