After a long silence following the announcement at The Game Awards 2021, Telltale Games and Deck Nine have resurfaced The Expanse: A Telltale Series with a gameplay trailer shown at IGN Fanfest.
If that wasn’t enough for you, they’ve also published nearly ten minutes of new gameplay with developer commentary from Telltale’s VP of Story Development Zak Garriss and Deck Nine’s Game Director Stephan Frost.
Frost explained:
This is a Telltale game, so we’re really trying to lean into the character-first storytelling. And we also wanted to expand it a bit and make sure that when we’re exploring, we’re using things like zero-G. Then we also have these cinematics that you’ve come to know and love from Deck Nine’s history of making narrative games and trying to have that Telltale feel to it that when we’re finding these things we’re seamlessly blending them. And a part of that also is going to include really difficult choices.
The footage shows protagonist Camina Drummer (played by actress Cara Gee, the same one as the TV show) exploring a fairly large space in three axis, which the developers said is unique for the narrative adventure genre. Moreover, Frost said items found during scavenging runs would affect relationships.
It’s a lot of fun. It also allows us to continue the storytelling by interacting with things in the environment.
So we’re jumping from different parts of ship remains, we’re finding things in the environment and our crew is commenting on the things that we’re finding.
I love that so, every part of the gameplay, the exploration, the object discovery and acquisition, it’s always going come back to character. It comes back to character, and it’s so important, in fact, in the exploration that there are items that will completely shift your relationship with characters if you find them and bring them back to your crew.
There are items that affect the rapport and relationship and affect the ending of the game. So exploration in this space with this cool zero-G mechanic is really important to the storytelling, and it’s just fun.
The Expanse: A Telltale Series, which is set prior to the events featured in the TV series, is targeting a Summer launch on PC and consoles. The Epic Games Store page already includes the game’s system requirements, which are predictably low.
