Telltale Games is easily rising up in the ranks of the hottest game publishers right now, based on the strength of such episodic fare as The Wolf Among Us, the two seasons of The Walking Dead and its forthcoming adaptation of HBO’s Game of Thrones. But as big as these stories are now, the developer/publisher actually wants to make them bigger – and it could utilize cloud gaming to do so.
“We’ve thought about how we use the cloud and the future of our games using the cloud to tell bigger, greater stories,” said Telltale co-founder and chief executive officer Dan Connors, during a recent discussion at the Cloud Gaming USA conference in San Francisco.
Connors was quick to bring up Netflix’s model as an example, utilizing the power of choice based upon what subscribers were looking to experience. “Players have been asking for this for years,” he said. “The game is informed by the data, and the player feels like this is their personalized game experience.”
He doesn’t just want to expand the game itself, though, but rather the experience surrounding it. With the forthcoming Game of Thrones, for instance, he’s hoping that after watching an episode of the series on HBO, you can also check on your progress within the game, in a relatable manner. “The back end talks to the game, and the game talks to the show, and everything works in sync,” said Connors. “We could have entertainment experiences that are multimedia. We feel we can do this with the biggest stories in the world.”
When it comes to grasping the power of the cloud, Connors explained to Gamesbeat, “What we look at is, we’re now in a place where the cloud is where all media live. Since we work with franchises and work in universes, we can take advantage of that to inform our game. On the other side, as far as how players use the game and form the story creation, we feel like we’re on the cusp of an evolution of entertainment that’s bigger than games, but that brings interactivity to the forefront of entertainment as a critical piece.
“Even if it’s just regular linear entertainment, it’s going to be surrounded by interactivity anyway, just through the way you get it and experience it. When we look at it, that’s the way we think about it,” he concluded.
No word yet on when this new model will be grasped, as Telltale is busy enough between Game of Thrones and the forthcoming Tales From the Borderlands. It shouldn’t be too long, though – and other companies may just follow suit.
Source: GamesBeat
