Aiming for the Common Denominator: Telltale Games Ditches In-House Engine, Favors Unity

[Raevenlord]

The present is likely a result of Telltale Games' vertiginous rise as a developer of single-player experiences - and their precipitous fall afterwards. As telltale Games has had to restructure its studio team by laying off some 25% of its workforce not that long ago, its seems the company has decided to cut its losses on a tool that arguably made their name and fame: their in-house engine.

Development costs have only gone up as the need for more detailed animations and assets has increased developers' graphics development costs, and Telltale had been working with an engine it had been continually building upon since 2005. however, the fact remains that the engine was showing its age - and gripping its teeth at performance - for the last few games the studio developed. In the end, the studio must have decided that in the face of the reduced workforce, games development and engine engineering were too much at the same time, and naturally decided to cut the latter.





For smaller studios, it does make sense, anyway, to license their engine tech instead of having the overhead of engine development and engineering in-house - and there are many cost-effective solutions out there. Unity is one such, and has already shown its capabilities in many games - and experiences (just check out Neil Blomkamp's Oats Studios' videos, for instance.) Here's hoping this move allows Telltale to do what they do best - focus on storytelling and experiences, eventually letting them grow again. Who knows? Eventually they may be able to have a newly-developed in-house engine again.

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[kastriot]

Well i wish them luck with new engine.

 

[TheMailMan78]

I spent 45 minutes trying to open a sliding glass door in "The Walking Dead". Not surprised they have had financial issues.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

One would assume the Unity is this great engine, but if you look side by side at all the games being use with Unity, you begin to see all the similarities. When all games start to look like they been made by the same graphics developer intern, and no one blames them because you play your game in gorgeous 48/12/16K, you reach a moment of realization that you've died and gone to heaven because even you can create such beautiful scenery with Unity.

Almost sounds like a commercial...

Well at telltale games, graphics is the only thing they do well, not much else.

 

[Venger]

CryEngine 5.5 or Unreal Engine 4 would be a much better choice then Unity imo...

 

[dozenfury]

I spent 45 minutes trying to open a sliding glass door in "The Walking Dead". Not surprised they have had financial issues.

I've loved some of the other Telltale series like Tales from the Borderlands, but I definitely concur that TWD had some particularly frustrating pathing/clicking issues in places. You could go along fine for a while, and then like you said you'd reach a point where it would take forever to complete a simple task.

Looking forward to more from Telltale with the new engine.

 

[efikkan]

Smart, TTG, when they're out of money they cut the most essential part of any game; the engine. TTG might be considered a "small" game developer, they still have about 270 employees after their recent layoffs. But evidently, the budget no longer had room for a real development team. This is just another sign of their demise, they might as well give up.

 

[TheOne]

Like Bethesda, it is overdue.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I don't know. Unity is not really meant for point and click adventure games which Telltale's engine was designed for from the ground up. I fail to see what they gain by changing to Unity unless they're aiming to make a revolutionary (for them) game that would have been costly to implement in Telltale's engine.

Now, instead of paying some people money to work on the engine, they're going to have to pay Unity for licensing fees which add up to a lot of money, very fast.

I think Telltale made a huge mistake. Their financial situation is going to get worse.

Like Bethesda, it is overdue.

Bethesda would benefit a lot more from a new engine than Telltale would. Telltale games are fundamentally simple (next to no chaos allowed). Bethseda's are not (lots of chaos). Bethesda needs an engine that will check for domino effect of assets (e.g. kill this civilian, how many quests are now incompletable?). Most of Bethesda's problems are in scripting.

 

[TheOne]

I don't know. Unity is not really meant for point and click adventure games which Telltale's engine was designed for from the ground up. I fail to see what they gain by changing to Unity unless they're aiming to make a revolutionary (for them) game that would have been costly to implement in Telltale's engine.

Now, instead of paying some people money to work on the engine, they're going to have to pay Unity for licensing fees which add up to a lot of money, very fast.

I think Telltale made a huge mistake. Their financial situation is going to get worse.


Bethesda would benefit a lot more from a new engine than Telltale would. Telltale games are fundamentally simple (next to no chaos allowed). Bethseda's are not (lots of chaos). Bethesda needs an engine that will check for domino effect of assets (e.g. kill this civilian, how many quests are now incompletable?). Most of Bethesda's problems are in scripting.

Bethesda definitely needs it more, so many issues, but as for Telltale there have been a few times in their games where you could see the engine holding back the gameplay design, more notably when they want to do an action scene where the player has more control instead of just QTE's.

 

[Prima.Vera]

CryEngine 5.5 or Unreal Engine 4 would be a much better choice then Unity imo...

Aye. Unreal Engine is perfect since it's already having that cartoonish look by default anyways.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Bethesda definitely needs it more, so many issues, but as for Telltale there have been a few times in their games where you could see the engine holding back the gameplay design, more notably when they want to do an action scene where the player has more control instead of just QTE's.

I can't name one Telltale game that didn't use QTEs for combat. Even going all the way back to Sam & Max. I don't think that's their intent at all.

 

[TheOne]

I can't name one Telltale game that didn't use QTEs for combat. Even going all the way back to Sam & Max. I don't think that's their intent at all.

What I'm saying is their engine has limited their ability to handle combat & exploration mechanics in their games, its probably why they are working in new game mechanics in the final season of TWD to give the player more control, like that over the shoulder cam.

 

[sepheronx]

UNITY is a neat engine. But most games made on UNITY have the same bugs. Escape from Tarkov uses Unity and while it looks pretty, it runs poorly and lack of physics drives me nuts.

 

[efikkan]

Regardless of a game's genre, its engine is the essential part that makes it playable or not. In recent years we have unfortunately seen most of the industry move towards using the same engines rather than tailoring something for their purpose. While there are pre-made engines that does some things fairly well, they are usually just suited for a limited range of games, and commonly makes the games based on it very similar. And then you have engines like Unity, which are more general purpose game engines, but they are usually not particularly good at anything. Games using such engines doesn't really implement the engine, but is a relatively small piece of code which interfaces with the actual engine, and lacks the ability to implement new underlaying features, any low-level control like precise timing and controls, proper networking/multiplayer, and even the actual rendering. So in essence, in engines like Unity it's easy to make something, but challenging to make something that is precise and seamless.

While Unity isn't really suited for what most of us think of as proper games, you could argue that story-driven games like the ones TTG makes, which are often more interactive movies than games, may be one of very few types of games that can work in Unity. TTG relies on a toolchain create their story driven games, and that need will not change when moving to Unity, and they will have to redesign it to interact with Unity instead. The reason for switching to Unity is cutting development cost, and I don't think this move will do that at all, as more time will be spent on tinkering with a "black box" to make it behave, rather than an engine designed in-house for their purpose.

But the larger problem for TTG isn't really the development cost of having their own game engine, it's bureaucratic overhead. Many of these start out as pretty lean companies and delivers some respectable products, then they get some success and they start to grow, the expansion gets out of control and they keep throwing resources at the ever-declining productivity and quality. Sooner or later the development costs surpasses the revenue and the company initiates a series of impulsive changes in management and restructuring, cutting staff and departments pretty randomly, and cutting development and innovation in favor of "playing it safe" by recycling the same old stuff. By this stage the company have long forgotten the cause of their initial success, and is deep within a death spiral. And this problem is not related to the game industry at all, it's a trap any kind of company can fall into.

 

[Mistral]

Let's be frank. Pretty much any modern "off the shelf" engine is better than the beaten horse that was pulling their Walking Dead cart.