The Wolf Among Us 2 Pushed to Next Year in Effort to Avoid Crunch

ign.com:

Today, Telltale Games has announced that its long-awaited sequel to The Wolf Among Us is being pushed out of 2023 in an effort to avoid crunch and team burnout, as well as accommodate a move from Unreal Engine 4 to 5.

Speaking to IGN, Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie explained that the team made the choice for a number of reasons, but primarily to avoid burnout or shipping an unfinished game.

"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."

Ottilie explains that like many other studios, the re-established Telltale Games had struggled with the challenges inherent to building a studio during the COVID-19 pandemic. After being resurrected by LCG Entertainment in 2019 following the shutdown of the original Telltale, Telltale unveiled The Wolf Among Us 2 at The Game Awards the following December. But the studio was still in its very early stages, with the game in pre-production (and explicitly not using any previously-developed material), and the new studio roughly two years away from being fully staffed. While at the time it made sense to announce early to help secure funding and support for the new initiative, Ottilie admits that had he known then about other coming factors like the pandemic, he may not have made the same decision.

Since then, he continues, The Wolf Among Us 2 has been proceeding well. But recently, Telltale made the decision to switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal 5. It's a move that Ottilie says happened because Unreal 5 has a number of interesting features that many on his team, specifically engineers and artists, feel are worth the effort. But he admits that means redoing "quite a bit of work" that was already