Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead season three begins today with the release of not one but two episodes of the new five-episode season, titled The Walking Dead: A New Frontier. Watch the launch trailer for the new season right here if you haven’t seen it yet.

If you’re familiar with the series, you’re aware that you make choices that change how your story plays out. You’re also aware that you were able to import your season one save file before beginning season two to fit whatever happened to the characters in your first season playthrough. That feature returns for season three, but unfortunately many people played the first two seasons on an older console such as Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and will be playing A New Frontier on Xbox One or PS4 if they haven’t jumped over to PC. Thankfully Telltale has shared details on the options you’ll have, including starting with a clean slate or continuing your story. You can read that below.

Hey All,

Kevin from Telltale here! Just wanted to let you know how we are handling importing Season One and Two data into our new Walking Dead game (coming Dec 20th!). I noticed that some folks aren’t aware that we’re importing your data, so I wanted to make sure we had this information out there. Please share if you can!

Here are the ways it works.

Start New Story

This is for people who haven’t played The Walking Dead before, or don’t recall their previous experience. In this mode, Season Three starts with a Clementine who has lost everyone from the previous Seasons and is left alone with AJ.

Continue Your Story

If you want to continue with the story you created in Season One and/or Season Two, then we have some options for you.

Option 1 – Story Generator

Inside of Season Three, there is a “story generator” option where we’ll ask you a series of questions that help us hone in on your Clementine. This will select one of 42 different “starting points”, that include not just your ending but also the relationships you had with different characters and the style of player you are.

This was a fascinating thing for us to build and involved us combing through mountains of Walking Dead data and using some fancy data science to figure this out. We’ll be talking more about this, but it was organic and cool. I guess 42 really is the answer to life the universe and everything!

Option 2 – Use your Season Two save game

1. If you’re playing on the same device, and you still have your old Season Two save file, you can import your save. When you start a new game in Season Three, you’ll be automatically prompted to use your Season Two save data.

2. If you want to play on a different device, and still have your old device with Season Two saves. Then we’ve done our best to help you out. We’ve recently updated Season Two (on all platforms) to include Telltale Cloud Saves. You’ll need to update your app, launch Season Two and create a Telltale Account (if you don’t already have one). Then you can enable Cloud Saves and upload your Season Two save to the cloud. When you launch Season Three, you’ll be able to login to your Telltale Account and download the Cloud Save. Then you’re good to go! This is how to migrate your story from one device to another, like moving from PS3 to PS4, or Xbox 360 to Xbox One. It works from any platform to any other platform.

That’s it! We have a video coming out that will also walk people through how to do this in detail. We’ll let you know when that’s available. You can share that too!

Happy to answer more questions about moving saves around if you’d like. Looking forward to the launch!

-Kevin (and everyone at Telltale)

As they mentioned, Telltale has created a complex story generator. You can read all about how they created it and how it works right here.

If you’ve never played the series, however, the best thing you could do is play them before season three. They’re not expensive, and they go quickly. Nothing compares to experiencing the whole story for yourself. Seeing how your choices affect the story and characters. Plus, Clementine is one of the best video game characters of all-time (for me, anyway) and it makes me sad thinking of someone jumping right into A New Frontier without having experienced what she’s been through.

[Source: Telltale]

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