In the retail version crowd play will be optional, but raises a number of interesting possibilities; such as giving Telltale fans more agency and direct influence when watching Batman on streaming sites such as Twitch.
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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.
Telltale Games’ upcoming Batman: The Telltale Series will debut a new crowd play mechanic that allows viewers to influence in-game decisions using their smartphones. “Now, from two to 2000-plus people can help the player make decisions”. “We are now turning all of Telltale’s games into a live interactive multiplayer experience”.
There are few things worse for a video game when multi-player is clearly just shoe-horned in because someone wanted to check off some arbitrary box of what a video game should have. They then go to that URL on their phone or other device and log in, essentially adding them to the game.
Batman will be the first of its games to support this new Crowd Play feature.
The developer is aware that its players are sometimes accompanied by people who like to chime in when the game presents a choice.
The hosting player can also choose with mode of Crowd Play they want to implement.
Crowd Play will offer two modes: one which automatically selects the choice with the highest percentage of votes and another which allows the main player to override the majority and select their own path. Crowd sway will be tallied live on screen for the player to see, letting them know immediately what everyone else thinks should be done.
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Unfortunately, there are some latency issues that prevent Crowd Play from being streamed; a shame as this seems like its most useful implementation.
