Telltale Games reintroduces itself through The Wolf Among Us 2 trailer and demo

Telltale Games is finally ready to share more details about The Wolf Among Us 2. At Summer Game Fest, the company revealed the game’s first official trailer, using the moment as a coming out party for the new Telltale.

The reveal of the first trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 on June 5 came eight years after the initial announcement of a sequel to the fan-favorite The Wolf Among Us at Summer Game Fest 2018. Unlike the original The Wolf Among Us title, The Wolf Among Us 2 will be released as a full game, rather than episodically, featuring many of the same voice actors from the original game, including the voices of protagonists Bigby and Snow. The game is slated to come out next year.

The original makers of The Wolf Among Us at Telltale Games closed in 2018 after filing for bankruptcy, with a new company acquiring Telltale’s assets — and taking over its name — shortly after. Over the last two years, the new Telltale has been conspicuously silent regarding updates on the development of The Wolf Among Us 2, which the game’s makers acknowledged had frustrated some fans of the series.

“That’s why we’re starting to speak now,” said Telltale chief executive officer Jamie Ottilie in an interview with GamesBeat ahead of the Summer Game Fest trailer reveal. “We were patiently waiting until we were in a place that we were ready to talk about the game — how we were making it, what we’re making, showing some content — to confirm that it’s coming and when it’s coming.”

Telltale is partnering with other companies to bring The Wolf Among Us 2 across the finish line, including the co-development studio Trick Games and publishing partner PM Studios, which hosted a The Wolf Among Us 2 demonstration at Summer Game Fest Play Days.

“The marketing team didn’t want to prematurely announce this game and not be ready for it. We knew that if we just showed something and said something, it wouldn’t be enough this time,” said PM Studios chief executive officer Michael Yum in an interview with GamesBeat. “We knew that we had to let people really see it, and so this was the best event to showcase it and let people experience it.”

The collaborative nature of the development of The Wolf Among Us 2 reflects the new Telltale’s goal of building a leaner company that is capable of adapting to market volatility more effectively than its predecessor. Telltale has worked with co-development partners since 2019, but over the last two years, the company has specifically invested in a relationship with Trick Games as its sole co-development partner, allowing both companies to shape their collaboration around the specific long-term needs of The Wolf Among Us 2.

“We wanted to avoid stepping up and then staffing down over the course of production,” Ottilie said.

At Summer Game Fest, GamesBeat participated in a demo of The Wolf Among Us 2 and spoke to members of the team behind its development. The demo provided a snapshot of a game whose makers understand and appreciate the original The Wolf Among Us, with a similar aesthetic updated with an updated, over-the-shoulder camera view that allows Bigby to explore the world of Fabletown in three dimensions. To replicate and enhance the original game’s comic-book style, Telltale build a custom renderer in Unreal Engine 5 — an upgrade over the previous title, which was built using Unreal Engine 4 and Telltale’s legacy engine.

“There will be magic; you’re going to see spells, you’re going to see a lot of blood, and you’re going to see different kinds of effects,” said The Wolf Among Us 2 creative director Zak Garriss in an interview with GamesBeat, “and I think we have more tools to work with now to bring that to life.”

The story of The Wolf Among Us 2 takes place six months after the narrative of the original game wraps up, giving Telltale the chance to expand on the story and lore of the game’s fictional world. The game features ample narrative and visual callbacks that connect back and forth between chronological elements of the story, with some easter eggs in early sections that only start to make sense hours later; The Wolf Among Us 2 design director Jess Campbell told GamesBeat that she used a detailed spreadsheet to maintain consistency across the game’s multitude of narrative elements.

“When we’re looking at all those connective tissue bits for the narrative, I personally do document a lot of this,” Campbell said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Some of it naturally forms some of the things that are key to the story we’ll discover later on. As we’re doing later episodes or content, we need to foreshadow something — seed it earlier — so there’s a lot of back-and-forth.”

In addition to building on the story of The Wolf Among Us, The Wolf Among Us 2 pulls directly from the lore of Fables, the comic book series that inspired the original game, featuring new characters like Dorothy and the Oz Gang, a new criminal group that Bigby investigates in the sequel.

“I don’t want to get too specific, but there’s this part in one of the side comics that’s awesome,” Campbell said. “We never need to vocalize it — but for people who know the story, it’s just going to be these nice little moments.”

The post Telltale Games reintroduces itself through The Wolf Among Us 2 trailer and demo appeared first on GamesBeat.