Telltale on why the game is returning, improvements detailed, more

If you’re a fan of The Wolf Among Us, there’s a lot to look forward to. For one thing, The Wolf Among Us 2 is coming next year. And if you’ve yet to play the original, The Wolf Among Us Remastered is launching in just a few weeks.

We were recently able to speak with Telltale to learn more about the project. Game designer Matt Saia talked with us about why The Wolf Among Us is returning now and went into detail about the many ways in which the team touched up the original game for this release.

Here’s our full discussion:

What was the motivation behind making the remaster? Was this a way of prepping people for the second game or was it for reaching a larger audience?

I think we could say both. For us, it was… it’s like part of our history and we wanted to kind of honor our legacy. It’s been over ten years since The Wolf Among Us released, so taking it and giving it a brush up in terms of the way it looks and visuals and the rest of it, and really reintroducing both a new audience and existing fans to it, and then, of course, getting everybody ready for Wolf 2 next year, so I think that’s definitely part of it as well.

You’re using the original Telltale Tool for this rather than Unreal Engine and you mentioned it was an undertaking. How did that feel working on the original again?

It really felt amazing. It was definitely an undertaking. It was definitely an undertaking. We were kind of opening an old toolbox and looking at it for the first time in a long time, but it was great. It’s got a custom renderer, which really makes Wolf look like Wolf. Going back in and retouching all the scenes and stuff was fun.

One of the biggest challenges is the lighting. We had to relight all the scenes. In the very beginning, we didn’t think we were going to need to do that, but as we got into it, that was something we had to do for everything. Every scene has been relit, every character model has been completely redone. Those were the biggest challenges – getting all that content in there, retouching all the animations, doing those things.

You mentioned the lighting there was improved. What other major improvements do you consider being in the remaster?

Yeah, there’s a ton of great stuff.

Every character we took from concept all the way through to final model, they’re five to six times the detail of the original game. You look at their hair, you can look at all aspects of them. They’ve improved in every way.

A lot of the monsters and creatures we took and kind of expanded their designs and embellished them a little bit, because again, we now have the poly count and the performance to be able to do those kinds of things. The outside environments and inside environments, we retouch every single one of those, including upresing both the models for a lot of the objects as well as the textures for everything. That includes repainting everything as well, so it wasn’t simple. We wanted to do this justice – really important to us.

And the city scenes, we actually gave a lot of life to. There’s a lot more like trash in the street, living things. We have pedestrians and things like that. That was a big thing that we added as well and stuff that just probably wasn’t possible back when they first made the game just because of performance.

During the play session, you showed me a new interaction in the game. Are there any other kind of new additions, content wise, within the scenes and choices?

There are a couple of them. We showed you one and there’s a couple of Easter eggs like that in the game. We kept it really minimal. We wanted to preserve the storyline and everything and we added them where we thought we could add something that did not interfere with the story that was just a really cool piece of Fables and Wolf Among Us lore. We are doing it in ways that are not invasive of the core storyline.

For these small new interactions, will the original scribes and writers from the original game be involved at all or was this all from the new team?

It was all from the new team. The original actor, Adam Harrington, who plays Bigby did all of the dialogue lines for it though. We did have him do everything to make sure that everything sounded the same.

Revisiting the game, which is beloved by so many fans, did it feel like it was intimidating to kind of go back into it?

Absolutely. I think you’re always asking yourself, like, how much or how little do we want to touch a scene. How much, how little do we want to touch a character. I think that’s the way we treated it as we went through it – just really respectfully. We didn’t dramatically change the way any of the characters looked – Bigby looks like Bigby. Snow looks like Snow. We wanted to make sure that you’re just taking them and kind of plusing up the original designs rather than redesigning them or putting them in new clothes or a different outfit or those kind of things – other than some of the creatures because it felt a little bit more open to do that just because they kind of scream for it, they kind of asked for it, they were begging for it. There’s always just kind of that balance beam of too little, too far, too much, too little in terms of how much you touch something. That was the biggest challenge from day one.

There was always the pillar of us honoring the legacy of the game and Telltale. If you keep that in focus, that kind of answers a lot of the questions as you go along about what you do and what you can do.

Someone on the team said that you are a new Telltale. What defines you now versus when this game originally released over a decade ago?

I think actually similar things. We’re a new Telltale, but we like telling great stories. That’s the most important thing about Telltale – telling these amazing interactive experiences with great cinematography and just great tone and great moods.

Even with the new Telltale, if you look at something like Expanse, which I also worked on, again, we’re telling these kinds of emotional stories where people are making these kinds of hard choices, and I think those are the important things. They were the important things then and they’re the important things now.

As far as new things we do, we look at different art styles. We’re open to looking at different ways of telling stories. I think that’s all part of things that, you know, looking at the future of Telltale, I think those are the things that you might see. It’s just, you know, experiencing new things, right?

Also keeping the core of that storytelling, the choices that matter. I think that’s a huge part of what we are, and that won’t change.

Is there a desire on the team at all to get a little bit more experimental in the future?

I think so. I think you’re always looking at things. I don’t have anything to announce or anything like that, but we’re always looking at ways to experiment with storytelling. I think there absolutely is that. That’s been part of the journey as we move forward, is looking at different ways to tell stories.

Alongside this remaster, a sequel is now in the works. As the The Wolf Among Us was a prequel, will we be seeing a direct adaptation of the content in Fables?

You know, I can’t answer anything about The Wolf Among Us 2, other than saying it’s coming out next year and everybody’s going to know pretty soon.

You can expect to see The Wolf Among Us Remastered for Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch on October 29, 2026. In case you missed it, our impressions of the game can be found here (and the same for The Wolf Among Us 2 here).