• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

How is it possible that Telltale's engine is this awful

I don't remember having any issue with The Walking Dead on PC or Episode 1 of The Wolf Among us on 360. I played both well after they came out though so either they patched it or I got lucky
 
does anyone know how The Wolf Among Us run on the Xbox One? After hearing some of the posts in this thread it has me kind of worried. I planned on buying for the Xbox one because it ran horribly on my Xbox 360.
 
I cut Telltale a lot of slack in the Sam & Max days since I was just happy somebody was still making them. I remember being optimistic about them improving their engine when The Devil's Playhouse came out, but it hasn't improved at all since then.
 
FyreWulff said:
People continue to confuse sane budgeting and running of a company with hubris.

This is a small studio by modern standards, considering the amount of platforms they are on. And mostly licensed properties. Ever work with licensed properties? The licensee isn't going to give you a budget for an expensive premade engine, and you become dependent on the engine maker to be available on your target platforms.

Why yes, let's re-write our entire engine just for HBO, who probably won't even renew the license in ~5 years time, on an HBO budget, who's working with us externally, lowering the budget even more. The cost of switching an engine could kill the company off - doing something like that is NOT free, or easy. Especially when you have to split your profits with another company while doing it.

I've barely played any of these Telltale releases but people truly do not know how games are developed, why it's not always advantageous to kill your in house engine. Bugs are a QA issue, and not something fixed by licensing another engine that also has bugs (and splitting your income even more)

Considering the good critical reception of games like Wolf Among Us, and the fact that they have multiple projects going at the same time, they're doing pretty good for their size.
Click to expand...
You should probably play some of these Telltale releases to get a better idea of how busted and outdated the engine is, years after Telltale's big breakthrough hit.

If they don't have the money for a fucking engine upgrade even after these huge critical and commercial successes, then their contracts are fucking busted. Maybe the low-cost propositions is why they manage to keep snagging up hot licenses one after another, who knows.

That said, I honestly think they're at a breaking point with this new batch of releases. You can only try to roll with the heavyweights for so long with an engine that looks this bad in 2014. I strongly believe that the customers will wise up and push back eventually.
 
They are a pretty small company if I remember correctly and they are taking big franchises with the season style development. So little time to recouperate and improve the engine even though they really need to
 
This is one reason I've stopped buying their games. There's no excuse for their games to run so poorly. Compared to other, actual games there's almost nothing going on that can make the games hitch up the way they do.
 
FyreWulff said:
People continue to confuse sane budgeting and running of a company with hubris.

This is a small studio by modern standards, considering the amount of platforms they are on. And mostly licensed properties. Ever work with licensed properties? The licensee isn't going to give you a budget for an expensive premade engine, and you become dependent on the engine maker to be available on your target platforms.

Why yes, let's re-write our entire engine just for HBO, who probably won't even renew the license in ~5 years time, on an HBO budget, who's working with us externally, lowering the budget even more. The cost of switching an engine could kill the company off - doing something like that is NOT free, or easy. Especially when you have to split your profits with another company while doing it.

I've barely played any of these Telltale releases but people truly do not know how games are developed, why it's not always advantageous to kill your in house engine. Bugs are a QA issue, and not something fixed by licensing another engine that also has bugs (and splitting your income even more)

Considering the good critical reception of games like Wolf Among Us, and the fact that they have multiple projects going at the same time, they're doing pretty good for their size.
Click to expand...

I'm seriously tempted to turn on my PS3 and make a Youtube video of Poker Night to show you exactly how bad this is. I'm not saying they need to go license a new engine. But unless their engine is just absolute shit, I refuse to believe that it can't be made to run better than it does right now on anything that isn't a PC.

TI82 said:
Total? And they are currently working on:
Walking Dead
Wolf Among Us
Game of Thrones
Borderlands
(More?)

They need to finish out these seasons and take a 6 month break just fixing their engine, or just migrate over to ue4 or something
Click to expand...

You forgot Minecraft.
 
Impeccable said:
If they want to continue their success they eventually have to change this. It's something many people are saying are the reason they are avoiding their games despite enjoying the genre. I know it's certainly holding me off some of their titles.
Click to expand...

I'm with this guy. I had bad experiences with Back to the Future, The Walking Dead, and The Wolf Among Us. All of the games were good, but they were constantly pulled down by the shoddy craftsmanship. So much stuttering and glitching and ugh... just terrible. Poor show, Telltale. It's so bad that I'm not even going to buy TWD: Season 2 for six bucks or whatever the price is right now on PS4 because I just don't want to deal with it. I definitely will NOT buy again until word-of-mouth proves that the engine has been completely redone and fixed.
 
Its a damn shame too, as the games are excellent outside of it. But my memory of TWAU, a game that had one of the strongest stories and artstyles, is tarnished by the frustration of having to reset my console multiple times or watch as a dramatic scene cascades in a jumbled mess of missing, late, or stuttering audio.
 
They've got too much shit going on. There probably hasn't been time for them to go back and straighten things out since that first walking dead took off. They also have to work on pretty much every device.
 
SummitAve said:
They've got too much shit going on. There probably hasn't been time for them to go back and straighten things out since that first walking dead took off. They also have to work on pretty much every device.
Click to expand...

I have no doubt they can create a core engine fixing team if they can make 3 different series at once.
 
I can't even finish The Wolf Among Us on Mac because it keeps crashing after every new location loads. On their support forum there are loads of other users reporting the same thing for months.
 
Sure the engine isnt a looker but its the growing list of never fixed bugs that really annoys me about their games.

Save corruption for example has been a major issue for them years and years and its never been fixed. And thats maybe one of the biggest issues any game can have. Then you add how important carrying over your save is in theri games and you really wonder how its gone this long without being fixed.
 
To many draw calls, bad use of textures, (no texture atlases)not using a deferred rendering.
No grouping objects together which use the same texture. Is my bet that's why their engine runs bad on portable and last gen. (and even new-gen for most parts)
 
I love their games, but I'm dumbfounded by the technical issues I've had with Walking Dead season 1 and 2 and Wolf Among Us on the PS4. I played Game of Thrones too and I had odd graphic glitches where the environment would be blurry like it was on LSD or something. I hope they invest in a new game engine soon lol
 
I'm late to the party and only recently played TWD Season 1. I was shocked when I noticed I could not invert aiming on the controller, and then that I could not remap keys on the KB. I had to use a stinking key remapper program while playing to switch it around. Good story or not, I won't knowingly buy more "games" that lack that basic function.
 
I bet the reason they get so many licenses is because their business model is dependant on a static engine that churns out similary structed games and they can't spend the resources to upgrade that big cog on the whole machine that is Telltale.
 
TimmiT said:
I remember Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse being great. It's been a while since I played their older games though.
Click to expand...

Oh, most of their games were great. I used to be a pretty big TellTale fan even before they blew up *adjusts hipster glasses*.

I was just saying they used to be a C-tier studio when it comes to size and budget, but these days they're definitely one of the big guys and have more than enough money and manpower available to make a proper new engine if they really wanted to.
 
I've never had performance issues with their games on PC, in fact the first season of Walking Dead ran okay on my awful old laptop which barely ran Youtube, but the amount of crashes and general issues is still insane. Does Walking Dead S2 still have the save bug from S1?
 
Escalario said:
Because people keep buying their games Day 1 no matter how buggy/glitchy their games are. They seem to get a free pass.
Click to expand...

Agree with this. Their engines are bad but it doesn't seem to matter as their games now sell very well. They probably won't sit up and take notice until their sales plummet and they get thousands of tweets or emails saying it's due to the shitty engine.
 
I was actually shocked that there weren't any visible improvements with Season 2. I know a lot of work goes into these games with very tight deadlines, but it was still disappointing.
 
I had the save bug on S1 of Walking Dead. Played through EP1 twice and nothing would carry over to the next episode. There was a thread full of complaints on their forum that went ignored. Tried to get a refund from Steam, but they refused, likely because I had something like 6 hours of playtime at that point. I tried playing a third time and somehow it ended up working the rest of the way.

All their games have also had various performance issues for me on PC. I don't have the best PC, but I have run far more demanding games without any problems.
 
FyreWulff said:
People continue to confuse sane budgeting and running of a company with hubris.

This is a small studio by modern standards, considering the amount of platforms they are on. And mostly licensed properties. Ever work with licensed properties? The licensee isn't going to give you a budget for an expensive premade engine, and you become dependent on the engine maker to be available on your target platforms.

Why yes, let's re-write our entire engine just for HBO, who probably won't even renew the license in ~5 years time, on an HBO budget, who's working with us externally, lowering the budget even more. The cost of switching an engine could kill the company off - doing something like that is NOT free, or easy. Especially when you have to split your profits with another company while doing it.

I've barely played any of these Telltale releases but people truly do not know how games are developed, why it's not always advantageous to kill your in house engine. Bugs are a QA issue, and not something fixed by licensing another engine that also has bugs (and splitting your income even more)

Considering the good critical reception of games like Wolf Among Us, and the fact that they have multiple projects going at the same time, they're doing pretty good for their size.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure Telltale pays for their licenses rather than doing work-for-hire (with the exception of the L&O games), so I don't think this is very accurate.
 
Gez said:
I wont lie Mass Effect and Dragon Age in the Telltale formula would be the mad notes.
Click to expand...

What are 'the mad notes'? Does that mean it would make a ton of money, or that it would be really awesome? I tend to think of myself as up on the latest hip slang, but you've really lost me.
 
The way that their games ran on Xbox 360 was downright unacceptable. Played through TWD and a few episodes of The Wolf Among Us, and I had a wide array of issues.

-lengthy frame rate stutter and drops, that persisted for entire game sections
-complete freezes, that either fixed themselves after 5 minutes of waiting or required hard reboots
-DLC not being read properly, requiring days before I could play an episode
-Game crashes at the menu, where the game couldn't even load if you were saved at a certain point. Requireds roughly 30 minutes of hard reset, try to load, repeat, until you get lucky and load through a black screen.
-Consistent, lengthy pauses as scenes transition, even within scenes themselves (ie. conversation occurs, when suddenly a zombie pops out. Suddenly = 15 second freeze)
-Long loading sequences

And the game is basically a choose-your-own-adventure novel. And 99% of these problems aren't even acknowledged by TellTale, let alone fixed.

Why does TellTale do this? Because they get away with it. Most journalist give them a free pass. Sure, there were mentions of the technical issues when TWD came out, but those same websites gave it the GOTY award. I don't care how good something runs on PC, if it comes out for PC/360/PS3, and 2 out of 3 of those platforms are a complete and utter technical mess, it does not deserve GOTY. Imagine The Last of Us came out on PC, 360, and PS3, but ran at 15 FPS on the consoles with frequent game freezes and required several reloads. It wouldn't have won anything.

I'm shocked that current gen versions suffer the same problems... /s
 
I bought the PS4 physical edition of The Wolf Among Us two days ago, thinking it would run more smoothly on newer hardware.

Anyone knows how it actually runs ? I paid 30€ for this, that's twice the amount of the digital edition. I don't want another TWD experience, I still have time to return it.
 
Triggerhappytel said:
Agree with this. Their engines are bad but it doesn't seem to matter as their games now sell very well. They probably won't sit up and take notice until their sales plummet and they get thousands of tweets or emails saying it's due to the shitty engine.
Click to expand...
Well, they're not exactly making shooters, so the framerate isn't going to have a huge effect on the gameplay. The save file bugs are more worrisome.
 
I enjoyed the first season of Walking Dead on 360, despite the ridiculous jankiness of the engine, but I won't be buying another game from them until I've heard they improved or significantly revamped the thing. They made plenty of money off Walking Dead to do just that, and instead of investing some of it into the engine and offering a better product to the consumer, they decided to just churn out as many titles as possible on as many platforms as possible.

It's a shame, because I really wanted to play Season 2. Or maybe even Game Thrones. But I just can't support a developer that operates like that.
 
Telltale games are ugly, a technical embarrassment, mind mumbling tedious and barely even fulfil the criteria for "interactive" entertainment.

How they are so revered is beyond me, TWD is one of the most dull, overhyped, technically inept snorefests I've ever had the misfortune to play.
 
I played all of their games on 360 and it was atrocious how they ran. I even died in TWD season 1 and Fables because the game lagged so badly that QTE time limits ended before the button prompts actually appeared, while I was looking at some random frozen frame for 10 seconds.

I enjoyed the stories so much, though, that I just dealt with it. That's all there is to it.

GOT and Borderlands seemed fine on Xbone so I'm hoping those days are past now.
 
I have never seen this engine drop below 60fps across both seasons of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us, but I haven't tried Game of Thrones yet.
That said, considering their success, I would love it if they licensed Cryengine or Unreal and made games with that :p
 
DJSharpeCheddar said:
I agree. It is hard to understand how they get such a pass. Their games BARELY run. Walking Dead Season 2 on PS4 was especially bad. How have they not fixed this by now?
Click to expand...

they have a lot of friends on the gaming press,and a sort of free pass too,its awesome how quantic dream is slammed by the mechanics ( im not gonna get into the historytelling i know telltale does that better) and not telltale,when QD games are excellent on the tech side,hell beyond looks better than a lot of next gen games
 
ff6js.jpg


Ok, maybe its not that but I really don't understand what is going with the company. There games have always been sort of janky but back in the days when Emily Morganti was their community manager, there was some response from the company. Sometimes the issue was fixed, other times there were workarounds put out. Now issues go into a void and are never delt with. The crazy part is their games have become less complicated. Tracking down issues should be easier but I guess its easier to ignore them. I've played most of their games on the pc and some of them on playstation and ipad platforms and the last 4 years of games have been terrible. Poor performance, glitches, save game fails, and just bugs that shouldn't have gotten through even programer QA. I doubt going to another engine would solve any of that. Its their engine, they can make it work, its just they aren't willing to.
 
Very janky engine. Its why I've not brought any of their new games on next gen.Despite really loving TWD.

I was watching someone play GoT on Twitch and I thought the hang-ups and pauses were streaming problems found out it was the engine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

  • Locked
How is it even possible for a developer to fall off this hard though?
14
404
nial replied
Linux on PlayStation 5 is now possible, and people already emulate PS3 on it
2 3
124
767
winjer replied
Former Epic Games Exec Arjan Brussee is Building Immense Engine, a European Unreal Engine Alternative
Hype Platform 
7
52
Jinzo Prime replied
Becoming immune to jump scares in horror games... Is it possible to learn this power?
47
679
Branded replied
Is A New AAA 'Legacy of Kain' Game Even Possible
23
392
Darkmakaimura replied
Top Bottom