Viewers Can Influence Dead Nation During a Stream

Last Updated: February 28, 2014

dead-nation

If you caught our announcement of March’s PS+ game lineup, you might have caught a few interesting details about the special broadcast features found in the PS4’s Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition.

Basically, if you decide to stream your Dead Nation gameplay, your viewers can do more than just sit back and watch. They’ll be able to vote on certain things that can happen in your game, and thereby alter the difficulty level. Kind viewers might choose to give you extra ammo. Not-so-kind viewers might gleefully vote to put a bunch of zombies in your path. We bet there’ll be a lot of that.

Viewers who vote will also appear in your game themselves, as named zombies.

This sounds like a really interesting way for game developers to take advantage of the PS4’s broadcasting features (and the Xbox One, once it integrates Twitch next month) in a way that doesn’t hinder the experience for players who don’t stream, but adds something special for those who do. We’ve never seen this sort of player-viewer interactivity before, and we’ll be interested in how it works out.

Check out the trailer, which includes a snippet of viewers voting during a broadcast, and let us know your thoughts.