Telltale has had to dissapoint its players yet again today, as the studio revealed via Twitter that The Wolf Among Us 2, the long-awaited sequel to the 2013 popular favorite, has been postponed yet again out of 2023, meaning fans will now have to wait another year for Bigby’s next adventure. Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie described the postponement, saying one of the main reasons is to prevent crunch and staff fatigue, as well as redoing and allowing a transition from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 to take advantage of new features and tools, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with IGN, Ottilie explained that if they meet their 2023 deadline, they will be forced to either crunch, which was a major issue in the original Telltale Games and one of the many reasons for the studio’s closure, or release an unfinished game, both of which he is adamant the studio will not do. He goes on to say that releasing the game in poor shape would lead to the studio and game being “torn to shreds” and that they aim to meet the high expectations of the fans, as well as commenting on crunch culture as a whole, saying “it’s not how you build a business,” and that “as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We simply need to cease doing it and make smarter decisions.”
This is just the latest setback in the game’s lengthy development, which began in 2017, was pushed back to 2018, then cancelled entirely before being resurrected by the new Telltale games and fully restarted in 2019. There is no fresh release schedule for the game as of yet.
While this will be disappointing for fans anxiously awaiting the new game, it’s always good to see a company placing its developers’ health first, and it should result in a stronger game in the end. Meanwhile, fans can look forward to another Telltale Series, The Expanse, which will be released later this year in collaboration with Deck Nine Games. The company is also working on a secret project.
We’ve made the difficult decision to delay The Wolf Among Us 2 #TWAU2.
To give more context, we spoke with IGN: https://t.co/afoCUHZwIy pic.twitter.com/KhrAfIrwYB— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) March 1, 2023
