Walking Dead: The Game – Where should it go in season two?

What sort of decisions will we have to make?

The first season was great at putting the player in no-win situations, asking us to make choices where either option seemed terrible.  One of the most brilliant things about the game is that it showed you at the end of each episode how other players chose, and let you see how truly difficult those decisions were.  We were asked not only to often choose between saving one person or another, but to make choices that would turn our friends and allies against us.  Watching the relationships with characters change as you made decisions was one of the great joys of the first season, and my question now is: how are they going to heighten that?

It would be a shame if the choices in Season Two are just rehashed versions of those we made in season one, which means putting the player in new, more extreme situations that allow for fresh moral dilemmas.  This is one of the main reasons I think it would be fun to play as a potentially pregnant woman, as there would be no one barometer (as Clem was for Lee) around which to base your choices.  If there are three or four things that are totally impossible for you to part with on an emotional level, it would create plenty of awesome opportunities for the game to break your heart over and over and over again.

Give us options for how to play the game

I know that ‘The Walking Dead’ isn’t a game about it’s puzzles, but rather about Quick-Time set-pieces, spur-of-the-moment decision-making, and emotional payoff.  But the puzzles in Season One were pretty easy, and I’d like to see them present us with some new challenges that stretch our brains a little bit more.  I get that this may not be for everyone, so give us the option of solving the puzzles, or blowing through them in an easy way that may or may not impact us negatively down the line.  It’s great to have storytelling choices, but I think that the next logical step is to present more gameplay choices, letting us pick not just what we do within the game, but how we play it.

Let’s see some new, cool environments.

The first season did a pretty decent job of showing us a variety of locations (trains, motels, farms, coastal towns) but they all had that same sort of rural feel to them.  I understand that that’s a trademark of the franchise, but now that it’s expanding so rapidly, I’d love to see some new locations.  Maybe let’s spend some time in the snow, or in a big city (I get that we’ve seen cities in the comic and TV show, but the biggest city we saw in season one was far from a metropolis).

Since, by it’s very nature, the characters in the game have to be pretty constantly on the move, it’s a great opportunity to expand the game’s world.  This is one of the reasons that I’d love a small time-jump between seasons one and two, so we can start off in somewhere totally unfamiliar to both us as players, and to the characters.

I’d also love to see more creative post-zombie situations, like the cannibal-farm or totalitarian-community (that we never really got to see) from Season One.  The most interesting part of the Walking Dead franchise has never been the zombies but the other people, so let’s meet some cool new villains in some cool new places.

Keep the people interesting

I mentioned meeting some cool villains, which I think is something game could really use (season one had the farm-cannibals and the crazy stalker dude from the end, but it could use something on par with the comic’s Governor), but it’s just as important that the people you spend the majority of the game with be interesting too, so that you can form strong, complex relationships.  In season one, a lot of characters would die shortly after being introduced, and while it kept the stakes high, I ended up wanting to get to know a lot of them better.

The most important thing in season two of The Walking Dead is going to be creating a network of complex relationships, much like in season one, but even more.  In season one you have the fucked up relationship between you and Lilly or Kenny, as you choose who would be a better leader, and there’s your father-daughter relationship with Clem, but I’d love to see the relationships branch out even more in this one, to be able to choose who you form relationships with, and what sort of relationships they are.  Really get to know each of the other characters, so that those relationships can be tested when in intense situations.

So there you have it!  This is what I’d like to see from Season Two of ‘The Walking Dead: The Game.’  Let me know what you want to see in the comments below!

Oh hey, before we even get started: SPOILERS for ‘The Walking Dead: The Game – Season 1’ lie within.

‘The Walking Dead: The Game’ is what ‘The Walking Dead’ TV show should have been.  There, I said it.  While I find the show to be plenty enjoyable, with occasional moments of awesomeness, Episodes One through Five of the game were consistently enthralling, moving, and really, really stressful (which I imagine a zombie apocalypse would definitely be.)

By focusing on difficult choices and innovative set-pieces, ‘The Walking Dead: The Game’ rises above the point-and-click adventure genre to create a story that pulls you in right from the start.  As Lee, a man on his way to prison for murder, it falls to you to protect Clementine, a little girl that you find hiding in a tree-house.  The relationship between Lee and his surrogate daughter Clem makes up the major emotional center of the game, to the point where you as the player find yourself making every gameplay decision with Clem’s safety and general well-being in mind.

Which is why the ending is so rough.  Finishing off with a cliffhanger of sorts, Lee (bitten and diyng) bids Clem farewell, chains himself to a wall, and depending on the choice the player makes, either gets shot in the head by Clementine or dies of his bite, supposedly to come back as a zombie.  So the big question is…. Where does Clem go from here?  And more importantly, where does the game go?  We already know that Season Two is in development, and given the ending of Season One, there are a ton of directions they could take it in.  Let’s look at a few of them, shall we?

Where will the story pick up?

The big question is whether season two will start immediately after the end of season one, or if there will be some sort of time-jump shenanigans.  Maybe we’ll jump ten years into the future, with Clem as a zombie-killing badass?  Or maybe we’ll pick up with her on the road, right after shooting (or abandoning) Lee?  Maybe we’ll even start before the end of Season one, with some other characters, and eventually catch up to Clem and the others somewhere along the way?

If I had to guess, I’d say it will pick up a short time after, maybe a month or two.  Season One did a couple small time jumps of this nature, and it allows for a bit of extra mystery as to what happened in the intervening time without having a whole ton of stuff to catch us up on.  Maybe they’ll even jump a year ahead, so that we can really see the changes in Clementine since the death of Lee.

Who will we play as?

I’m assuming that we won’t just spend the next game shambling around as an undead Lee (although I would totally play that) looking for Clementine, which begs the question: who will we be playing as?  The obvious choice seems to be Clementine herself, who was an observer for much of Season One, but will certainly have to be more proactive and aware in the wake of Lee’s death.  It would certainly be a change of pace from the badass Lee, and would create a new game experience, although I can’t help but wonder if it would be a little too hard for many gamers to put themselves in the shoes of a child as their primary character in such an immersive game.

My guess would be that we will play as Krista, one half of the couple that Clementine sets off in search of at the end of Season One.  She’s a badass much like Lee was, but her relationship with Clementine has an opportunity to be much softer, not just because she gets to be a mother-figure to her, but because she also has an actual baby on the way (I’m pretty sure this was heavily implied in Season One without ever being outright stated, although I could be wrong).  Having to look out for her boyfriend Omid, Clementine, and the unborn baby she’s carrying could make for some really intense and harrowing choices.

The other option, of course, is for us to play as a totally new character in a totally new group, who runs across the (surviving) season one characters early on.  That could be cool too, I guess.