Trivia / The Walking Dead: Season Four

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A common complain of A New Frontier is Clementine's lack of importance to the story and only being playable during short flashback segments. Here, she is once again the playable character and her actions will influence AJ similar to the relationship between Lee and Clementine in Season 1.
  • Kent Mudle stated in a Reddit AMA that he disliked a lot of the often unavoidable character deaths in Season 2, echoing a particular complaint from fans, and promised that if a character is determinant and is saved by the player, they will live to the end of the story.
  • Clementine's Ship Tease with Gabe in A New Frontier received mainly negative reactions, due to Gabe being considered The Scrappy for many, and since you didn't control Clementine, there was no way of influencing her opinion of him either way. Whether the crew was aware of this backlash or not, in The Final Season, you're back in control of Clementine and are given two different, much more likable love interests and can decide which one to romance, or even if you want Clementine to romance them at all, the choice is entirely yours.
    • Expanding on that, when Louis asks Clementine in Episode 1 if she's ever had a boyfriend, you can decide whether Clementine will mention Gabe and that she possibly liked him, or dismiss him entirely.
  • Similarly, another romantic sub-plot that received some flak in ANF was Javi and Kate's relationship being pushed by the narrative and other characters even when you try to have Javi show no interest in her. Kate can come off as down right nagging as she will regardless attempt to pursue a relationship with him and throws a tantrum if you don't reciprocate. In Season 4, as mentioned above, you can choose to have Clementine not pursue a relationship with either Violet or Louis and, apart from minor scenes, nothing of the story changes (in fact staying friends with them will give different unique minor scenes and dialogues) and neither Louis or Violet will act "disappointed" at being rejected; on the contrary, it's never brought up again and they continue to be great friends to her (particularly the one you save).
  • Season 2 received some criticism due to the group of able-bodied, healthy adults relying on an eleven-year-old girl to do everything on account of Clementine being the protagonist. In this season, Clementine becomes the protagonist once again, but this time she's surrounded by children her age or younger who don't know as much about fighting and survival as Clem does, so their reliance on her is much more believable.
  • Seasons 2 and 3 were criticized for undermining the side characters, as even those with more dimensional personalities (Nick, David, etc.) were often left out-of-focus until they often died abruptly. Season 4 has been praised for giving the new characters proper focus and development, allowing players to actively care about them as opposed to seeing them as bodies waiting to drop.
• Channel Hop: After Telltale Games began to close down and left the final two episodes in question, Skybound Games took the task of developing the final two episodes.
• Crossdressing Voices: Coupled with Dawson Casting. AJ is voiced by a 25-year old woman.
• Dawson Casting: Nearly all the Ericson kids have voice actors in their thirties, while Brody, Ruby and Omar even have voice actors in their forties. The only characters with voice actors close to their own age are Violet and Tenn, with 19-year old Violet being voiced by 22-year old Gideon Adlon, while 12-year old Tenn is voiced by 14-year old Zaire Hampton.
• Network to the Rescue: Well rather a fellow studio formed from former Telltale employees. But after Telltale folded, Skybound quickly stepped in to finish up the remaining episodes so the series could at least end without being Left Hanging. The fandom was utterly grateful to them for it.
• Old Shame: Kent Mudle lowkey dislikes the marketing image for Season 4, since Clem looks too aggressive and AJ looks too timid.
• Playing Against Type: Cherami Leigh, who normally plays girls who aren't messed up in the head, like Lucy Heartfilia, Asuna Yuuki, and Elizabeth Midford, here plays the Ax-Crazy (no pun intended) Minerva.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The story was originally going to be a road trip plot like Seasons 1 and 2, where Ericson's school would have fallen in the first episode thanks to being overrun, leading Clementine and AJ to return to the road, accompanied by some of the kids from the school. This was scrapped as the team figured they wanted to do something different.
  • When Clementine is by the piano with Louis and are given options to carve something, the team considered a third option that was deemed too inappropriate and quickly got axed - presumably something rude that would have served to upset Louis.
  • Episode 3 was originally going to let Clem wander around and mingle during the party — hence her dialogue with Ruby — but this had to be cut to save on development costs.
  • Brody's near-finalised character model/art was uploaded onto Artstation, where she's depicted as blonde-haired and green-eyed, whereas she's redheaded and blue-eyed in the game proper. It's possible that the developers deviated from the original design in order to better distinguish her from Violet, who has the same coloration.
  • At the party in Episode 3, Ruby was going to read another file that would have revealed Aasim's reason for being at Ericson's - he used to set fires.
  • Early drafts had Tenn having a much bigger role at the end where he'd be the reason Clementine got bit as it would happen when she tried to save him. Violet/Louis would have survived regardless and Tenn would have joined Clem and AJ at the barn where he would either try to kill Clem, being afraid she'd turn, or he'd end up sacrificing himself to buy Clem and AJ more time. Your choice with AJ would also have determined how AJ treated Tenn, being forgiving towards him or attacking him for getting Clem bit. The writers figured your choice with AJ only decided Tenn's fate in such case and didn't feel like too much of a consequence, along with making for a problematic potential reunion with Tenn and AJ later, and thus it got scrapped.
  • Another early draft had Violet determinately turning into an antagonist at the end, where she'd keep fighting Clementine after the boat destruction and either leave or be forced to come back to the school. Even in the latter scenario, Violet would still end up leaving, her trust in people broken to the point she'd rather be alone. After the above scenario with Tenn got changed, this ended up changed too, as the writers figured an ending where both Louis could die and Violet leave would be too much of a Downer Ending.
  • A lot of things were planned for the Ericson's school setting, such as having more children/teenagers as background characters to make it more inhabited, an almost free-roam of the school to reclaim overrun buildings and yards, learning new techniques to fight walkers, finding new weapons and so on. All of which had to be cut as the team simply didn't have the budget for it.
  • Gideon Adlon originally planned to audition for Ruby, but was asked to read for Violet instead and ending up getting that role.
• Write What You Know:
  • The cinematic artist for Clementine and Louis' scene by the piano (a bisexual woman), specifically asked to do that scene as she plays classical piano herself and even got kissed by another girl while sitting by a piano, remembering that so fondly that she, in her own words, "basically self inserted as Louis."
  • Similarly, the story Violet tells Clementine about her grandmother buying them chicken nuggets was based on a real childhood memory of the cinematic artist for that scene.