The Wolf Among Us 2 was one of the two Telltale Games titles the revitalized developer announced for 2023. However, Bigby’s long-anticipated follow-up adventure won’t be making it in time for this year.
Telltale tweeted about the delay and also spoke in more detail to IGN. The tweet cites the general reason for pushing a game — it needs more time — and the team wants it to be the “sequel fans deserve.”
Telltale gave more nuanced answers to IGN, as it noted that this push was to avoid crunch and burnout. CEO Jamie Ottilie said that setting up a studio in the midst of a pandemic was difficult, and since the team isn’t using elements from the prior version of The Wolf Among Us 2, it had to start fresh. After being canceled when Telltale died in 2018, the game was announced once again at The Game Awards in 2019. However, it was revealed quite early in order to secure funding. Ottilie stated that he might not have made the same decisions in hindsight.
Development has been going well since, according to Ottilie. The studio has even switched the game to Unreal Engine 5, even though that means it has to redo some work that was already done in Unreal Engine 4.
So while the game the was originally slated for 2023, Ottilie said that it would only hit that date if the studio put out a rushed game or crunched.
“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds,” he said. “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.”
Crunching is a particularly sore spot for Telltale, as the prior version of the developer was notorious for squeezing its workers far past their breaking points, which ultimately led to its demise. Neglecting to crunch follows up on something Ottilie said in 2019 when he noted the team is “taking a measured and methodical approach to growth” in order to build a healthier culture from the start.
The Wolf Among Us, based on DC Comics’ Fables series, originally started October 2013 and finished in July 2014 with its fifth and final episode. It was one of Telltale’s most beloved games and left off on quite a cliffhanger, one that will have taken the studio about a decade to follow up on.
