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bug's The Walking Dead: Season Two (PC)
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| [February 25, 2015 02:40:07 PM]
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What I'm finding more and more is that many of the choices have to do with managing what information each character knows. This includes Clementine herself: for example, your choices can give the impression to others that she was alone, and at certain points, it seems that she believes the fact that Christa died. In other words, aside from the usual choices of telling the truth, withholding it, or lying, the player also sometimes has the option of creating a new truth, at least, as far as Clementine believes.
Related to truth and information are the choices that involve making promises, such promising to look after Nick. In some cases, what that means isn't well defined, and whether your actions live up to that is up to interpretation. For example, when Nick shoots the man on the bridge, you can give your own account of the events, which might incriminate Nick. The situation is ambiguous: the man's intentions at that moment were never truly known. I answered that the man wasn't going to shoot, since that's what I believed, before I realized that saying so would put Nick in a bad light. Does relating my believed account count as betraying Nick? Would I have had to say something I didn't believe in order to truly keep my promise to Pete? In such a case, the game can't really answer that question objectively, since it has no knowledge of the player's view of the events.
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| [February 24, 2015 03:16:25 AM]
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Playing this without repeating leaves me guessing exactly how much the game's choices affect the plot. However, at the end of the episode, I'm presented with a selection of the choices that I made, compared to other players' choices. Some of these choices don't even have in-game consequences at all, such as the decision of whether to end the dog's life. Some of the captions on these choices (particularly: "Mercy", "Trust", "Generosity") are even rather moralizing. This, along with my causal intuition, leads me to believe that the plot doesn't actually have major branches that will lead Clementine to different locations and sets of choices, but instead that the choices are simply there to add layers of complexity to the single story-line. That isn't to say that I believe the choices don't have consequences, merely that said consequences are not enough to sway the plot beyond a sort of single, guiding continuity, unlike games with widely branching plot trees like Dragon Age: Inquisition. If I'm right in this guess, this may have been because of development scope, but I'd also like to think that the the design choice was very deliberate: barring completionists, players are free to consider each choice honestly, for its own sake, rather than for what content it will unlock.
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| [February 24, 2015 12:51:04 AM]
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Upon starting the game, I'm already given an interesting choice. The game is designed to build off of of the player's choices in Season One, so it provides both a link to buy the prequel, as well as an option to randomly generate a series of choices, which I choose, since I don't have the time to play both. A television-style recap of Season One's events plays, showing all the major choices.
What's interesting about this choice is that the randomly generated choices (at least, what I can glean from the brief recap) immediately make me feel indignant, and that I would have chosen differently. I'm actually compelled to purchase and play Season One at a later date in order to experience Season Two from a more personal perspective, as well as to experiment with other choices. This is, if anything, a good marketing strategy from Telltale...
It's nice that the choices that will be important later on are pointed out. I also appreciate that there are some choices that seem like they might be important, but end up being inconsequential, and are left only to reflect on the player, such as the choice of which fuel to burn: a photo, a drawing, or a damp log.
The quicktime action system is a little overplayed, but it's not what makes the game interesting, anyway.
(note: I submitted this on Feb 23, and not at 12:51 or any :51....this website's clock seems to be off.)
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 24th, 2015 at 00:52:59.
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bug's The Walking Dead: Season Two (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 24 February, 2015
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