No. As I said, I was thinking of a game where players have multiple instances of objects. But some objects can be used only by characters that have a specific profession/role or certain skills.
You can either design a game that requires specific players to be online or a game that requires just other players to be online. The second option just gives you more opportunities to play the game.
I understand you mean there are many hammers in the game, and they can only be used by characters with a certain skill. But still there is only a single instance of other objects, like “the king’s crown”, and of NPCs, like “Major Thompson”, or “Kate Capsize”. (I don’t think you want to duplicate them too)
You are right, I’ve thought about it a bit and I have realized that the “massive multiplayer” model is incompatible with a scripted and static story.
I imagine this would encounter similar challenges as real world Escape rooms. It’s fun to work as a team to solve puzzles… with the right group of people. I think it has great potential but a lot of thinking would need to go into the puzzle design. I think Escape rooms have done a lot of this thinking so maybe much could be learned by that model.
Escape rooms however are based on the fact that once you begin, all your friends are there and will be for the whole game duration, which is also quite short.
The main problem in a multiplayer videogame, especially an adventure game, is that you have no guarantee that you’ll always, every time, be there to play together.
If the escape room analogy is not good, let’s take tv shows. I usually watch tv shows with my wife. A season of a tv show is about 20 hours, comparable to an adventure game. If we are watching a show together, it is normal for me to abstain from watching until my wife is ready. (Sometimes it happened to me to watch one episode alone, but then when she was ready I rewatched it. )
Not only with story, but also incompatible with puzzles, it seems to me. Because a puzzle, once solved, changes the state of the world (NPCs and objects).
But then, how do MMORPGs solve this problem? Or do they have no story and no puzzles? (sorry, I haven’t played them enough to know).
But you can’t do it in a game. It means you HAVE to wait for your friend. Which is something we usually don’t do for games, at least nowadays.
They tend to rely on instancing. If a player does spmething that changes the state of the world, they’re moved to a different instance that contains that altered state. Other players who have not yet changed the sate of the world remain behind in the previous instance until they make the necessary changes.
Hi folks, this thread is pretty old , but maybe you are still interested in it: There is now a cooperative point-and-click adventure game, even though it is disguised as an online escape room. Check it out at www.team-and-click.com.
Looks awesome!
I just stumbled into a multiplayer escape room game: First Class Escape 2: Head in the Clouds on Steam
Multiplayer murder mystery set in the west; demo out now:
It’s out now:
You won’t believe this : a two-player parser adventure game 
It’s already out by the way. A Lively Haunt on Steam