Telltale Games Delays The Wolf Among Us 2 Release Until 2024 to Avoid Crunch and Team Burnout
Telltale Games has announced that the release of The Wolf Among Us 2 will be delayed until 2024. The decision was made to avoid crunch and team burnout, as well as to accommodate a move from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. While talking to IGN, the CEO of Telltale Games, Jamie Ottilie, explained that the team made the choice for a number of reasons, but primarily to avoid burnout or shipping an unfinished game.
Telltale Games was re-established by LCG Entertainment in 2019 following the shutdown of the original Telltale. The new studio was in its early stages, with the game in pre-production and the studio roughly two years away from being fully staffed when they unveiled The Wolf Among Us 2 at The Game Awards in December of that year.
While it made sense to announce early to help secure funding and support for the new initiative, Ottilie admits that had he known then about other coming factors like the COVID-19 pandemic, he may not have made the same decision.
According to Ottilie, The Wolf Among Us 2 has been proceeding well since the announcement. However, the recent decision to switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 means redoing “quite a bit of work” that was already done in Unreal 4. With this in mind, the only two options to meet the 2023 release window would have been to ship something unfinished or to crunch. Ottilie is adamant that their version of Telltale simply won’t do it.
“I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it,” he says.
You can’t plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don’t want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labor markets and the growth in the games industry.
So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It’s not how you build a business. And as an industry, we’re terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices.”
Telltale Games has stated that The Wolf Among Us 2 will be an episodic release, but unlike many former Telltale titles, it’s being developed all at once. When episode one hits, all other episodes will already be completed.
In the meantime, Telltale has one major release this year, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, which it’s making in partnership with Deck Nine Games. The company is also developing a third, unknown title in very early development.
What are your thoughts about this news? Is this the right decision by Telltale Games? Let’s discuss this in the comment section below.
