So you guys are assuming that everybody sees everybody else? that is, massive multiplayer? I was imagining you only see your partner (or partners) and the NPCs. So each team plays in its own world, with its own instance of the chainsaw.
To have more than this, i.e. massive multiplayer, we need some kind of “justification”. Concurrent puzzles only justify two or three players. What would be the added value of seeing members of other teams?
Having a large quantity of players makes the “blocking” issue easier to solve. If you were thinking about a small team of players who have to cooperate to solve puzzles, then you need most players to play at the same time to proceed. It’s easy to do if the playable characters are just two or three, but organizing the agenda of more people is more difficult.
you mean that, if your original teammate is not online, you can approach someone you don’t know and ask him “can you help me distract Mr Jones while I sneak in the shop?”
interesting.
Why, do you imagine situations where you need more than 2-3 people to cooperate to solve a puzzle? (now it would be useful if I had played some “escape room”). (maybe some heist situations)
In a “massive” version of the game, you don’t need to have an “original team” at all. You just go online and interact with other unknown players.
I don’t know how the players would communicate. I think that a free chat would motivate people to ask for hints and trolls to spoil the fun. A more limited kind of communication might be needed, like scripted dialogues.
I wasn’t clear, I’ll rephrase my thoughts: “if you were thinking about a small team of specific players who have to cooperate to solve puzzles, then you need most of those specific players to play at the same time to proceed.”.
Right.
So you envision a game where there is only a single instance of every object and every NPC, shared between all players? This is interesting, for the reason you stated, but there’s something I don’t understand : either the jewels of mr. Jones have been recovered, or they haven’t. Either the thief has been discovered and put in jail, or he hasn’t. If all players share the same instance of these NPCs, then if I subscribe late I am transported in a world where all the puzzles (quests) have already been solved?( I must be missing something)
There might be a third way. The game might be completed even by playing alone, but those “shortcuts” (multiplayer puzzles solved in a separate way by a single player) make you skip parts of the story. So your team completes the game, but not 100%.
I don’t know, adventure games don’t scale well to multiplayer if we agree that they have to be made of puzzles and story.
I seem to understand that you guys think this is a big problem? It’s like when you want to play tennis: you can’t play on your own, you first need to find a partner and you have to both agree to be there at a precise time. If it’s a doubles, four people need to agree.
An escape room could be another analogy.
Do you mean that Alice skips parts of the story and Bob sees the whole story? Or that both won’t see the whole story?
Wouldn’t it be in both cases unfair? Both would have to replay the game again to see the whole story.
No, it’s not. In tennis, you play a match. You just have to coordinate being there and that’s it, you enjoy the match.
You don’t play a campaign that will go on and on for at least a month. I have no hard data, but I’d state that the average solving time for TWP in the forum was about 20 hours of play. But it has been spread over very different schedules: there’s the guy who solved it in three 7-hours sessions, there’s the guy who solved it in a month playing a hour each day. You can’t just coordinate such things easily.
It’s more like a RPG, where a bunch of friends meet regularly to carry on a campaign and if one can’t make it for that day, the friends can’t advance. So they might meet anyway, but play something else.
The problem is we don’t use online videogames like that. If I want to play, I play nevertheless. If I have a FIFA match scheduled with a friend of mine, and he doesn’t show up, who cares - I’ll find another player in the lobby, or play solo. He’s not blocking me.
In an adventure game, he IS blocking me. Either I can’t play the game anymore (because I need him to solve a puzzle), or I can still play, but I’ll advance by myself.
I mean that they will both miss some “secret”, be it a room, another puzzle, a cutscene, a part of the story. It is unfair, but just as unfair as games like Laura Bow or Cruise for a corpse where you can miss things.
And they would have to replay the game again, but how is it a downside? 
Replay value added!
Those of you who played with your wife (or husband, or affiliate 
), how did you cope with the “blocking” problem? Did one of you skip some part of the story, or did one of you wait until the other was available?
That’s unfair, the wife is always right.
What if it were a competitive game? Two people, two characters within the same story / universe, with the same goals and puzzles to solve… but no collaboration. You want to gather some object, you find out your “enemy” arrived first and now you have to do something else to advance. Or, instead, your “enemy” already unlocked a door for you, so it’s not just “who arrives first has it easier”.
Something like the dear old trope where the hero spends a lot of time and resources to gather stuff and solve puzzles, and once he does, the enemy profits from it. IIRC it happens in Raiders of the lost ark, for example.
There might be paths you can’t access at all, paths you can access but by solving an extra puzzle to get around the missing object, and so on.
However, again, that would mean you can just play the game by yourself. Which is something one might do in the end, after playing the “battle mode”, to see the things he missed by arriving late.
Well, personally i don’t find it appealing to have to think under pressure (otherwise the opponent will solve the puzzle before me). It would take away all the relaxation component, the reason why I like adventures and not arcades…
(I might be an extreme case because I would prefer an adventure with cooperative puzzles but in turns, not in real time.)
That’s basically the same feeling I had when playing TWP 
I knew I was behind my friends and that increased the chance of me getting spoilers
Since you’ve been thinking a lot about this topic, can you tell us (sorry if I missed it) what is your solution to the other problem? A puzzle, after it is solved, changes the world state: someone has been put in jail, the jewels have been recovered and are back in the safe, the dam exploded and the flood destroyed the village, the king has been killed, etc. If all players share the same world state, then when you subscribe you are transported in a world where many puzzles have already been solved. It seems to me there must be some way to reset the world state without interfering with the worlds of other players.
I don’t see it as a single world instance for everyone, but an instance for each “match”. Like when you have a savegame where Ricki Lee’s store is called YouTube, then start a new game and change its name and save again.
I don’t even see it as a massive multiplayer game, but at most a handful of people, who basically know each other in person and decide to try the game in competitive mode instead of standalone. So, if you arrive late and the guy has already been put in jail, you just accept you missed that part and, if you really really want to see it, start a new instance and play by yourself up to that point, before reconnecting to your match with friends where it wasn’t YOU who put it in jail.
So also for you there is a concept of “team”, and a new world is created when you create a team. And you only see members of your team and NPCs. But not members of other teams.
However, in your idea, 1) team members do not collaborate but are opponents.
2) the absence of one team member is not blocking for others.
Basically, yes. It’s just like when you play TWP you see your own state but not my state. You’re sharing the world only with the people you’re playing that “campaign” with. You can start a new campaign with other friends, which resets the state.
Point 1 comes from point 2. They could also be collaborating, but if you want to have full collaboration, then you have to make blocker points. If you don’t want blocker points, you have to accept the fact that they might not collaborate. So, if they are instead concurrents, they are motivated not to leave the other do everything by himself, but the mechanics are the same.
I think it would get frustrating real fast when one of the people solved all if not most puzzles. Not everybody solves things at the same speed, and people would often rely on the “smart” one to solve the game.