The Walking Dead from Telltale Games is about to enter its third season. Titled The New Frontier, it follows Clementine from the previous two seasons as she continues to grow into a young woman.
Being the third in a series of games known for their decision making and save transfers, The New Frontier runs into a problem of save transfers for those who have updated to a new console or somehow lost their old saves. It could potentially even bar new players who find it too daunting to download and play the first two seasons before taking a crack at the third. That is until they announced the story generator. Telltale CEO Kevin Bruner expands on their reason for the generator:
"It’s been four years since we launched The Walking Dead Season One, and so much has happened since that game exploded for us! For the first time we had millions and millions of players and it’s been skyrocketing ever since […] Now we’re here, four years later. We've released “400 Days”, Season Two and explored a whole new aspect of the The Walking Dead with the “Michonne” mini-series. We now have 14 different Walking Dead episodes spread across a dozen or so different devices. When we were getting ready for “A New Frontier” we faced a problem: how do we make sure all these players can continue their story when they may not have their old device and save game, or their platform isn’t supported any longer?"
The story generator is the answer to these dilemmas. It takes 44,000 playthroughs and examines 2,200 choices made within them, including dialogue choices made, items clicked on, items used, etc. This brought their observed data points to 96 million. After lots of fancy math and analysis, this ultimately boils down to 42 different paths the players took in the game. "The game is kind of like a weird "personality test" that lets you know who you are (or at least who you’re pretending to be)."
The story generator starts with these 42 paths and proceeds to ask the player questions. As these questions are answered, it closes off potential paths until one is left, and the player is given their "up to this point" story.
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier will release Episode 1 on December 20. For those who do have their old save data, there is a really simple three step process to import it to a new system using Telltale's website.
