Telltale Games has delayed The Wolf Among Us 2 outside of its 2023 release window and into 2024, to avoid burnout and meltdown at the studio.

The Wolf Among Us 2, the sequel to Telltale’s acclaimed 2013 narrative adventure based on Bill Willingham’s Fables comics, has had an eventful development. It was first announced in 2017, but progress was halted after the studio closed its doors the following year. It was then unexpectedly re-announced in 2019, after Telltale was resurrected under new management.

This new version, which is being co-developed by AdHoc Studio, co-founded by original Wolf Among Us co-director Nick Herman, and made up of nearly 50 percent former Telltale employees, was initially expected to release in 2023, but Telltale has now pushed the game’s release back to next year, as detailed in a statement shared on Twitter.

“We started working on this in 2020 and are still determined to tell the ongoing story of Big and the rest of the Fabletown gang,” he wrote. “However, it’s going to take more time. As disappointed as you are to hear this, we feel worse saying it. But the work continues.”

“We are committed to delivering the sequel fans deserve,” the studio continued, “and doing what’s right for the game while protecting the health of our team.”

Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie, who helped resurrect the studio in 2019, expanded on the statement in a short interview with IGNexplaining a number of factors that have affected the development of The Wolf Among Us 2, including difficulties in assembling staff during the pandemic and the development team’s desire to switch to Unreal Engine 5.

While work is said to be “progressing well,” the engine switch, which is occurring as “many in [the] team, specifically engineers and artists, feel [the new features] worth the effort” – will mean redoing “a lot of work” already done in Unreal Engine 4.

All of this means that Telltale would have had to ship an unfinished game or crunch to meet its originally announced 2023 release, not being an option in Ottilie’s eyes. “If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to tear ourselves apart,” she said. “The expectations are pretty high and we want time to meet them and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made.’”

And as for the crisis, Ottilie told IGN: “I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask… We don’t want to burn our good people… This is not how you build a business. And as an industry, we’re terrible about it. We burn our people. We burn our best people faster. And as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow…we just have to stop growing and make better decisions.”

Telltale’s second announced game, a prequel to Amazon’s acclaimed sci-fi show The Expanse, which is being made in association with Life is Strange: True Colors developer Deck Nine Games, is still scheduled to release this year.