Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season 3 will be released later this year, Mashable reports.
If you haven’t played Season 2 yet, you may wish to stop reading at this point in order to avoid spoilers.
Season 2 concluded Clementine’s story in a manner that brought closure but also presented Telltale with the problem of addressing the vast range of different ending in future.
Addressing how the developer plans to keep the game going while remaining faithful to all of the possible choices, Telltale Games CEO Kevin Bruner told Mashable “When we got to Season 2, we had a plan in the back of our minds of how we would make all these endings keep those threads going forward.”
Bruner says Season 3 will use an “unexpected” approach instead of neatly tying everything together so the story progress.
“From a role-playing, interactive storytelling point of view, it is not from the bag of tricks that we’ve ever shown anybody before,” he teased.
“The way that we’re dealing with and validating and retaining all those different playthroughs is really cool and unexpected and, I think, pretty innovative from the storytelling point of view.”
Telltale hopes to expand the reach of the game with Season 3 and introduce fans who may love the TV show but are not invested in the previous season into the series.
The developer is also working on a solution for importing decisions from previous seasons given that they were largely released before Telltale’s cloud system kept track of player choices.
“We’ve got a strategy to help Season 3 players … collect all their data from the previous games. [W]e didn’t have the cloud services in Season 1 that we have now,” Bruner said. “So we’re going to have a solution for everybody that we’re not talking about it yet.”
Telltale is also developing The Walking Dead: Michonne. The first season was released in February while the second comes out next week. The final episode launches in April.
It was recently confirmed that Telltale’s Batman will be released this summer.
