Categories: Among UsDiscussion

The Future of Among Us- What would you advise the developers to do?

Among Us' core concept is incredibly sound as proven by the enduring 30+ years of popularity of Mafia and other similar social deduction games (most notably Town of Salem and Werewolf). Hence, Among Us, if well-managed, could conceivably sustainable for decades, helped by its 'streamability' due to the variance (and therefore interest) created by differing personalities.

However, its Dev team is small (3 people!) and overwhelmed. It is already declining slightly rather than growing exponentially as it was before. It is strongly in the collective gaming conscience but people will lose interest if improvements are not made quickly before it loses relevance or even dies in order to counteract the game’s simplicity, monotonous internal gameplay and numerous flaws.

The recommendations I would give based on what I've seen around the community are:

  1. Fix Technical flaws

Glitches, server issues (particularly to handle high capacity), hacking and cheating prevention and premature leaving prevention (either by penalties or rewards for completing games)

  1. Implement an Elo System in Public Lobbies (can have distinct ranked and unranked modes) 

Would have a similar scoring system used in tournaments (points for wins, kills as impostor, correct votes as crewmates etc).

It would create match-ups at similar playing level, create a sense of progression, disincentivise poor play and in general raise the stakes.

  1. Add new content

a) New Maps

Possibly could have more complex Maps unlocked at higher ELO, hopefully with new features (e.g sabotages). 

A Custom Map creator + the ability to save and share Maps. Let the community do the work for the Dev team.

b) Additional gamemodes

  • Hide and Seek
  • Timebomb: complete tasks but no emergency meeting. 1 killer

c) Optional additional roles (besides crewmate and impostor). These are all ideas I've seen around the community

  • ‘‘Bodyguard'; like doctor in mafia; can protect one player per round (with a time limit) from being killed by impostor, cannot protect same person twice
  • 'Engineer'; can close vents (limited # at a time), can travel through vents once tasks are done
  • 'Forensics': is able to see a timer for how old the body is if they report it
  • 'Helper': has less tasks to do. After finishing them gets the tasks of another crewmate who has finished the least, helping them complete them
  • 'Vigilante'; crewmate-aligned but can do 1 kill when tasks are complete
  • 'Traitor'; an impostor-aligned player who undos tasks and/or creates additional tasks (and does not know who the impostors are (so can’t vote with them easily)
  • 'Diener'; impostor-aligned, can visibly move bodies

d) Miscellaneous

  • more lobby options
  • buff coms sabotage
  • translation in chat (to allow multilingual communication?)

4. Ability to add friends + ability to spectate games

  1. Add extra dimensions to ghosts 
  • the impostor should be able to (choose to) see ghosts
  • Extra for crewmate ghosts to do (e.g warn living crewmates they are in danger?, open doors? Maybe a one-time 'guardian angel' block of an impostor kill, resetting their kill cooldown (the impostor is notified that their kill was blocked and the living cremate wouldn’t see anything)

6.Provide its own voice chat (probably a partnership with discord)

7.PR events: e.g crossover with other space-themed IP. e.g Star Wars (I'm just fantasising about a Millenium Falcon map okay?)

Obviously, to achieve this, they probably need an expansion of the Dev team (they have 1 programmer!) or partnership with a larger company.

Gamer

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