Last year, Telltale Games released new trailer for the upcoming sequel, The Wolf Among Us 2, alongside a release window of 2023. This is no longer the case. Telltale Games announced today that The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed out of 2023. “We started work on this in 2020 and we’re still determined to tell the ongoing story of Bigby and the rest of the Fabletown gang,” Telltale said on Twitter. “However, it is going to require more time. As disappointed as you are hearing this, we feel worse having to say it.” Speaking to IGN, Telltale said that the game was delayed in an effort to avoid crunch and to accommodate the transition from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal 5.
Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie explains that there were many reasons for the delay. Primarily, they wanted to avoid burnout or shipping an unfinished game. He also says that the re-established Telltale Games struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges that came with building a studio during that time. “Making games is difficult and they need time to be right,” he said. “And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.”
Telltale made the decision to switch to Unreal Engine 5 because of the number of interesting features that Unreal 5 has. Ottilie said that many on the team, specifically engineers and artists, felt it would be worth the effort. He admits that means redoing “quite a bit of work” that was already done in Unreal Engine 4. Ottilie said that there was two ways that Telltale would be able to meet the 2023 release window. One option would be shipping the game unfinished.
“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds,” he says. “The expectations are pretty high, and we want time to meet those and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made.’ Let the world say what they will [once] it’s done, but at least we know that in these times, in these conditions, this is the best game that we could make.”
The other option would be crunch, something that persisted throughout the original Telltale Games.
“I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it,” Ottilie 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.”
Currently, The Wolf Among Us 2 is now on the docket for 2024.