'Death Door's: Aftermath' Is The First Crowdvoted RPG
It's 'American Idol' except you're voting to drink potions.
There are multiplayer co-op games where you need teamwork to win, and then there are games like Death’s Door: Aftermath. The latest game from Shiny Shoe is the first of its kind: a crowdsourced streaming title where every action is voted on by a group of spectators.
If this concept sounds familiar to you, then you probably remember Twitch Plays Pokémon, a social experiment where thousands of Twitch users collectively played a single session of Pokémon Red. Every action was a crowdsourced, and, as you can imagine, the result was extremely chaotic. Sometimes it took 30 minutes for Red to simply walk across the screen because of the deluge of commands coming in.
But damnit, it worked. The first session of Twitch Plays Pokémon began on February 12 2014. It concluded a little over 16 days later, on March 1. All those masses spamming different actions were somehow able to get organized and finish the entire game.
Sometimes Red would get stuck like this for half an hour.
Shiny Shoe never mentions Twitch Plays Pokémon in the press release for Death’s Door, but that crowd-sourced experiment clearly inspired the game. In Death’s Door, players spectate a single session of the game via live stream and vote on what to do next.
However, you’ll find that Shiny Shoe’s approach is a lot more organized than Twitch Plays Pokémon. In Twitch Plays Pokémon, decisions were made on a rolling basis, but Death’s Door uses a limited time window to vote on potential actions. A live tally keeps track of the most popular commands as votes come in.
One of the perks of being a subscriber is being able to vote on special occasions like this.
The game is currently being streamed on Mixer, Microsoft’s live stream platform. You can try it for free, but if you subscribe for $6 a month, you’ll also be given access to special voting periods, custom emotes, and a Discord channel where you can speak directly with the team of developers behind the new game.
