The Wolf Among Us and My Expectations
The Wolf Among Us and my expectations for it didn’t jive at the end. I think I need another 3 days to play multiple rounds of the Wolf Among Us to get it out of my system so I can understand what I’m feeling here. Let me be clear – I love the story, I love the art style, and have enjoyed my experience playing every episode! What I’m tripped up about, and what Charles is probably reading this saying “I TOLD YOU SO!” was the player agency. I felt like… everything was so pre-ordained, so what were my choices really doing?
So before I get into my problems with the agency, I want to reiterate, The Wolf Among Us is an awesome series. 5 episodes long, at least an hour or more playtime for each episode, there is tons of fun to be had, and it’s easy to play a segment and then walk away. (important for me – I need time to digest story fragments!) Telltale games did an amazing job of making a Fables video game. (for reals, if you are interested in comics, you should check out Fables)
The art is really interesting. It’s the same lines that I associated with Borderlands – handy that they’re going to be making Tales from the Borderlands! I’m even of thinking of cosplaying as Snow White from Wolf Among Us for a day at PAX Prime, but don’t hold me to that because I might chicken out sometime before August 29th! But really, look at this awesome art!
Now for the meat of this. We were sold on how much player agency there was. And for the first game or two I let it slide because, hey, there was world building – how much could they really put in? As we went along, you did get to choose what locations you go to first, how you treat specific characters, but here’s what got me. It still felt like that story was on rails. Like, if you let one person die instead of another, the people of Fabletown were still going to be just as upset, and still point you at the same bad guy. It doesn’t influence too much in the game if you are nice to your friends, or if you tell them they need to pack it up, and go to the Farm.
I don’t think I was ever expecting The Wolf Among Us to be an open world game like Skyrim, or to have character plots that change based on who is in your party like Dragon Age, but I was expecting to talk to my friends after we all played the entirety of the series, and have wildly different endings! I suppose it isn’t the strangest thing ever if we have the same play styles, but it was still a moment I wasn’t thrilled with when we all compared notes, but they were pretty much the same.
I remember cheating at the Choose Your Own Adventure novels as a kid and flipping around to the ending pages, reading them, and reverse engineering how to get to that ending. I don’t want to do that here, because it’s the experience of playing the game that I loved! But, I’d like to know that there is more out there than what I was shown, you know? Maybe there is an ending where Bigby saves Faith, you two go to the Farm, and raise little Toad Junior as your really odd adopted kid. (Please don’t make that ending, that was a supremely bad example)
So I think what I’m saying is that my expectations weren’t set correctly walking into this game. It was tons of fun, and I loved every moment playing it, and looked forward to each episode. I just bought too much into the idea that you could make the choices you wanted and could make the ending unique. I’m going to try again, and hope that maybe there really is something more that I’m missing!
