Geoff Keighley has shared new images of The Wolf Among Us 2.
The organizer of The Video Game Awards and Summer Games Fest shared four new pictures from the upcoming title on Twitter. We will also share them with you scattered in this article below.
The Wolf Among Us 2 was originally announced in the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con, but ran into such a complicated series of hurdles that that history will comprise the rest of this article.
We’ll start off with the hard part. Mismanagement within the original Telltale led to them taking on too many projects, which did not turn out at the same quality as their original successful titles at release. While they tried to roll things back with new management, by 2018 the studio had failed to secure some new deals and funding.
Telltale went out of business, but to avoid filing for bankruptcy outright, they had filed for assignment instead. Under this arrangement, some of the licensed properties were taken back by their IP owners. Famously, The Walking Dead was given back to Skybound, who then hired some Telltale staff to finish The Walking Dead: The Final Season. For all intents and purposes, the original Telltale Games, much like the original Atari, is dead.
Telltale’s assets were managed by Sherwood Partners, and would eventually sell most of those assets to LCG Entertainment. LCG founded a new Telltale Games in 2018, which is, once again, a completely different company. They hired some of the former Telltale Games staff, and renewed work on the games that they still had the licenses too.
One of those games was Batman: The Enemy Within, released as a bundle with its predecessor, Batman: The Telltale Series, in 2019. In the same year at The Game Awards, the new Telltale Games revealed that they are once again working on The Wolf Among Us 2. This time, they will be working on this title with AdHoc Studio, a new narrative game studio comprised of employees from the original Telltale.
We cannot end this without pointing out that this new Telltale was part of the wave of employee layoffs in the video game industry, confirming that they had had layoffs last October. They did not confirm the number of employees affected, but stressed that The Wolf Among Us 2 and other projects were still in production.
But the strangest turn of events occurred last September 2023. The Wolf Among Us is a prequel series for the comic book franchise Fables, originally created by Bill Willingham for DC Comics. Bill declared the Fables franchise to be public domain, after years of squabbling with DC over royalties and other issues.
If Bill’s claim is valid, DC still owns all the comics that have already been published, but other entities, including fans, and even other companies, can make their own Fables comics, video games, movies, etc without talking to DC or Bill. DC claimed that they still owned the rights to Fables as a franchise, but nothing so far has led to legal action.
This game that we thought might never come out, could itself be caught in the crossfire of this entirely separate issue that neither the old or new Telltale had anything to do with. And it’s all of this baggage that we see signs of progress for the title, and hopes that we will see more from Telltale and Adhoc soon.
