Telltale's "Pretty Innovative" Walking Dead S3 Due 2016

As first hinted back in 2014, there's definitely going to be a Season 3 of Telltale's The Walking Dead - because The Walking Dead in all its forms is a story specifically designed to never, ever end. Telltale promise that the endings of Season 2 will be respected, and claim what they're doing is "not from the bag of tricks that that we've ever shown anybody before."

'The Walking Dead' is a clever play on words because it actually means the doomed survivors of the zombie apocalypse, not the zombies themselves: so say a hundred thousand pub-bores the world over. Well ACTUALLY 'The Walking Dead' refers to the endless hordes of consumers who mindlessly devour anything with 'The Walking Dead' written on it, DO YOU SEE. "Oh look another story about people being mean to each other and sometimes kissing while all their friends get killed, I must have it immediately. What do you mean what was the name of that guy I really liked in season one who got killed by whossiface? I don't remember and I don't care. All I care about is the fate of Feisty New Survivor #192. She's definitely staying around forever, there's no way they'd unexpectedly kill her for the same kind of easy melodramatic emotional manipulation that they've used 87 times over already."

You're quite right, I didn't sleep last night. What of it? It's fine, the games are fine, at least if you go in for Body Horror & Crying. A bit more self-contained than the entirely open-ended comics and TV show, and hugely influential, too. I'm just burned out on a conveyor belt of survivors and no possibility of illumination or meaningful closure. I used to watch soap operas too, and I don't begrudge anyone who does, but there came a point where I realised any destination I thought was in sight was mere illusion and I just couldn't care about these people any more.

Many others don't feel similarly, and I'm sure there will be an enormous appetite for The Continuing Adventures Of Anyone Who Isn't Dead Yet, Depending Somewhat On The Choices You Made In The Previous Series.

Telltale revealed the new series to Mashable, claiming that on the one hand it's a clean point of entry for newcomers but on the other it will nonetheless reflect some decisions made in the earlier instalments.

Without spoiling anything, there are a bunch of different ways season 2 can resolve, and Telltale claim they've got a way to make season 3 incorporate whatever you chose. "From a role-playing, interactive storytelling point of view, it is not from the bag of tricks that we've ever shown anybody before," Telltale Games CEO Kevin Bruner told Mashable. "The way that we're dealing with and validating and retaining all those different playthroughs is really cool and unexpected and, I think, pretty innovative from the storytelling point of view."

They also promise that they have a 'solution' in mind with which to import save data from previous series, which was hitherto looking tricky due to the lack of cloud save support in S1.

The game's first episode is due at some point this year. It's actually Telltale's fourth Walking Dead series, as they've just wrapped up a Michonne side-story.

IT'S YOU, YOU ARE THE WALKING DEAD.