Whether it’s the heart-wrenching journey of Clementine in The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, which thrust players into a fantastical fairytale world, Telltale’s catalog of episodic series are often solitary experiences – save for the splash screen at the end of each chapter that reveals how your choices compare with the global average.
But with the launch of Batman: The Telltale Series next week, the esteemed studio is introducing multiplayer in the form of Crowd Play, allowing local viewers to keep pace with your journey and even chime in with their own suggestions.
Those hoping to expand this into the realm of Twitch may be disappointed, though, after Telltale revealed via a blog post that latency issues mean that Crowd Play is really only intended for a group of viewers watching the same screen, who can interact via smartphones or computers.
“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. The group can’t make a choice together at the same time.”
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the developer will introduce Twitch compatibility further down the line, as the blog post notes:Â “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.”
Batman: The Telltale Series will bow across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac on August 2 with Realm of Shadows, the first in Telltale’s five-part rendition of the Caped Crusader.
