I would but there would need to be a robust set of options. Making it easy to block, and therefore cut out, people who would leave a line open playing Eye of the Tiger on loop in the middle of a tavern. Also, would need the same types of channels like you have for text chat, especially with proximity. It wouldn't necessarily need to cut out the surrounding people but at least lower the volume of background noise. Could you imagine a tavern filled with 50 people all talking over proximity at the same time? O.o
I know some people do not like voice chat for various reasons but I hope they become more a part of MMOs, though not as a replacement but an addition. Even farther I hope we can get to a point of talking to NPCs to get dialog much like we did typing to NPCs in EQ and now SotA.
No. I find it kills the immersion for me. Now if there was some kind of modulator where i could change what your voice sounds like then maybe. Also most times i just want to do my own thing and if i have to respond well eventually we'll both just get annoyed.it's easier to tune people out in chat.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
I really hate when I join a new mmo and all the guilds require you to be on voice chat 24/7. It's stupid! I don't even stay on voice chat with friends let alone random strangers.
I like to listen to the game, immerse myself, watch youtube videos (If it's a steam game as you can open a browser inside), sometimes listen to music etc etc
With voice chat all I'll be hearing is people rambling stupid stuff most of the time which frankly I don't give a rat's ass. Plus me and my brother share the bedroom so I can't really talk that much, if ever.
With the overwhelming number of 'No' responses, I wonder what the results would have been if the original post had not targeted voice communication, but rather suggested using full VR input for movement -- i.e., no wasd/arrows for movement, replaced by a different walking input. That's frequently a long-term goal for VR, but voice is more easily adapted to games.
A new walking metaphor might require new hardware, similar to VR technology -- some kind of direction indicator and leg motion input -- from a button and rudder setup (similar to several arcade games from the 80s) to a full-on VR walking treadmill. That pushes another cost to the consumer. Most players already have microphones for other purposes, so the cost to adapt might not be as big an impact.
If a new technology appears to be imminent, I'd rather try to suggest improvements to make the innovation a satisfying experience, rather than try to shout down the idea of improving.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I don't mind it as an option, some folks like it and there are some situations where it's nice. But to make it more or less mandatory, or the only way to communicate in a game - no thanks.
no to voice chat unless I choose it. As other have said, it ruins the immersion... or the illusion of immersion I dont want to know that the big beefy badass tank is 10.
No. Voice chat ruins the game for me. I understand using it for raids and pvp and the like but if that was the only method of communication I would not play that game.
There have been done experiments with a program that changes your voice to sound more like your characters (so a female toon would sound female even if you are male and a troll would sound nastier and lowered pitched), CCP among others put some work on it but I ain't sure if something good enough exist right now.
If you actually could use specific voices for each of your characters I think it would feel better and I could see voice chat replace party chat and the "say" chat (as long as you have to be rather close for it). Not the map or guildchat though, it would just be too much talking.
Actually speaking with other players do have advantages but in a massive game it is easy that the voices just drown out the entire game and that would give me a headache.
I think that's a bit too "role play" for some people.
And regardless of whether someone sounds like an ogre, orc, or fairy princess, chat programs are just that ... non-stop chat.
I have no doubt that people like that but for me it's a never ending stream of some people talking just to talk.
And by that, I don't mean being social, I just mean people saying things, announcing every little thing they are doing and feeling. It's like they have never been social before and feel like it's their first time talking to people.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
As with everything else in life, there are pros and cons to this system, but is this something that could potentially interest you as an MMO player?
I feel that MMOs today are very anti-social and the ability to talk to anyone anywhere cuts the need to actually get together and interact... I feel that MMOs definitely need an incentive for players to get together, even if it means forcing it a little by removing some convenient feature.
No. chat is fine and should be offered as an option, and I would never play a MMORPG that demanded I had to be in voice chat for the hours I might spend in game. Not only do I talk a lot in my job, so not talking a lot of the time is much needed, but a lot of gamers just are not that interesting or funny.
Community is created by design though, so you are thinking along the right lines. You are just looking at the wrong part of the machine.
I would be all over it, for certain games. For Everquest, no, I'd get my own channel and invite. For WoW, yes, it desperately needs it to make LFG sufferable at any level above cakewalk. People who don't read dungeon journals also don't read party chat. It would add immensely to many action-heavy mmoarpgs.
As for immersion, if the stories of these games means anything to you, you are probably 12 anyway and can handle the kids chatting.
It surprised me quite a bit when WoWs voice chat feature wasn't widely adopted. Seemed a natural evolution to me.
No. Voice chat ruins the game for me. I understand using it for raids and pvp and the like but if that was the only method of communication I would not play that game.
I totally agree, but the number of people who agree with us goes down and down. When Rift first started out I actually made a guild built on the premise of no voice communication, just for people who didn't/wouldn't/couldn't get on it. It was very successful, super popular and one of the top guilds at the time. I left rift, went back a year later and it was the top guild on the server they kept it chugging along although i just popped in to say hi they probably dropped the no voice premise.
Is it really a multiplayer game if other people are around, but communicating with them is impractical?
That's an interesting discussion, but I think one for another thread. Sometimes both voice and text are impractical, however other solutions do exist. For example, in most FPS and MOBAs, there are shortcuts to automatically say most needed phrases. An example would be SMITE's VGS ( http://smite.gamepedia.com/Voice_Guided_System ).
With international audiences, this is sometimes preferable to voice AND text chat, as the shortcut system is usually localized. The German player and the American player can understand the Brazilian player telling them that (s)he is headed to base and the enemies are missing from left lane.
Post edited by LynxJSA on
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Is it really a multiplayer game if other people are around, but communicating with them is impractical?
That's an intersting discussion, but I think one for another thread. Sometimes both voice and text are impracticle, however other solutions do exist. For example, in most FPS and MOBAs, there are shortcuts to automatically say most needed phrases. An example would be SMITE's VGS ( http://smite.gamepedia.com/Voice_Guided_System ).
With international audiences, this is sometimes preferable to voice AND text chat, as the shortcut system is usually localized. The German player and the American player can understand the Brazilian player telling them that (s)he is headed to base and the enemies are missing from left lane.
and thats why they should learn english, at least the german speaks it, its the brazilians fault if he cant communicate and others cant comprehend. I have nothing against BR's but they are mostly hated in online communities not because of their personality its because of :
1. Their PING is horrible and can drag down the group.
2. They cant communicate well.
thats why they are being frowned upon in most games. Sure they are part of Latin America keyword "america" so they really should take effort in speaking it.
Combine the anonymity of the internet and it's gaming with a cross-section you wont find anywhere else and the obvious response is Absolutely-No-Friggen-Way. A semi-retired 50 year old can play alongside a 13 year old in a random mmo group just fine, throw in the fact they are from different countries and insert their own person views and memes, just no.
Is it really a multiplayer game if other people are around, but communicating with them is impractical?
What is impractical to you? Typing or speaking? because both come down to ability and inclination.
Text mostly works in a broad range of circumstances. Voice only works is a relatively handful of corner cases where you have a small, fixed group who all want to communicate by voice and all want to make it work. And even then, voice isn't very good if it's your only form of communication.
One issue is bandwidth. If five people are typing at once, you can read them all and it's fine. If two people are talking at once, you can't understand either of them. Voice causes accidental collisions even in the best of circumstances, and it's very open to griefing from someone who wants to be disruptive.
Another issue is that voice is very ephemeral. If you missed something important in text chat, you can go read it again. With voice, it's gone. Some people mentioned language difficulties, and voice exacerbates this far more so than text.
Yet another problem with voice is, as mentioned by others, it's hard to tell who is talking. With text, it's trivial to put a player name label beside the message. There's no natural way to do that with voice. That's fine for a fixed group where everyone knows everyone else and recognizes their voices, but that's wildly false with the strangers you need to communicate with in online games.
With the overwhelming number of 'No' responses, I wonder what the results would have been if the original post had not targeted voice communication, but rather suggested using full VR input for movement -- i.e., no wasd/arrows for movement, replaced by a different walking input. That's frequently a long-term goal for VR, but voice is more easily adapted to games.
A new walking metaphor might require new hardware, similar to VR technology -- some kind of direction indicator and leg motion input -- from a button and rudder setup (similar to several arcade games from the 80s) to a full-on VR walking treadmill. That pushes another cost to the consumer. Most players already have microphones for other purposes, so the cost to adapt might not be as big an impact.
If a new technology appears to be imminent, I'd rather try to suggest improvements to make the innovation a satisfying experience, rather than try to shout down the idea of improving.
Alternative movement input is "already here" so to speak (it's not officially launched yet). It's not the ultimate form of VR movement, but it's something similar to your walking threadmill.
And yeah, lots of "No" but very little in terms of suggestions for improvements. It's a lot easier to shut down an idea than to imagine and play with it in your mind to see how it would work. Some of the issues raised in this thread, like not being able to tell who's talking, have already been solved by other games/genre. For this particular one, an indicator next to the player talking or above the screen with the player name next to it are pretty common methods (Overwatch for example).
The whole purpose of this thread was to gauge people's reactions to what is undeniably coming in the somewhat near future of the VR experience. What surprised me the most however, is that people find text chat to be more immersive to voice chat, perhaps because that's what they've grown used to coupled with the low quality of voice chat content, but I can't say for certain. Which isn't to say that I expected people to agree with me, on the contrary I expected at the very least 50% to disagree, but I wasn't expecting this almost unanimous level of opposition however. It means that there is a lot of work left to be done to improve voice-related technologies and not just on the client side.
To me, there's nothing more unnatural than to have to stop everything completely in order to be able to type a sentence. I accept it because I know both the technology and the community have not reached that point yet, but the technology will come through eventually even if it is out of necessity rather than out of personal desire. I certainly can't see myself typing all the time while playing a VR Game, it's highly impractical.
There are two aspects of voice chat that important. It works very well now and is used often by friends. We are always on teamspeak or mumble or discord or whatever when playing with friends. If they arent in that game at the moment we can still talk. We play games that have in game team voice chat and we rarely use it other than to mute obnoxious people. We can invite newfound friends or players in a group if we want. So voice chat is used a lot, just not -Game Voice Chat-
The idea that I have to continually mute every person that comes by and fills my living room with their senseless chatter is annoying, ill just turn down game voice chat and type to people I dont know. To me this system works flawlessly. If I am in a game where I have to communicate with people i just met with voice chat, i won't play it. That game hasn't ever existed so far and that is a good thing.
I recently decided to re-watch the .Hack// series and it brought the question to mind. Would any of you play an MMO that removed the text chat entirely (with some exceptions like sending private messages/emails), and instead require player to interact with voice chat? Using voice chat would force players to be in a relatively close vicinity in order to be able to talk to each other. As with everything else in life, there are pros and cons to this system, but is this something that could potentially interest you as an MMO player?
I feel that MMOs today are very anti-social and the ability to talk to anyone anywhere cuts the need to actually get together and interact. I recently transferred in FFXIV from Gilgamesh, a highly populated server, to Balmung, another highly populated server but also the unofficial RP server. On Gilgamesh I always saw the cities and taverns fairly empty. Sure there are players in the cities, but they're only there because there's no where else to go. On Balmung however, the cities and taverns are buzzing with players, especially RPers because their playstyle is very social-oriented, and I am quite jealous of that. It'd be impossible to ask non-RPers to suddenly become RPers however (and RP has never interested me anyway), but I feel that MMOs definitely need an incentive for players to get together, even if it means forcing it a little by removing some convenient feature (like world-wide chat).
@MadnessRealm IMO there is one simple reason why that wouldn't work. I know many guys with families with which I play in some online FPS, sometimes they just cannot talk because somebody is sleeping, watching something, or you know. Their families do some typical stuff, and sometimes talking through mic about the game is disturbing for others
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I would but there would need to be a robust set of options. Making it easy to block, and therefore cut out, people who would leave a line open playing Eye of the Tiger on loop in the middle of a tavern. Also, would need the same types of channels like you have for text chat, especially with proximity. It wouldn't necessarily need to cut out the surrounding people but at least lower the volume of background noise. Could you imagine a tavern filled with 50 people all talking over proximity at the same time? O.o
I know some people do not like voice chat for various reasons but I hope they become more a part of MMOs, though not as a replacement but an addition. Even farther I hope we can get to a point of talking to NPCs to get dialog much like we did typing to NPCs in EQ and now SotA.
I really hate when I join a new mmo and all the guilds require you to be on voice chat 24/7. It's stupid! I don't even stay on voice chat with friends let alone random strangers.
I like to listen to the game, immerse myself, watch youtube videos (If it's a steam game as you can open a browser inside), sometimes listen to music etc etc
With voice chat all I'll be hearing is people rambling stupid stuff most of the time which frankly I don't give a rat's ass. Plus me and my brother share the bedroom so I can't really talk that much, if ever.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Forced to talk to annoying kids, stoners, loud breathers, psychos, screamers, emos, drunkards just to sell some items or general quest help.
Come to think of it, it would be perfect for a study on human nature on Saturday night though.
A new walking metaphor might require new hardware, similar to VR technology -- some kind of direction indicator and leg motion input -- from a button and rudder setup (similar to several arcade games from the 80s) to a full-on VR walking treadmill. That pushes another cost to the consumer. Most players already have microphones for other purposes, so the cost to adapt might not be as big an impact.
If a new technology appears to be imminent, I'd rather try to suggest improvements to make the innovation a satisfying experience, rather than try to shout down the idea of improving.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I don't mind it as an option, some folks like it and there are some situations where it's nice. But to make it more or less mandatory, or the only way to communicate in a game - no thanks.
And regardless of whether someone sounds like an ogre, orc, or fairy princess, chat programs are just that ... non-stop chat.
I have no doubt that people like that but for me it's a never ending stream of some people talking just to talk.
And by that, I don't mean being social, I just mean people saying things, announcing every little thing they are doing and feeling. It's like they have never been social before and feel like it's their first time talking to people.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
No. chat is fine and should be offered as an option, and I would never play a MMORPG that demanded I had to be in voice chat for the hours I might spend in game. Not only do I talk a lot in my job, so not talking a lot of the time is much needed, but a lot of gamers just are not that interesting or funny.
Community is created by design though, so you are thinking along the right lines. You are just looking at the wrong part of the machine.
As for immersion, if the stories of these games means anything to you, you are probably 12 anyway and can handle the kids chatting.
It surprised me quite a bit when WoWs voice chat feature wasn't widely adopted. Seemed a natural evolution to me.
It was very successful, super popular and one of the top guilds at the time. I left rift, went back a year later and it was the top guild on the server they kept it chugging along although i just popped in to say hi they probably dropped the no voice premise.
Forced Text = Sure
Forced Pve = Maybe
Forced PvP = HELL YES!
What is impractical to you? Typing or speaking? because both come down to ability and inclination.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
With international audiences, this is sometimes preferable to voice AND text chat, as the shortcut system is usually localized. The German player and the American player can understand the Brazilian player telling them that (s)he is headed to base and the enemies are missing from left lane.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
1. Their PING is horrible and can drag down the group.
2. They cant communicate well.
thats why they are being frowned upon in most games. Sure they are part of Latin America keyword "america" so they really should take effort in speaking it.
One issue is bandwidth. If five people are typing at once, you can read them all and it's fine. If two people are talking at once, you can't understand either of them. Voice causes accidental collisions even in the best of circumstances, and it's very open to griefing from someone who wants to be disruptive.
Another issue is that voice is very ephemeral. If you missed something important in text chat, you can go read it again. With voice, it's gone. Some people mentioned language difficulties, and voice exacerbates this far more so than text.
Yet another problem with voice is, as mentioned by others, it's hard to tell who is talking. With text, it's trivial to put a player name label beside the message. There's no natural way to do that with voice. That's fine for a fixed group where everyone knows everyone else and recognizes their voices, but that's wildly false with the strangers you need to communicate with in online games.
And yeah, lots of "No" but very little in terms of suggestions for improvements. It's a lot easier to shut down an idea than to imagine and play with it in your mind to see how it would work. Some of the issues raised in this thread, like not being able to tell who's talking, have already been solved by other games/genre. For this particular one, an indicator next to the player talking or above the screen with the player name next to it are pretty common methods (Overwatch for example).
The whole purpose of this thread was to gauge people's reactions to what is undeniably coming in the somewhat near future of the VR experience. What surprised me the most however, is that people find text chat to be more immersive to voice chat, perhaps because that's what they've grown used to coupled with the low quality of voice chat content, but I can't say for certain. Which isn't to say that I expected people to agree with me, on the contrary I expected at the very least 50% to disagree, but I wasn't expecting this almost unanimous level of opposition however. It means that there is a lot of work left to be done to improve voice-related technologies and not just on the client side.
To me, there's nothing more unnatural than to have to stop everything completely in order to be able to type a sentence. I accept it because I know both the technology and the community have not reached that point yet, but the technology will come through eventually even if it is out of necessity rather than out of personal desire. I certainly can't see myself typing all the time while playing a VR Game, it's highly impractical.
The idea that I have to continually mute every person that comes by and fills my living room with their senseless chatter is annoying, ill just turn down game voice chat and type to people I dont know. To me this system works flawlessly. If I am in a game where I have to communicate with people i just met with voice chat, i won't play it. That game hasn't ever existed so far and that is a good thing.
Think of how toxic and idiotic general chat can get. Now imagine that being voice instead of text.
No thanks.