Telltale's 'Crowd Play' For Batman Is Local Only Multiplayer
It seems the grand ambition at Telltale Games to inject some multiplayer fun into their adventure franchises, like Batman: The Telltale Series, is actually quite limited.
The studio announced an interesting feature called Crowd Play that allowed other players to vote on major story decisions in their new Batman series, letting the collective dictate Bruce Wayne's responses. This had huge implications and could have made live streams very interesting indeed.
Sadly the Crowd Play mechanic isn't quite as impressive now that Telltale have clarified exactly what it is. The confusion came from the studio holding a major stage demo for Batman: The Telltale Series where attendees could all vote through apps to effect the playthrough. This was a marketing gimmick however.
The actual Crowd Play that everyone can experience is a very different and vastly more limited affair. First of all there is zero support for any kind of mass voting, like in the stage demo, as the feature is locked between 4 to 12 players.
"The most important point is that Crowd Play is a local multiplayer experience. It’s designed for everyone to be watching the same screen, at the same time, in the same room and works best with 4-12 people," blogged Telltale Games.
All players must watch the same screen as it won't 'stream' to any connected device voting. The host of the game must select to have Crowd Play on where a code then gets displayed on-screen for the others to use on their devices to 'log in' and vote.
"Crowd Play is not a feature intended for use over streaming services. There is latency introduced by services such as Twitch. This means that everyone isn't seeing that game at the exact same time, which means that everyone doesn’t see the choices at the same time. So, the group can’t make a choice together at the same time."
Telltale are apparently investigating what can be done with streaming platforms like Twitch to see if there is a way to eventually support an expanded Crowd Play. "For now, everyone needs to be in the same room, watching the same screen."
Check out the official Crowd Play FAQ for more.
Batman: The Telltale Series starts tomorrow, August 2nd, with Episode 1 which releases on PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, iOS and Android.
