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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
DDO to integrate voice chat
Turbine announced that their upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Online game would have integrated voice chat. Kudos for being the first, but in a way that was an inevitable development. MMORPG are getting faster, so typed chat is getting too slow a form of communication for most people. Most activities which involve groups can benefit a lot from voice chat, so much that I actually consider a PvP fight between one group using voice chat and another group not using it to be unfair and unbalanced, a kind of cheating.
Setting up a Teamspeak server for your guild is easy enough, but voice chat in a pickup group is next to impossible in the current MMORPG. You can't assume everybody has the software, and then you need to communicate the IP address, passwords, and so on to everybody. Just takes too long for most people to bother with. Once the voice chat is integrated in the game, and a chat channel for your current group is automatically created, chatting gets a lot easier.
Unfortunately I dislike wearing headsets, although I already bought the most comfortable one. Also by wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, you are one step more removed from the real world, shutting it out even more. I might go for a switch-activated desktop microphone instead, if voice chat really becomes necessary for playing MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:09 AM Permanent Link
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We've had this debate about voice chat in the guild since the DaoC days. One thing I've learnt about it is (from ww2ol) that everyone needs to use it for it to be successful. Soon as you have one guy unable to use voice coms, everything has to be echoed to the chat channel to keep him/her in the loop.
Just by adding it into the game won't help. As you say, not everyone likes to wear a headset, not everyone has perfect spoken english or can hear english that well (assumption made theat multinational guilds would use english). Some players might play in a common room with the rest of the family and not want to be heard talking through the wives favorite soap. Others still are shy and feel uncomfortable.
Also voice comms with its own problems of sensorship. You can't implement a swear filter to mask inappropriate language for the young (or sensitive in nature). Also with typed chat you have more opportunity to self moderate...with voice comms its all to easy to blurt out something that can be taken the wrong way and cause an argument (been there :| )
So yeah, voice comms are very very handy, especially in team play (I wouldnt play ww2ol with out it!), but those that can't use it will be excluded from the full experiance!
Just by adding it into the game won't help. As you say, not everyone likes to wear a headset, not everyone has perfect spoken english or can hear english that well (assumption made theat multinational guilds would use english). Some players might play in a common room with the rest of the family and not want to be heard talking through the wives favorite soap. Others still are shy and feel uncomfortable.
Also voice comms with its own problems of sensorship. You can't implement a swear filter to mask inappropriate language for the young (or sensitive in nature). Also with typed chat you have more opportunity to self moderate...with voice comms its all to easy to blurt out something that can be taken the wrong way and cause an argument (been there :| )
So yeah, voice comms are very very handy, especially in team play (I wouldnt play ww2ol with out it!), but those that can't use it will be excluded from the full experiance!
Of the PS2 / Gamecube / XBox trio, the XBox is the one console that I don't have. I only rarely get the opportunity to play something on the XBox of my nephew, and he hasn't got XBox live or Halo 2.
very curious if u can do some small part of dm'ing.
would be awesome if your guild managed to do something epic or so u may create an "instanced dungeon" for guildquests...
would be awesome if your guild managed to do something epic or so u may create an "instanced dungeon" for guildquests...
# posted by 
: 23/11/05 12:02
: 23/11/05 12:02
DM'ing sounds more like Neverwinter Nights 2. I don't think it could work in MMORPG, because DM'ing includes giving out rewards, and people could simply cheat by pseudo-DM'ing and giving out lots of treasures to guild mates.
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