Lee met Shawn as he was escaping Clementine's house. Walkers have attacked the two, one grabbing Shawn as he is pinned underneath a tractor and another clutching Duck's shirt as he is perched on top of the tractor. One of the first choices we're faced with in Season 1, Episode 1, is deciding whether to save Shawn, son of Hershel, or Duck, son of Kenny. Each of these choices, in the end, did not affect your story, whatever you chose. Each of these choices might have filled you with dismay at the thought that your actions would negatively impact the game's outcome. We're going to examine several choices that players are confronted with in the course of all three seasons. But have you ever looked back on your playthroughs (or actually played the game again) and realized that making a different choice led to the same conclusion? We now have three completed seasons of The Walking Dead to play through, but the formula has roughly stayed the same: make choices, see the consequences, realize that your choices were meaningless and destiny plays a larger part in these games than we would like to admit. In an even more harrowing situation, you are faced with two actions to choose from and each action can lead to a person's death.īut do your choices ultimately matter? Is player agency an illusion that these games trick you into believing? In each episode, we're reminded that this game is about player choice and that our choices will have consequences. Faced with four options of dialogue as a time bar slowly shrinks, players experienced the panic of trying to say the right thing at the right moment to achieve a better outcome for their character, be it Lee, Clementine, or, more recently, Javier. Telltale's The Walking Dead series has stood as a shining example of how player choice can affect storytelling in a game.
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