The Walking Dead season two aims to be more "robust", less buggy
The Walking Dead produced a couple of unpleasant save-destroying bugs, and while only a tiny fraction of players were affected, TellTale is working hard to avoid a repat if possible.
"Percentage-wise it wasn’t a huge majority or anything beyond a small percentage," Connors said of how many players were affected by the bugs, while speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
"But for how invested people were in the characters and the story, it hit them that much harder. They wanted to scream that much louder about the situation."
They certainly did - and Connors doesn't want to hear it again.
"I think in season two, we’re going to be a lot more diligent about making sure that part of the system can handle everything that’s going to happen. Now we know how people are going to do this and how they’re going to use this and how it’s going to appear to people," he said.
"I think we’ll have some good systems in place to make sure that it’s great in the next season."
Connors said TellTale struggled during the production of the first season as it was implementing the save system for the first time, and so was solving problems as they went.
"We were always actively fixing it. It was basically whack-a-mole. Chasing it through the season. Another problem would pop up in another episode," he said.
"We’ve certainly learned from that and said, 'Next time out, procedurally, these things are going to be very robust and it’s not going to allow for someone to require data from four in order for them to have the fix that fixes two.' That kind of stuff. It got very complicated in that sense.
"There were so many things going on with how downloadable content works and how you can update things and how you can patch that once the first one showed up. Bug-free would have been really hard, considering episode five didn’t exist when we put episode one out. Once one showed up, then it was, 'Okay, let’s just go in and fix that.' But there was two to consider and three and four. Then the edge cases started to pop up. It got super complicated super fast, because of the way we were doing it."
The Walking Dead's second season is high on TellTale's priorities list, and it's promised some new content while we wait, but it's also currently working on Fables.
Thanks, Kotaku.