Telltale Games, the creators of modern adventure games such as The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, have announced a brand new feature that will allow your friends to play the game with you.
Modern adventure games are heavily reliant on narrative choices and using Crowd Play, players will be able to let their friends and family vote for the decisions they take. Starting with Batman, all future Telltale titles will have this feature in built.
The host will be given a unique code and a web address. Just by going to that webpage and typing the unique code, anyone can join in and start voting. By default, the option with the most votes wins but the hosts can give themselves the ability to override that decision. This isn’t available on the mobile versions so the host also needs to be playing on a console or PC.
Theoretically, Telltale has said that they can support up to 2,000 players but for Batman up to 12 players will be able to take part. It has been designed for local play only and as such, Crowd Play isn’t ideal for streaming purposes. In addition, latency issues prevent everyone from seeing the same choices and then submit their decisions in time.
It’s a neat idea, which can one day bring significant changes to how we play such adventure games. For now, being able to let your friends and family have complete control over your fate sounds exciting yet horrifying at the same time. I would want other developers that are famous for choice driven narratives, such as Dontnod and Quantic Dream, to also bring a similar feature to their games.
