The Walking Dead ‘story builder’ lets players reconstruct old choices — or alter them

For a series going back to 2012, it’s likely that the save files of many that played all three seasons of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead are missing, or that their choices were lost in the transition to a new console generation. For those who remember all the major choices they made, the developer has released a web-based tool to help players rebuild their history with Clementine.

Or they could go in a completely different direction — saving someone they had forsaken earlier, for example (hey, we’re trying to avoid spoilers). The Story Builder doesn’t involve every “so-and-so will remember that” choice — just the major ones that forked the story. It’s also Clementine-focused, so much of Season Three: A New Frontier is left out.

At the end, players get a game save in the cloud that they can download for Season Four: The Final Season. Users must have or create a Telltale Games account and access it from their platform of choice to get the file.

The Telltale account is also a way to upload cloud saves and import them into The Final Season, with varying compatibilities. A page on Telltales’ website has more details. The big limitation is that saves are only importable from either The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series Collection (not individual game saves from Seasons One or Two) or The Walking Dead: A New Frontier.

Xbox and PlayStation saves are not cross-compatible, but both consoles can accept cloud saves from Windows PC, iOS and Android versions. And Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 saves, from Season One or Season Two, can’t be imported at all.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season launches Aug. 14 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. It will close out Clementine’s saga and offer new gameplay features, such as more open-ended combat against the undead.