WhenThe Walking Dead: Destinieswas first revealed, many were curious why the game was just limited to the first four seasons given the long runtime of the show. Season 11 came to an end in 2022, and there are plenty of spin-offs the game could explore as well. Negan and his entire arc would be a big draw forThe Walking Dead: Destinies, too. We asked about this during a recent interview with Paulo Luis Santos, Game Director at Flux Games, who discussed why the team decided to stick with the earlier days of the show.
The Walking Dead: Destiniesis a third-person action-stealth gamewhere players control the characters from the TV show, with the big draw being its “What If” scenario. While ensuring that characters are consistent with the show, Flux Games strove to give players the power to change who lives and who dies. The game still follows the show in terms of locations and events, but for example, Shane can walk away from his encounter with Rick alive, changing how the group operates at the farm, the Prison, and so forth.
The choice to focus on the first four seasons largely comes down to nostalgia. The amount of content covered by the game was a major talking point among Flux Games, GameMill, and AMC, with the trio considering more seasons at one point in the project. Santos, specifically, wanted to be able tosave Beth inThe Walking Deadseason 5, but it was a bit of a surprise when it dawned on the development team that it’s been 13 years since season 1 aired.
In other words, the dev team decided to focus on major locations from the earliest days of the project, including the few early HQs like the Greene Farm and the Prison. Another benefit of this focus, beyond nostalgia, is the ability to craft a tighter narrative with more details, should someone letThe Walking Dead: Destinies' Shanelive (as one example) or make extremely different choices from the show.
At the end of the day, we got to a place where we were sure that we wanted to focus on crafting the best TWD experience that we can, and to achieve that we decided that it means a more detailed, deep dive into these rich, awesome arcs that include Rick and Shane and Woodbury, as opposed to covering more ground seasons-wise.
Quality over quantity is an approach that should be appreciated byThe Walking Deadfans, and it certainly doesn’t mean that there’s not enough content to boot. While the team still faced tough choices regarding what to cut, covering the first four seasons means that 40+ episodes ofThe Walking DeadTV showare represented, to some extent, in the upcoming game. It’ll be interesting to see how the choices impact this plethora of episodes, like how Shane reacts to the Prison Flu in season 4.
Of course, ensuring that the narrative and overall direction stick strongly to the show is not simple, requiring a lot of work on the part of Flux Games, Game Mill, and AMC. According to Santos, there were constant, recurring meetings between the three companies “to get everyone on the same page, discuss creative paths, nail technical decisions, adjust narrative points, find solutions to challenges, and ultimately play the game together to fine-tune the experience.”
The Walking Dead: Destiniesis set to release on November 14 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
