Batman: The Telltale Series seemed like it would subvert some of Telltale’s decision choices by introducing Crowd Play, a multiplayer mode that allowed up to 2000 players to vote in on the Dark Knight’s decisions. Whether the host wanted everyone’s opinion or granted the audience full control was up to them.
Unfortunately, according to Telltale Games in an updated blog post, Crowd Play will only support between four 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.
“Technically, it can support thousands of players, but they still need to be watching the same screen at the same time. This is mind blowing in a theater full of fans, but we don’t expect you can fit 2000 of your closest friends in your living room so we’ve designed everything for smaller groups.”
There’s also the matter that the feature won’t be on mobile platforms. But perhaps the biggest reason for not wanting to facilitate the Twitch crowd with huge audience counts for Crowd Play is due to latency.
“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. We are working closely with all the streaming services to address this problem, but it certainly won’t be ideal for streaming out of the box. For now, everyone needs to be in the same room, watching the same screen.”
Which is fair enough and it’s possible that this feature could be implemented to support more players in the future (perhaps for other Telltale games). For now, Dark Knight fans will have to be content with the current version when Episode 1 of Batman: The Telltale Series releases on August 2nd.
