Communication Ingame (VOIP)

You know, I once considered this idea being part of an mmorpg...


Here's the idea:

Have an inbuilt VOIP system in place in the game... allow people to chat with one another verbally ingame.

HOWEVER,

Limit the distance in which your VOIP sound can travel, like how sound tends to drop over distance in real life. i.e. People who are further away from you will not be able to hear from you better. People closer to you will get a louder sound from your VOIP. And VOIP will work just like that.

There will be no channels for that, you won't be able to VOIP someone in another act (like private chat). So if you want to speak to someone personally, you'll have to walk close to them.


Positioning hence... will become important in communication. Want to complain to a party leader that a team member is useless or being a ninja? Walk over next to him and whisper into your mic. The other party member will not be able to hear you.

Want to shout war cries to amuse the rest of your party members when you charge into battle? (Leeroy Jenkins) Also possible.

Cursing and swearing when you get killed in a town in a cut-throat league? Someone might over hear you and decide to help you out with the guy who killed you.

Possibilities are endless because it makes the communication aspect of the game an aspect that is player determined allowing it to develop in ways you'd never expect.

I know I posted this in the Dev Discussion.. but I put this here to open this up to more debate.

So long as there are options not to use VOIP as a primary method of communication, it's always a good idea to give more options to the user! It's really annoying that some other developers expect you to use VOIP and remove a real chat function altogether.

I never said anything about removing text based communcation. :P

My suggestion is an optional form of communication.. because we all know we don't have time to type if we're kiting a boss.

Has there ever been a game where players actually use the ingame voip chat? In any game that I know which has its own voip, players use teamspeak/ventrilo/skype/mumble regardless.

In-game voice chats are usually awful, hence most people don't use them at all.

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dust7 wrote:

Has there ever been a game where players actually use the ingame voip chat? In any game that I know which has its own voip, players use teamspeak/ventrilo/skype/mumble regardless.

Team Fortress, L4D2... probably other Valve FPS's with the same engine/voice chat system.