It looks like the wolf won’t be among us until 2024 now, as Telltale Games has announced that Bigsby and the gang’s next mystery in The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed for various reasons.
Telltale Games has announced that The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed into 2024, as the company’s shift from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 has added more development time, and it doesn’t want to impose crunch or burnout on the team.
Telltale Games attempts to avoid crunch or burnout by delaying The Wolf Among Us 2
The studio let fans know of the delay on its official Twitter account, but to give additional context and to be “as transparent as possible,” it also spoke with IGN about The Wolf Among Us 2’s delay. “Making games is difficult and they need time to be right,” Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie said. “And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.”
The Wolf Among Us 2 was revealed at The Game Awards in 2019, and at the time, the game was in the pre-production stages of development. Telltale had revealed it early in an attempt to secure funding after the studio was revived by LCG earlier that year — the original studio closed its doors in 2018 — but had factors like the pandemic been known then, Ottilie “may not have made the same decision.” On top of that, Telltale recently switched from Unreal Engine 4 to 5, as the latest version has some features that could benefit many members of the team, especially artists and engineers, but the switch has meant that Telltale has had to redo “quite a bit of work.”
“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds.The expectations are pretty high, and we want time to meet those, and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made,'” Ottilie said. “Let the world say what they will [once] it’s done, but at least we know that in these times, in these conditions, this is the best game that we could make.
I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it. 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,” Ottilie continued. “It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labour 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.”
You can play Telltale Games’ Walking Dead games as part of an Xbox Game Pass subscription if you’re yet to see what the studio creates. Alternatively, Microsoft has announced that some of the best games on Game Pass will be leaving the service on March 15th.
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