In news that probably everyone would have expected, The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed until after this year. In a post on Twitter yesterday evening, the newly revived (minus most of the original staff (opens in new tab)) Telltale Games announced that they had made the difficult decision to delay The Wolf Among Us 2 from 2023. However, given that it has been nearly a decade since the last episode of the first series was released, I would be willing to wait a little longer.

Telltale says the delay is "to protect [the team's] health," and in a chat with IGN (opens in new tab), studio boss Jamie Ottilie said it was to avoid crunch. 'As an industry, if we are going to continue to grow, we have to stop it,' Ottilie said. As an industry, if we are going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. The choice between delaying the game or taking a crack at it was to ship an unfinished game, but the studios seem to be refusing to do so. Said Ottilie, "If we shipped this game out and it was unfinished, it would tear us to shreds."

The Wolf Among Us 2 was announced early in the 2019 development cycle: Covid-19 and the tight labor market that comes with it, of course, but also the decision to switch the game from Unreal Engine 4 to 5. Ottilie said the change was worth it, he says, but it meant redoing work already done for the UE4 version of the game.

It is not surprising that this new Telltale is sensitive to crunch. The original studio was notorious for it, forcing staff to work 80-hour weeks. Kevin Bruner, co-founder of the original Telltale, said in 2019, "We tried to create an environment where you really had to [crunch] to survive at Telltale." Given that this was almost certainly a terrible experience for the staff, and that the company eventually dissolved anyway (open in new tab), it is not surprising that the new Telltale is trying to adopt a more measured pace.

Unfortunately, it is unclear how long The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed, but one hopes it has only been pushed back to early next year. The original "The Wolf Among Us" series, along with "The Walking Dead," was one of the original Telltale's notable successes, and PCG's Tyler Wilde, in his 2014 review of "The Wolf Among Us" (opens in new tab ), which praised the "ethical challenge, quality of characters and script." Until further notice, we'll likely be watching the trailer for "Wolf Among Us 2" (opens in new tab), which was released last year, over and over again. It looks like we will have to make do with this trailer for some time to come.