The Walking Dead is an episodic, graphic adventure video game series developed and published by Telltale Games, based on The Walking Dead comic book series. First released in April 2012, the series currently spans three main five-episode seasons, an additional episode as downloadable content, and a mini three-episode season, with plans to release a fourth and final season in 2018. The games have been released to personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices and have had both digital and physical releases.
The series, like the comic, starts with an epidemic that turns the dead into zombie-like "walkers" that decimates civilization, and takes place along the United States eastern seaboard. The series has focused on the character of Clementine, a young girl found alone by Lee Everett at the start of the epidemic. Lee helps teach Clementine how to survive in the chaotic world, and sacrifices himself to try to reunite Clementine with her parents. Clementine continues to travel with other survivor groups for several years, eventually becoming the adoptive parent of the infant Alvin Jr. (AJ) when his parents are killed. She has a run-in with a survival group known as the New Frontier that strips AJ from her, and she works with Javier Garcia to help rescue his family from the New Frontier and learns where AJ has been taken and makes plans to rescue him. Some of the characters from the comic series, such as Shawn Greene, Glenn Rhee, Hershel Greene, Michonne and Paul "Jesus" Monroe, have appeared during the video game series.
The games in The Walking Dead series eschew typical puzzles and exploration found in most adventure games and instead offer a stronger narrative and interaction with other characters. The game mixes such scenes with more action-oriented ones based on quick time events to elicit excitement during the games. Telltale introduced the feature of having numerous determinants that could result from the player's choices, such as which of two characters to save during an attack, that influenced the story in later episodes and seasons, and the company has used this aspect of player choice in its future adventure games.
The series has been praised for its strong narratives and impact of player choices. The first season was particularly noted to have considered to revitalize the waning adventure game genre which had been languishing since around 2000.
Video The Walking Dead (video game series)
Concept
The Walking Dead series is based on the comic series of the same name. The game's events run concurrently to the comic, starting at the onset of a zombie apocalypse, where dead humans have become undead "walkers" that feed on the living which quickly overwhelmed most of the population. As established in the comic and show, this is a result of a virus that all living humans possess that takes over the brain of the body once the person dies, and the only way to stop this is to destroy the brain.
The game series initially starts in Georgia, with the whole of the first season and the events of 400 Days content taking place within the state. The second series follows the protagonists as they move north along the United States' eastern seaboard, believing there to be a human encampment in the north as well as the colder temperatures slowing the walkers' speed.
Maps The Walking Dead (video game series)
Gameplay
The Walking Dead games follow the same point-and-click adventure game approach that other Telltale Games episodic series have followed. Within an episode, the player controls a protagonist as the story progresses through several scenes. Within a scene, the player can move the character to explore the area, examine items, and initiate conversation trees with non-player characters; in these dialogs, the player has the option of selecting a number of options to reply to characters, including the option to stay silent. Other scenes are based on cinematic elements using quick time events in which the player must hit a controller button or a keyboard command as indicated on screen to react to an event. Failure to do so in time can lead to the character's death or other undesirable ending, and the game will restart just prior to these scenes.
All choices made by the player in The Walking Dead are tracked by the game, and certain choices ("determinants") will influence later scenes across the episodes and the series to date, when the player continues from the same saved game state. For example, in the first episode of the first season, the player has an option to save one of two non-player characters from a walker attack; the other character is killed, while the surviving character will uniquely impact other aspects of the story. Other times, selection of certain dialog options will influence the attitude of a non-player character towards the protagonist, and can manifest in later scenes as providing additional options for the player to select from. Telltale Games tracks these decisions, including five main choices made during the course of each episode, allowing players to compare their choices to others.
Series overview
Season 1 (2012)
At the onset of the zombie apocalypse, Lee Everett rescues young Clementine whose parents had traveled to Savannah prior to the apocalypse. They join with other survivors in Macon, Georgia to protect themselves from the undead, taking shelter in a defensible motel. When their position is overrun by both walkers and scavengers, the group flees and heads towards Savannah hoping to find boats to flee the mainland. Lee promises to reunite Clementine with her parents while teaching her rules of survival in this new world. In Savannah, they find no boats, and a strange man communicating to Clementine via walkie-talkie. When Clementine goes missing, Lee in his panic searching is accidentally bitten by a walker. With his time short, Lee assures the safety of the remaining survivors and goes to rescue Clementine, held by a man who has blamed Lee directly for the death of his family. Lee and Clementine overwhelm the man, and as they escape, they witness Clementine's parents, who have already become walkers. Clementine drags a weakening Lee to a safe location, and Lee, in his final moments of rationality, directs her to find the other survivors, before telling her to kill him or leave him before he fully becomes a walker.
400 Days (2013)
400 Days is a downloadable special episode. It focuses on five different protagonists and it serves as a bridge between Season 1 and Season 2. In the final scene, the survivors of each story are offered to be taken into a safe camp.
Season 2 (2013-14)
More than a year after the first game, Clementine is separated from the other survivors and forced to fend on her own. She meets up with another group that are attempting to flee a man named Carver, who runs the human survivor camp at a strip mall, as alluded to in 400 Days. Clementine learns Carver seeks to capture Rebecca believing her to be carrying his child while she insists it is her husband Alvin's. They come into another group, discovering that Kenny, one of the survivors that Clementine traveled with from the first season and who had lost his wife and son to walkers, has managed to survive. In the midst of a walker attack, they are captured by Carver. Learning that a massive walker horde is approaching the strip mall and will readily overrun it, the group manages to escape with other prisoners, killing Carver in the process after he kills Alvin. During their escape, a woman that Kenny had taken a romantic interest in is bitten by a walker, forcing Clementine to intercede to kill her before she can turn, angering Kenny. As they regroup, Clementine becomes close to Jane, a loner that was part of the prisoners at Carver's camp and who teaches Clementine survival skills. Later, Rebecca dies after giving birth to a child, which they name Alvin Jr. (AJ) As winter sets in, Jane and Kenny become hostile towards each other, and Kenny's distrust of the group leads to a fraction of them fleeing from Kenny, Jane, Clementine, and Alvin Jr.. Jane forces Clementine to see what Kenny has become from witnessing the deaths of his loved ones by faking the death of Alvin Jr., and Clementine is forced to intercede, killing one of them and opting to continue with the other while overseeing to Alvin Jr. herself.
Michonne (2016)
In June 2015, Telltale announced a three-episode series The Walking Dead: Michonne. The mini-series will release on February 23, 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; February 25, 2016 for iOS and Android; and March 1, 2016 for PC, and will serve as a tie-in between the existing The Walking Dead seasons developed by Telltale. The series will mostly focus on the Michonne's untold story on what took Michonne away from Rick, Ezekiel, and the rest of Rick Grimes' trusted group and what brought her back. Samira Wiley voiced Michonne in the game. The mini-series was originally scheduled to be released as downloadable content for Season 2. However, in December 2015, Telltale announced that the game would be released as a standalone title that would not require any previous game in the series to play
Season 3: A New Frontier (2016-17)
The third season of The Walking Dead launched with two episodes on December 20th of 2016. The season plans to tie in all the possible endings from previous seasons without compromising the story to avoid pushing away new players to the series. In an interview with IGN, Kirkman stated that the third season would bring the video game closer to the comic book's time frame. It takes place a few years after the second season, and includes a somewhat older Clementine along with AJ, the infant she rescues at the end of Season 2 who is now a toddler. Clementine is a playable character along with a new character, Javier. A New Frontier uses the updated Telltale Tool, the same game engine Telltale used for Batman: The Telltale Series.
During the 2016 PAX Expo, Telltale revealed the third season will be released in November 2016, with the subtitle "A New Frontier". Telltale later had to delay the first episode's release until December 20, 2016. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will publish retail versions of Season 3 as part of a deal with Telltale for Batman that was released in August 2016. The physical edition is expected to release on February 7, 2017, featuring the first episode on disc and download codes to obtain all future episodes of the series.
The Walking Dead Collection (2017)
Announced in November 2017, The Walking Dead Collection includes all episodes from the first three seasons, as well as "400 Days" and The Walking Dead: Michonne. The collection was released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on December 5, 2017. The content of the first two seasons and "400 Days" has been visually improved, reflecting on improvements Telltale has made in their engine since these seasons were first released, including high-definition texture mapping for all survivor characters, improved dynamic lighting, and upgrading the game's graphics to use DirectX 11 over DirectX 9. The older games will also use the user interface elements developed for the third season as to provide a consistent interface to the players.
Season 4: The Final Season (2018)
During the July 2017 San Diego Comic Con, Telltale announced The Walking Dead: The Final Season, which is expected to launch in 2018 on personal computer, console, and mobile devices. Clementine will return as the lead character. Telltale anticipates this will be the final season of their series and will focus on Clementine's journey to rescue AJ from McCarroll Ranch. Gary Whitta, who left Telltale after writing the first season and the "400 Days" content, will return to write the final season's story, seeing his role to help complete Clementine's story that he had started.
Cast and characters
The Walking Dead video game series introduces new characters developed by Telltale for the games. Season One is based around Lee Everett (voiced by Dave Fennoy), a Georgia college professor who had been charged with murder, and was in the midst of being sent to prison at the start of the walker outbreak. Lee escapes and encounters young Clementine (voiced by Melissa Hutchison), hiding in her treehouse after her babysitter had turned and her parents not yet back from vacation. Lee becomes a protective figure to her to help reunite her with her parents. Within Season Two taking place about a year later, Clementine is now the central character, struggling to find a place in several survivor groups.
Other major characters include Kenny, a fisherman who has suffered numerous losses of family and loved ones and has become emotionally unstable, Luke, a former entrepreneur who carries himself logically than emotionally, Jane, a young lone-wolf woman that teaches Clementine the values of self-preservation that a person's life comes first than anybody else, Carver, a principle antagonist of Season Two that seeks out the group of survivors that Clementine has joined believing one carries his child, and A.J., the newborn infant that Carver seeks who Clementine takes care of after his mother succumbs to the elements. The fate of several characters are determinant based on the actions that the player has taken in previous episodes, or otherwise unresolved within the narrative of the games. As the game takes place within the comic's universe, there have been some character crossovers with the series; Hershel Greene, Shawn Greene and Glenn Rhee, three characters from the comic series, have appeared briefly in Season One. Michonne, a prominent comic character, is featured as the playable-character in the Michonne mini-series. It was also confirmed in a trailer that Jesus would make some appearance in The New Frontier.
Critical reception
Sales
According to Telltale, the combined games in the series have sold over 50 million episodes worldwide by July 2017.
Season 1 and 400 Days
The Walking Dead has received critical acclaim, with reviewers giving praise for the harsh emotional tone, the characters, story and the resemblance to the original comic book, although criticizing the graphical glitches. The game received over 80 Game of the Year awards and many other awards.
"Episode 1 - A New Day" received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 85.14% and 84/100, respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 83.87% and 79/100 for the Xbox 360 version, and 83.38% and 82/100 for the PC version. The game received various accolades including the IGN "Editors' Choice", PC Gamer "Editors' Choice", Xbox Editors' Choice Award, and the PlayStation Gold Award.
"Episode 2 - Starved for Help" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 86.53% and 84/100, respectively, for the PC version, 86.26% and 84/100 for the Xbox 360 version, and 85.90% and 84/100 for the PlayStation 3 version. The game won the GameSpy E3 2012 award for "Best Adventure Game".
"Episode 3 - Long Road Ahead" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 88.47% and 88/100, respectively, for the Xbox 360 version, 86.11% and 87/100 for the PlayStation 3 version, and 85.41% and 85/100 for the PC version. IGN's Greg Miller gave the game a 9 out of 10, saying "It's a disturbing, depressing and entertaining entry in a journey that's been nothing short of excellent so far." GameSpot gave the game an 8.5, saying "The Walking Dead has passed the midway point of its series of five episodes with every indication that the game will keep getting better right through to its inevitably depressing and unsettling conclusion." MTV also gave it a positive review, saying "Telltale has created a series of wrenching, emotional decisions in the middle of a collection of not-too-hard puzzles in a visually-impressive adaptation of the Robert Kirkman comic series (with some nods to the TV show)."
"Episode 4 - Around Every Corner" received positive reviews, but to a lesser extent than the previous episodes. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 84.00% and 80/100, respectively, for the PC version, 82.50% and 82/100 the Xbox 360 version, and 78.94% and 81/100 for the PlayStation 3 version.
"Episode 5 - No Time Left" received critical acclaim. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 94.75% and 89/100, respectively, for the PC version, 88.15% and 89/100 for the Xbox 360 version, and 87.75% and 88/100 for the PlayStation 3 version.
400 Days received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 78.20% and 78/100, respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 78.00% and 78/100 for the PC version, and 76.88% and 80/100 for the Xbox 360 version.
Season 2
The Walking Dead: Season Two overall received generally positive reviews from critics earning praise for its atmosphere, tension, and Clementine's newly appointed role as the protagonist, but earned criticism for its lack of hubs and certain aspects of its storytelling.
Episode 1 - All That Remains received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.29% and 82/100, the PC version 78.76% and 78/100 and the Xbox 360 version 77.50% and 80/100. Matt Liebl from GameZone gave the episode an 8.5/10, stating that it "...is just a taste of what's to come -- a mere setup for the horror that awaits us in the final four episodes."
Episode 2 - A House Divided received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 87.29% and 82/100, the PC version 81.39% and 81/100 and the Xbox 360 version 79.44% and 80/100. Mitch Dyer from IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10, saying it is one of the best episodes Telltale Games has ever made.
Episode 3 - In Harm's Way received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 82.43% and 80/100, the Xbox 360 version 82.25% and 82/100 and the PC version 82.22% and 81/100.
Episode 4 - Amid the Ruins received mixed to positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 79.22% and 78/100, the PC version 78.58% and 78/100 and the Xbox 360 version 72.00% and 71/100.
Episode 5 - No Going Back received positive reviews, higher than its predecessor. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.67% and 87/100, the PC version 79.19% and 78/100 and the Xbox 360 version 77.00% and 84/100. Mitch Dyer of IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10 saying that the finale is "an impressive and intelligent episode, and among Telltale Games' finest stories."
Michonne
The Walking Dead: Michonne received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics earning praise for its action sequences, atmosphere, and the character development of Michonne, but earned criticism for its story, side characters, short episode lengths, and graphical glitches.
Season 3: A New Frontier
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier received favorable reviews from critics with particular praise directed at the game's updated graphics, new cast of characters, action sequences, and overall new direction. However, the short episode lengths and the treatment of the Season 2 endings were both subjects of criticism and Clementine's shift to a supporting character was met with a mixed response.
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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