Kirk Hamilton wrote:
For so long, there's been too sharp a disconnect between what we in the press say about Telltale games and what we hear from players. These games are well-liked by the media and by gamers, and for the most part, deservedly so. They're engrossing, well-written adventures that let us visit worlds we've previously only watched on TV or read about in books. My Kotaku colleagues and I have written many articles praising Telltale's games, and we love to join readers in talking about them. Yet each game is accompanied by an inevitable crowd of people calling foul, people with bugged and broken games who feel ripped off and ignored.
Part of the problem is that Telltale's games are released in piecemeal "seasons," and most players only have to spend around $5 to play the first episode. After that, many players will opt to buy the full season up front—usually for around $20 total—since that's a better deal than waiting and buying each episode separately. Thing is, it's usually in later episodes that the problems hit.
After years of reading various emails and forum posts reporting problems with various Telltale games—problems that I, usually, have not personally experienced—I decided to look into some of the most widespread issues their games have faced since 2012's The Walking Dead.
I headed over to the Telltale Support forums, expecting to find several lengthy threads centered on the most common problems for each game. Instead, I found something a lot messier. In every game's support hub, there are dozens of threads outlining problems with pretty much every version of all of the studio's games. I spent several days last week reading as many as I could.
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At first, I worried that listing user complaints in an article would feel unfair, like cherry-picking. After all, I was reading the support forum, so of course the majority of the posts would be about problems people were having with the games. Telltale's main forum is filled with happy users, contentedly chatting about the stories and characters in the games.
An hour or two of reading later, I had set that worry aside. Telltale's support forums paint a portrait of a publisher that is constantly releasing buggy and even outright broken games, and, unlike most of the other companies with which it competes, one that lacks the resources to meaningfully help or, sometimes, even acknowledge its frustrated users.
A few caveats, before we get into this:
- All games have some technical problems. If I were to visit the support forums of a larger publisher like Ubisoft or EA, I would find plenty of people complaining of problems installing or operating games. The differences, as I see them, are threefold: A) Telltale's games have all had similar problems for years, and each new game brings the same issues, B) Telltale's major bugs tend to be of the catastrophic and game-halting variety, corrupting saves and erasing progress to an extent that would be noteworthy for any publisher, and C) Telltale's support apparatus appears to be limited to a support email address and a single person responding to forum posts as best he can, and as a result many of their players feel ignored or brushed aside.
- Some of these threads have been successfully resolved, and, to Telltale's credit, even the unresolved ones tend to contain responses from a Telltale rep. With the majority of them, however, it's unclear whether the user in question actually got his or her game working.
- I can't verify every claim listed here, or anything close to that. I'm taking each anonymous forum poster's word for it. Or rather, I'm allowing that between all of them, they paint a convincing picture, especially when combined with our staff's firsthand experience of Telltale's games.
- I had intended to go back to 2012 and put together a timeline of complaints, but that proved unnecessary. Many of the forum posts I found, whether from 2012's The Walking Dead or 2015's Game of Thrones, were from sometime in the last few months. Go further back and you'll find many, many more.
- This chronicle is incomplete. I tried to find problems that seemed clear-cut or had resulted in multiple posts or responses, but there are dozens I've left off. If you've had your own troubles, I hope you'll share them below.
Here now, an incomplete chronicle of messed up Telltale games:
