"Does Telltale listen to its fans? Well the answer is simple: Quite possibly."

LOL!

You guys crack me up!!

Bravissimo!

"Does Telltale listen to its fans? Well the answer is simple: Quite possibly."

That's your first mistake.

Never listen to the fans :)


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/72/14

Be careful bulding up the expectations.

And also, be careful listening to the fans. Remember that for every player who complain about certain aspect of a game, there can be three who liked the same aspect but don't say anything. Humans always tend to bring out the negative features of everything, while just assuming the positive ones.

There's a difference between listening to, weighing and thinking about the fans' requests, and copy-and-pasting forum posts right into the design doc. I think what's going on here is the former. There aren't marketing meetings where we make a bulleted list of every complaint and hand them to the designers saying "next episode must have these 30 things or we believe it won't sell, because these are the negative things people said on the forums." I personally don't think that attitude bodes well for any product, unless your business model amazingly hinges on selling forum polls. On the other hand, the game isn't made in a vacuum. As you can see from our forums, or, for instance, this blog post, the designers do read what the community and the press says about the games, and because those guys are all reading the same words on the same internet, you can bet that the more intelligent/relevant points raised by the community come up in design meetings.

It's a fine line to walk, especially on paper, but -- from my uneducated and totally peripheral vantage point at least -- I think in practice any balance or divide between "listen to the fans" and "let the designers design" is sort of moot, as every piece of input about the games regardless of its source eventually gets weighed, assessed and thrown into the always stewing discussion of "what will make the next game better." Different ideas are surely weighed differently, and most ideas are thrown out regardless of their source (because for every excellent "thats going in" idea there are probably a near infinite number of not-as-good ones, or good ones that simply don't fit), but I imagine there's less of a distinction between which ideas at least make it into the pot and which don't, than people think.

Personally, I loved the first Telltale-Sam & Max through and through, but I understand that some people may complain that it is too simple. Hey - I finished it in just a few hours myself. However, seeing as there have been few to no adventure games being released in the last few years, I thought it was a proper way to transist into an old genre renewed. A friend of mine even complained that he thought the game was too difficult, so this just proves that the gamers clearly will respond anything from horrendously bad to extraordinarely good. People who have never played adventure games like the good old ones, will find these new games perhaps a tad bit too mind-boggling, and that's why this transition is such a great idea.

Keep up the good work! You've injected new life into the most wonderful of genres, and I salute you! ;)

Hmmm so basically if we want a challenging (and more fun IMO) product we have to wait? And we'll be forced to buy the simpler, easier games because we'll be lost by the time the actually difficult games come out if we don't continue buying games of the series until then? pffft.

I know that lots of people complained that the game was a little short and too easy, but telltale has got to be more careful this time because the ease or puzzles and short game length was forgiven by some thank to it being an episodic game so the next episode should definitely be harder and longer I'm not saying hard like harder than indiana jones and the fate of atlantis but at least at the hard level of the curse of monkey island and when it comes to longer game playability (i''m not sure if it's a word) it should be about almost the same length as day of the tentacle but then again who am I to complain. congratulations on a job well one telltale and may the next episode bring glory to sam and max freelance police.

the difficulty is the only sticking point for the series for me..everything else about the first game I loved and Telltale got right(music, voices, visuals, gameplay, writing, etc)

(The allusion to Edison being that he was an inventor, and that it took him around 3000 different trials until he was able to figure out the right combination of elements to get his light bulb working correctly.)

Narf?! Damn it, I thought I was pretty smart for beating Episode 1 within a day. It was intended for "newcomers?!"

Sounds good to me!

If you package a product with several difficulty levels and let your consumers choose which one they want to play at, you don't run the risk of over- or underestimating them. Any consumer that gets "scared off" by having the option of freely selecting a difficulty level setting for a video game is probably not a consumer that should be catered to...

For me, length is not so much an issue as difficulty because the series is episodic in nature; as long as all the episodes in a season combined equal about as much total gameplay time as the average adventure game - for about the same total price mind you - then things should be fine. The $35.00 pricetag on the season collection is just right (Score: 1 point)!

However my playtime on Episode 1 clocked in at not even 4 hours, and I lovingly perused every dialogue choice available (reviewers of Episode 2 are citing times of under 3 hours in store "http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,711/"). With only six episodes in the season, even rounding UP to an even 4 hours per episode nets an underwhelming 24 hours of gameplay. This low playtime is compounded by the months of NO playtime inbetween episode releases. (Score: still only 1 point)

If there were some kind of replay value (I hate to sound like I'm beating you over the head with this Multiple Difficulty Levels thing) to hold fans over between releases that would be one thing. The online S&M community can only do so much (regularly updating S&M online-comics issues for eager customers might do more).

There isn't the 13-year buildup of eager fanlove after "Hit the Road" anymore, and the runoff can't suffuse EVERY forthcoming episode. Let's see if I have a point. I predict diminishing returns on sales of every new "easy" episode of S&M because "easy" neither draws in new consumers nor satisfies the old. The last thing we want is for Sam & Max to become "old-hat" because the new episodes can't stand on their own playability.

As a fresh and freethinking entity, Telltale has the ability to show the gaming 800-pound gorillas (Lucas Arts perhaps?) that their business model of repackaging stale, rehashed content over and over again ONLY works because there's nobody doing it differently to challenge their stupid little paradigm. You guys are selling S&M because Lucas Arts is too stupid to.

They were afraid their market would shy away from an adventure game/S&M franchise while the whole time their market was circulating petitions and writing letters to tell them the exact opposite. You don't have to worry about scaring off your customer base by shaking things up because the very reason you have this customer base is BECAUSE you are shaking things up.

And if you guys didn't want to shake things up most of your employees would still be working for Lucas Arts. In a way, you have a mandate to shake things up. Not enough shaking and you get nothing but a foamy fizzle. But with all this shaking going on, we fans are going to want a big, startling 'POP'!

Adam: Interesting theory--in lieu of market data, since it'll never be provided, I suggest you keep watching the frontpage of Gametap, which lists the top 5 games for the week; Culture Shock has been up there for over 2 months, and no other game has lasted so long on the Top 5 list.

If your prediction holds true, the following episodes should be hitting lower and lower spots on the list.

Oh, wrong wording. I meant if Season Two came out, it should start out easy too. But there's no point in having Episode Five of Season One simple as the first part. So, so sorry.