Telltale's Walking Dead game engine is new and improved

Telltale’s polished engine makes ‘Walking Dead,’ ‘Batman’ games look better

Spoiler alert: In the next The Walking Dead game, Clem is making a comeback, and she’s looking better than ever thanks to Telltale’s update of the engine it builds its conversational simulator games with. Although these sorts of games were never built with aesthetics in mind, the style it employed was starting to look a little dated, so now we have something better to play with.

The third season of Telltale’s heart-wrenching The Walking Dead series will debut sometime this fall, playing out over the ensuing months as each episode is released. All of them, however, will look much better than previous series, as will games based around other franchises like Game of Thrones.

Unfortunately, the only evidence we have to support this is Telltale’s claim and a couple of screenshots, which, if we’re feeling cynical, were probably hand-picked to show the engine in its best light. There was also no word on whether some of the visual and audio issues experienced in previous games would make a reappearance in Season 3.

Since this is the same updated engine that Telltale used to put together its upcoming Batman title, we can take note of the latter game’s recent trailer release to see how The Walking Dead world might look and perform once season three rolls around.

Forgetting that Bruce Wayne seems to have become Sterling Archer in the trailer, the engine looks to have maintained its pseudo cartoon, sort of cell-shaded look, but the lines are crisper — it’s like Telltale has gotten better at coloring in between the lines.

Of course that is a trailer, so it’s likely also showing the game in a good light, but it’s a little more indicative than a couple of HUDless screenshots. Fortunately, both games will be released soon, Batman as early as August 2, so we don’t have long to wait to find out what these games really look like.

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