Hmm, maybe, but the problem with Telltale is they really haven't improved their game much at all. Their latest games still suffer from the same flaws their first games did, which is to say the puzzles are often far too easy and the pacing is a bit slow. Something a bit more serious than their normal pure comedy fair will be nice, but I'm a little wary, that's all.
It doesn't help that one of the main designers on Telltale Games, Dave Grossman, has said this, which explains some of my criticisms.
Quote:"Sure, I've played a few old-schoolies. The first adventure game I ever played is the one that the genre is named after, "Adventure", which I came across in the late 1970s. Later, while I was working at LucasArts, I played some of the Sierra titles, and others, you know, checking out the competition. I found those games interesting and challenging, but ultimately very frustrating. They tended to punish curiosity with death, and they had all these puzzles where the solutions were amusing but often arbitrary and more or less impossible to figure out. It was like no one was thinking about what it would actually be like to PLAY the game. I claim no personal innocence on this point, by the way; I did write and design some games at that time which, while somewhat friendlier, are decidedly old school with some of their puzzles. I'm still apologizing to random strangers on the street for expecting them to think of hypnotizing a monkey as a rational way to turn him into a monkey wrench."
"As for where it's going now, I see a shift from puzzle games with story to story games with puzzles, if that makes sense? The story and characters, which were probably always the most compelling part of the experience anyway, take center stage, and the challenge offered to the player is whatever best supports the moment and the scene at hand, instead of whatever makes the designer look clever. The games are also often being made less lengthy and more accessible, to fit with the busy lives of modern players."
I understand where he's coming from a little bit, but I really have to disagree. I don't like the idea of making adventure games, traditionally already short titles, even shorter. I also don't like the idea of dumbing down puzzles too much. Granted, SOME puzzles really are too esoteric to ever figure out on your own, like that infamous bridle on the snake puzzle in KQ2. However, a lot of them did come to you if you just sat down and thought for a bit. Deaths "punishing" players is something else I can understand, but I think that's largely solved with the system KQ7 put in place, where deaths would often clue you in to hints and return you to the location you died. I also have to disagree on the "story is the thing most people remember" thing. While story does help to draw you in, and there are a number of adventure games with truly great stories, such as Syberia, I tend to remember the fun of actually solving a puzzle. My mom tends to agree. While she absolutely loved Grim Fandango, King's Quest 4, Syberia, The Longest Journey, and even a few of the Monkey Island games (though she admits that style of comedy isn't really her thing), she couldn't get into a few of the Telltale games I showed her. Her main complaint? Too small a world, too few puzzles, and the puzzles were simply too straight forward. I gotta say, being presented with a rope on one side and a torch on the other really doesn't say "mind bender" to me.
Telltale isn't a bad company mind you. I did enjoy the games, but they were mostly average to me, and they haven't improved much. None of their current adventure games really stand up to the current and past "greats". Back to the Future had great PREviews, but the reviews when it actually came out tended to all come back as "disappointing", at least at the sites I check out (I don't go to IGN and haven't for years). The voicework is spot-on, but the puzzles were rather disappointing and even the story didn't amount to much at the end of the journey.
It doesn't engender much hope when they move on to more serious stuff like Jurassic Park.