EverQuest II Voice Chat!

Discussion in 'Developer Roundtable' started by ARCHIVED-Autenil, Jun 19, 2008.

  1. ARCHIVED-Kigneer Guest

    Zorlok@Guk wrote:
    I'm a woman gamer who plays male characters (these male top heavy games make female warriors so out of touch with their job, that I simply won't play them -- oh, Ms. Kigneer the Sex Kitten, in that black skimpy dress [online games are mostly men playing drag anyway]). The last thing I want to do is hit up on voice chat -- even with silly sound fonts -- to chitchat with guys calling every woman the P and B word (want to ruin more than immersion completely??).

    So, yes, this voice thingie is good for those who want it, but the moment it becomes required it will kill the immersion for others like me (and I know I'm not the only person on Earth that feels this way). This is a fantasy game. All play styles play it. Some like to find a quiet area and play forever (removing chat all together); while others want to use the game as a dating service with all the drama. Whatever. But options should be options, not requirements -- nor should it affect your way of playing (will I now get all the chatty folks talking now, and having to kill their speech as another option to hunt and peck through, too?). Worse, I don't have the screen real estate for another menu. In the last game I played with built in voice chat, at least it was just an activate "on" and "off" icon, not yet another menu. This game has too many menus, even Windows XP doesn't have this many.
  2. ARCHIVED-thepriz Guest

    I think this is great. It will be even better when Voice Fonts are added. I think it enhances the role playing experience because you can now actually talk to each other instead of typing, which in my opinion is more of an immersion breaker. It feels more natural to talk instead of type. I am really looking forward to Voice Fonts and proximity chat. With these two additions this will make EQ2 one of the best games on the market.
  3. ARCHIVED-kozmic Guest

    So I'm kinda curious, will there be a feature to let you turn off the voice font so that you can hear peoples real voices. I would be rather appalled if I were a male and another male with a females voice were trying to hitting on me!
  4. ARCHIVED-Barq Bandit Guest

    kozmic wrote:
    All females are male until proven otherwise, in text chat or voice comms. : P It should still be pretty obvious anyhow. There's more to sounding like a girl than having your voice pitch-shifted up.

    I'm curious, though, how most roleplayers will handle this. I mean, how do you designate OOC chat over voice comms? If the voice fonts really do work well, and lots of folks use them... how do you make it known that you wanna say something out of character real quick over voice, in between roleplaying over voice?

    Hrmmmm...
  5. ARCHIVED-ke'la Guest

    Powers wrote:
    If your concerned about the voice font feature, I would check out Linda "Brasse" Carlson's article on Vivox here* at mpogd.com. I think it will put your fears to rest about the quality of the voice fonts. If you don't know who Brasse is, a) same on you;), b) check out her website thebrasse.com, C)below is a picture of her at Fan Fair last year(taken off of the SoE Fan Fair Site).

    [IMG]


    She also was the "Quest Giver" for the live event that year, and Made that outfit herself, and yes this is her winning the costume contest.


    *BTW the part about the Voice font is at the end of the article past a lot of other really cool stuff about Vivox, but if you don't want to read the whole thing then the part about the voice fonts starts just below this picture. Starting around this line "Now, I am not a big fan of in-game voice."
  6. ARCHIVED-ke'la Guest

    Donilla@Antonia Bayle wrote:
    Or for raids you could use the Station Launcher Client instead of the in-game one(when it becomes available on station launcher) that way you can have both. ;)
  7. ARCHIVED-ke'la Guest

    Kigneer wrote:
    The voice fonts will accually make your voice change from sounding like a Woman to sounding like a man or visa versa, check out my post(with the pic of Brasse in it) for a link to her artical on the Vivox system. So if you don't want people to know your female then you can change your voice to sound like a Male Orc or whatever.
  8. ARCHIVED-Alycs Guest

    Tock@Antonia Bayle wrote:
    Simple...type ooc. *grins* As I try to stay IC as much as humanely possible...I'd rather be talking and saving my poor wrists. lol
  9. ARCHIVED-Barq Bandit Guest

    Dejenchri@Venekor wrote:

    I'm not sure I could catch that every time, and associate the OOC someone typed with what they are saying at any one moment. I'm curious to see what folks would say over voice to designate it. Perhaps there will be a simple toggle for your chosen voice font without going through lots of menus, so you can turn it off at will so that it's completely obvious by the sound of your voice that you're being OOC and then IC again when you toggle it back on. Or perhaps the devs can provide a toggle that will change the look of the overhead speech bubble significantly enough to designate between the two.

    Another thing I'm curious about is how the system will handle multiple people talking at once. On every other voice comms program I've ever used, I've always run into that problem when three or more folks try speaking at once, and each of their voices is delivered at full volume, and you end up listening to a moment or two of completely unintelligible, crackly, loud noise. And then everyone shuts up for a beat, and one person goes ahead with what they were saying. With Vivox, can two or three people be talking over each other and it sound as natural as it would in a room, and allow you to single out a single person's voice to pay attention to like you would in a real-world environment? We do this all the time at parties and other gatherings, but I've never seen this achieved in voice comms.
  10. ARCHIVED-Tobby Guest

    And I hate to ask..

    BUT

    What will be the expected monthly charge for this service added to our accounts?

    As I do not expect Vivox will be hosting this all for free.
  11. ARCHIVED-Wilde_Night Guest

    For our guild, Voice Chat has always been designated Out of Character. If you want to chat In Character, you type. With the Voice Fonts going in, I do not see any changes to that rule being made any time soon really. You can now sound like your character? Cool, but talking via VOIP is still OOC. ;)
  12. ARCHIVED-ke'la Guest

    Tobby wrote:
    It will be free, just like it is with every other MMO that has an integrated voice chat system. Heck according to the press release that announced the partnership with Vivox, if you are a Station Launcher user you eventually* will be able to use it free, even if you don't play any SoE games.

    *once they get out of BETA and get a chance to integrate it into the Station Launcher.

    :EDIT:
    I linked to the Press Release in my reply to your question in the Test form.
  13. ARCHIVED-Nakaru-Nitepaw Guest

    I like the idea of voice fonts. I always remain silent on voice chats / vents because my voice don't exactly match the voice of a 3ft tall rodent.
  14. ARCHIVED-SirDinadan Guest

    Powers wrote:
    I am very concerned about this sort of scenario. No one in my family will be using voicechat, even when it becomes included in the standard game. It won't be a problem in my guild, as everyone either agrees with us, or has long since given up trying to convert us to TS or Vent.
    Once it is available to everyone without a special server being required, I am very concerned about constantly being asked to talk in groups.. and the exasperated tension that will probably result if we 'make' other people type. I don't have a solution; I'd be fine with some sort of visual clue that I have turned off chat, so others won't even have to ask, but I'd guess others might not want that to be so visible.
    Who knows, maybe a voicechat-less guild will be a selling point, and all the other mute misfits will join us. I guess we'll see.
  15. ARCHIVED-Calain80 Guest

    I would love to have voice detection. It is hard to fight while pressing the control key. ;)
  16. ARCHIVED-Barq Bandit Guest

    Calberak@Valor wrote:

    No, thank you!

    I can't count the number of people I've had to ask to switch to push-to-talk because everyone got tired of listening to them breath into their mic, playing their music, arguing with their siblings/parents, etc. This isn't an FPS game or anything. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of players can handle holding down a key to speak for a bit.
  17. ARCHIVED-Calain80 Guest

    Ok I can understand a Ranger using P2T, but for me there are no 2 seconds without needing me to press some keys. There is no way I can say what I want in intervals < 2s. Even to use P2T to call an add is fruitless then, cause an macroed gsay will be faster then pressing P2T saying "Add from ..." and releasing P2T, which would me I lose out on one heal or 2 CA. With voice detection I would lose no time at all, which also enables you to do some smalltalk while fighting. P2T is about losing efficiency. There is no way you can talk and play at the same time to 100% with P2T. Either you sound like Scatman or you can't press any keys. Just because some people can't configure voice detection right does not men it is bad. It does only mean, that we need a better interface to configure it. At least give us a start / stop to talk button. That would be OK in 90% of the cases beside the people forgetting to press start / stop.
  18. ARCHIVED-Jida Guest

    It would have to be a supported item in the voice engine. So, until you go and look and see if its part of voice engine, I think the push to talk / voice detection 'discussion' is a pretty moot point.
  19. ARCHIVED-Calain80 Guest

    There are other features not supported by the voice engine they are trying to include later on. So why not add this to the list of wanted features. ;)
  20. ARCHIVED-Zakarth Guest

    This looks really good. I can't wait for the next update!
    I noticed on Wikipedia that SWG uses Vivox too. We can add our friends from SWG to our EQ2 friends list and even send them tells by using SWG.(Server).(Character), will we be able to invite them to our voice chat channels too?