Telltale Games’ the Wolf Among Us 2 Was Delayed to at Least 2024 To Avoid Crunch
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Telltale Games announced that they are delaying The Wolf Among Us 2 out of 2023 in an effort to avoid crunch, team burnout, and transition the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.
The developers want to be transparent with this announcement, so Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie spoke to IGN as to why they made the decision to delay the game out of 2023 and now aim for a 2024 release.
"I've done [crunch], and I don't want to do it again, and it's not fair to ask it," he says. "You can't plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don't want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labor markets and the growth in the games industry. So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It's not how you build a business. And as an industry, we're terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we're going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices."
Simply put, they don’t want to go down the same road the studio experienced years ago.
The decision to move the project to Unreal Engine 5 was also made because the team wanted to utilize the features found in the new game engine, but that results in extra work as they have to convert all of what they’ve done so far in Unreal Engine 4.
Just like the first game, The Wolf Among Us 2 will be an episodic title but this time all episodes will be created all at once before the first episode becomes available. It will be available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC (via Epic Games Store).
It’s not going to be all quiet for the Telltale as they still have The Expanse: A Telltale Series still set to launch Summer of this year. Have a look at the latest gameplay trailer released just last month.
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