Why no Voicechat in Multiplayer Games, yet?

[Winterrain]

I am operating a small Teamspeak server for the clan that I´m in, it does not cost loads of money, so money is not the issue here. Almost all regular players I know (I avoid the l33t hardcore term) use either Ventrilo or TS for their team communication, as its simply by far more comfortable to chat verbally then to type during gameplay.

Still I don´t see a nice customizable voicechat implemented in most games. Whats the deal?

[Calistas]

In MMOGs you don't want to be paying for player's voice data transfer. For normal games it's a matter of then giving yourself the responsibilty for setting up voice chat servers. It's cost without much benefit I guess.

Peter

[TomChick]

Since it's most likely not a bandwidth issue, my guess is that it's probably not worth the development resources. As far as I know, there's not much evidence that games that do have voicechat support see it used very widely. I imagine most folks with a PC might not bother with setting up a mic, doodling around with whatever stuff their sound card needs to do, or whatnot.

However, I agree with you, Winterrain. I think it's an invaluable addition to MP games, particularly with people you know.

-Tom

[Wheelkick]

UT2K4 has it. Planetside has it(allthough I've heard that it's crap). XBox Live has it (...). Counterstrike has it. Join a CS or UT UT2K4 game and check how much it is used.

[Winterrain]

Try a different approach: Use it and see how comfortable it is!

[shang]

It's comfortable for only as long as your are voice chatting with people you know, and for that you can use a 3rd party utility. Listening to strangers on public servers is nothing but agonizing.

[Winterrain]

Yeah I guess if you voicechat with everybody on your team in a 64 player BF1942 battle it would get annoying, as people that would normally flubber up your chatbox, would now annoy your ears.

BUT: There is no reason why a in-game voicechat should not be customizable with buddy options etc.

[Derek Meister]

I am operating a small Teamspeak server for the clan that I´m in, it does not cost loads of money, so money is not the issue here.

I believe you just answered your question right there. Why spend money on the development of VoIP technology when there are already a number of third-party solutions available? Especially when it eliminates another network agent you'd have to support.

That said, I believe UT2004 has some neat tricks. Not only do you have the "team" and "public" VoIP channels you can join in-game, but it has a "local" channel as well. Within this channel, any broadcast you make will be heard by other players close to your in-game location. The further away they are, the lower the volume. If you have the proper 3D sound support, you can even tell what direction someone is speaking to you from.

[Rywill]

Yeah, the reason I've always heard is the one Derek put forth: nobody puts it in their games because it's already being done really well by Teamspeak and Ventrilo, which everyone is already used to using. I hate that, though, because those programs can't do stuff like have the "local" chat in UT04. It's also difficult to set up with strangers--if Planetside's voice chat worked better, I bet squads would use it all the time.

[Jack]

And who really wants to hear that slinky elf chick flirt with you in a basso-profundo voice? (That's rhetorical. I don't want to know about any elf chicks-with-dicks fantasies).

[Sean Tudor]

I am operating a small Teamspeak server for the clan that I´m in, it does not cost loads of money, so money is not the issue here. Almost all regular players I know (I avoid the l33t hardcore term) use either Ventrilo or TS for their team communication, as its simply by far more comfortable to chat verbally then to type during gameplay.

Still I don´t see a nice customizable voicechat implemented in most games. Whats the deal?

Using a dedicated TeamSpeak server is far more preferrable to using ingame comms. For example IL2 does have ingame comms but almost no one uses it because it is so flaky.

The beauty of TeamSpeak is that it has powerful voice room functions, macros, permissions, different voice codecs, and many other options that would be useful to a clan/squad. Plus it can be used with any game.

[Brian Rubin]

Personally I prefer using a 3rd-party program like TS so that we have control over it, and we can use it whenever and however we wish.

[VegasRobb]

Personally I prefer using a 3rd-party program like TS so that we have control over it, and we can use it whenever and however we wish.

Yeah I have to agree with this. I do think someone will try and incorporate it into a game, Planetside is the best I've seen so far.

[fuzzyslug]

I'd imagine it's really just a matter of cost for development. Homebrewing a voice chat feature on your own is

1) largely unappreciated by the gaming community due to the difficulty of the task (dealing with bandwidth issues is no walk in the park, for example) and the rather good implementations of programs such as Roger Wilco, TeamSpeak, or Ventrilo (my favorite).

2) barely used by the majority of the folks. As a few folks mentioned, I don't want to talk to everybody. I want to talk to my friends. How do I locate them anyway? If you consider this an essential feature (which I do in a lot of cases), you probably already use voice chat software of some sort. This feature is now of little use.

3) costly, given the above two facts.

The only way I see it getting strongly adopted in the PC community is if someone offered voice chat software that could be easily included as part of the game, much like GameSpy's software can be found in a lot of retail games. A more unified interface would be very helpful. A buddy list like that of Xbox live would be wonderful (and might just be the key to get folks using it). Unfortunately, I don't see something like that happening in the short term.

[sluggo]

I play a lot of UT 2004, and I use the in-game voice chat features. As a simple solution, it works great for me. It's cake to use and you can shut it off easily enough if some moron on your server thinks it's kareoke night.

However, I've heard a lot of people prefer third-party voice chat because, qute simply, it lets you cheat. I don't think Counter-Strike lets you talk to teammates when you're dead; the third-party apps don't make any such distinctions. I'm in a casual UT clan / league where we allow subs to spectate our matches, and we're pretty sure there have been matches where the other team's spectators have been giving hints to their buddies via external voice chat.

(we usually win, tho, so we don't care. :) )

[Kryten]

A couple of friends and I have a reasonably low-tech solution to the comms problem that works perfectly - our telco has a home teleconference facility, so we just ring each other and have a three-way phone call. Saves on bandwidth and the quality is, well, as perfect as a phone call :)

Of course it doesn't scale, at all, but NZ is small enough that there's a couple of places around that run full time voice servers for gamers.

Speaking of UT2k4, does anyone else use the "text-to-speech" function? I have, and it's quite good. I don't get distracted by having to read messages that the other players type....

[sluggo]

I've had text-to-speech enabled in UT2004 since I started playing the demo. At first, I thought it was a cute gimmick, but I find that it's really useful -- anything that helps keep my eyes focused on the action is a good thing. I play a lot of teamplay games, and that way I don't miss messages that might scroll by in the heat of a battle.

It doesn't seem like something Epic developed, but piggybacked on something already present in WinXP -- I hope more developers make it an option.

[Derek Meister]

Not only text to speech, but voice recognition for bot commands.

Pretty smart use of the existing Microsoft OS technology.

[Moore]

I actually like it, but don't like bothering to set anything up - what I do is type to communicate to the bulk of the team, and to talk to Jay while playing (my one friend on the east coast that I try and spend time with by playing online games) I just call him on my cell and put him on speakerphone and throw the phone on the desk, works great and has zero setup (besides holding the number 6 on the phone for one second to make it dial his number).

[Shiroko]

I find voice chat could be really annoying unless your with your friends.

I barely use it in UT2K4, but I will admit that in Pandora tomorrow it worked great, since you had it on all the time, you would sometimes hear the other guy get surprised or the firing sounds through radio, plus eliminating the need to press a key like a radio made you talk more freely and comfortably. For me at least.

-Shiroko

[MauxFaux]

I detest in game voice comm systems. They are filled with guys talking about needing to go smoke a bowl, kids with dentist drill voices and clowns who think they need to order everyone else around.

A private teamspeak server really helps reduce this, and is great if you have a friend who is willing to host.

[Jason Cross]

Voice chat on the PC has a bunch of problems. Your game might support it (Tabula Rasa already does, and it's a long way from release), but that doesn't mean it's not going to be screwed up by a bunch of external factors.

There's the whole issue of how so many PC users have integrated audio with totally borked and crappy drivers that they've never udpated. That's one factor.

Then you have the equipment factor. Do the players have a mic? Is it hooked up? Is it a headset mic, or is it one of those boom mics that sits on your desk?

Even assuming it's all hooked up, some bozo is going to ruin it for everyone without even meaning to. He'll be using a boom mic which will pick up every single sound out of his speakers - including everyone else's voice - and rebroadcast it to everyone on his voice chat. That right there makes the whole thing unusable. Or he'll have his gain way up high or something and be four times as loud as everyone else.

Xbox Live circumvents most of these problems quite neatly. There's obviously no driver issue. The hardware is almost all the same - you've got a headset mic tuned only for near-field operation so it doesn't pick up your TV sounds very well, if at all. The software uses a bit of auto gain control to keep the voices coming across at a reasonable level. The headsets effectively give you an extra voice-only speaker: one speaker stuck to your ear that all the voice chat and ONLY the voice chat comes from, so it's easy to distinguish from game sounds.

What the PC needs to get voice to become more ubiquitous is a similar standard - something that incorporates an OS-level (or at least DirectX level) treatment of voice content with automatic gain control and noise cancellation, together with a consistent hardware component that minimizes the chances of players inadvertantly broadcasting all their game sounds. Dealing with nonsense like port opening/close and forwarding automatically wouldn't hurt, either. I'd love to see what boils down to a USB version of the Live headset - a single USB plug that to a device that would not appear as a standard mic and speakers to windows, but appear as a "communications headset." The OS would treat it differently than how it does all your regular speakers and microphones, so you could do things like have the voice come only out of the headset speaker, and adjust headset mic settings without messing up, for instance, your webcam conversations with grandma.

The bandwidth thing isn't much of an issue. Voice components in games are established in either a peer-to-peer fashion or with one of the players being picked (perhaps by the software) as the host, with automatic host reassignment. These are solved problems already, and it makes it so that the game sever doesn't have to host voice traffic as well.

[Jon R.]

In my experience with games that natively support voicecomms, the problem really doens't have much to do with software integration and support at all. $10 desk mics work just fine compared to headset mics, and it's actually rather rare to run into someone who unwittingly creates a problem with voice-activated comms and speakers.

The real hurdle would appear to be in getting the majority of the players to see the other players as... players. The reason you don't see voicecomms in wide use on public servers is more or less the same reason why you don't see a general inclination towards teamwork. People on pubs are largely there for themselves and consider teammates as miscellanious ingame entities that they don't have to worry about shooting. They have no desire to communicate with other players, and as far as their play style is concerned, they have no need to do so. So they don't even bother with it. On better servers where people are interested in acting as a cohesive team unit instead of barely cognizant stooges, you can't go a minute without hearing information. I think it's really as simple as that. Basically, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

[DennyA]

What we need is for Microsoft to bring the XBox Live! voice stuff into DirectX 10... It works great, and it'd give everyone a standard API and it would make adding voice support trivial.

[JessicaM]

Beyond the technical issues, there is the immersion issue. Most people don't like the sound of their own voice on tape and think other people think they sound goofy. Until voice fonts work quite well and allow people to choose the exact voice they want for a particular game, I don't see it being wildly popular for RPGs.

FPS games are probably another matter, but some of that attitude probably lives there, too.

[Shiroko]

$10 desk mics work just fine compared to headset mics,

Dude, there are headsets for $10 already, and for a little more you get pretty good ones.
The truth is that headsets are very cheap nowdays, and are anyway a preference for people who need a mic to make any voice chat through the net.
Unless its for recording audio stuff, in which case no $10 equipment will work for you.

-Shiroko

[Jon R.]

Yeah, that's what i was trying to get at. The type and quality of the mic really doesn't matter. The equipment side of things hasn't been a major consideration for a while now, if it ever was.

[DaveC]

USB headsets need to become cheaper and used by more players. It's the easiest solution to a seperate channel for voice chat. That's waht makes Live work so well. I hate voice chate coming through my speakers or headphones and drowning out game sounds.

[McBain]

I'm horribly, horribly conflicted on this issue.

On one hand, I do so enjoy listening to people cuss eachother out (and occasionally, joining in the cussing out) when I play SOCOM II with my buddy.

On the other hand, listening to kids with nasal voices who have the microphone rammed down their throat is *very* disconcerting.

[Warlord of Mars]

That's what buddy lists are for on XBox Live, McBain.

[nutsak]

I was thinking of this while reading that thread about Eve online (the scam) and how using 3rd party stuff was considered a no no.. or whatever.

See I was thinking that in that particular game it would have been good to have voice chat, surely space ships have radios they could use, you could implement all sorts of game related shit with it ( like flying out of range, etc ).

Personally I'd like to see voice chat more in games, I use it a fair bit in Natural Selection (saves typing whilst trying to walk on a wall ) but I rarely use it in Day of Defeat, I figure because it's less team based. Also, the quality in most games voice chat is terrible when compared to most 3rd party programs like TeamSpeak or Ventrillo . ( Half life I'm looking at you "bbzzt bzztt MG forttZZZTT" )

I can understand most peoples frustrations with little kiddies getting on there and realising that every single person loves the sound of their voice so they talk and talk ... which is why I love the 'mute player' options that games with half way decent voice chat has.

I like the idea of UT's chat system with the local area chat.. I think that alot more games should force that .. unless of course you have Ravenshield style gameplay ( the guys have little headsets.. so it makes sense..) .

[Theodore Rex DX]

I would like a megaphone gun that does damage based on how loud you yell into the mic.

[Jon R.]

That strikes me as the coolest mod idea ever. I know exactly how it'd turn out, and i still like it.

[Theodore Rex DX]

Exactly. Who doesn't want to make somebody's head explode by screaming at them?