Telltale is about to add something new to its point-and-click adventure games, starting with Batman: The Telltale Series. At San Diego Comic Con, the studio announced that they will implement a feature called Crowd Play, allowing multiple players to join together and make the various decisions throughout the game.
The studio explained at the convention that they’ve been observing a phenomenon over the years with their games where people band together to watch the game in one room and try to shell out the decisions the characters need to make. They want to make this even easier for friends to “play the game together” with Crowd Play.
“We wanted a better way to integrate that audience,” Job Stauffer, head of creative communications at Telltale, told Shacknews at SDCC. “Now, from two to 2,000-plus people can help the player make decisions.”
“We are now turning all of Telltale’s games into a live interactive multiplayer experience,” he said.
Batman: The Telltale Series will be the first game of Telltale’s to implement Crowd Play. If the player turns on the feature, the game will submit a URL that the player can share with friends. They can then visit the web address on any web-enabled device and log in, which will add them to the game in spirit.
The hosting player can also choose with mode of Crowd Play they want to implement. Either the crowd can vote on a decision, or the player can override what the people want. Crowd players can also give a thumbs up or a thumbs down in response to actions the player takes, letting the player know how many of the audience they are appeasing or upsetting.
At the end of the game, the player will get a recap of their decisions, how they fall in with the rest of the population who has played it, and how their audience following voted for each choices.
Stauffer added that there may be a potential for streamers to implement Crowd Play with their own streams, but he emphasized that the latency issues will make it more difficult. It is possible that with technology improving, latency will become less of an issue in the future.
Would you use Crowd Play with these choice-centric games?
[Source: Shacknews]
