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The sounds of Tabula Rasa's war
If you're like me (sorry) you don't usually listen to the in-game music, sounds and other audio oddities that go on in your favorite MMO. You're either TeamSpeak-ing to your guild mates about the current mission, ranting to your friends about why there' so much lag, or listening to the Rock Band of the hour - full blast. Whatever you're treating your ears to the painstaking hours of audio worked on by the development team usually goes unheard.The gang at Tabula Rasa is doing something to change that. The TR official website now has a very cool feature that let's players download actual audio files from the game - including base announcements (which are often LOL hilarious) and battle cries.So far they have five main files you can download (each contain multiple sound bites): Barks (2.3 MB - zipped MP3s) Base Announcements (1.3 MB - zipped MP3s) Funny Base Announcements (3.4 MB - zipped MP3s) Friendly Battlecries (18.9 MB - zipped MP3s) Hostile Battlecries (3.5 MB - zipped MP3s) If you're clever enough (if I can do it you can do it!) I imagine these audio clips can be used in a myriad of fun ways (i.e., ring tones, computer shut down/start up sounds, etc.). Download them and find out!
Making yourself heard with the right headset
Mr_elenganza has a great question over on the WoW LJ-- what headset do you use for voicechatting in WoW?Me, I use two different audio inputs. On my Mac Powerbook, the built-in microphone actually works really well (and I hear from others who've used the new Macbooks that those work even better), so whenever I'm raiding with Teamspeak on, I'll have it on there, and just use that mic to talk.But when I need something a little clearer, I use the cheaper Logitech headset-- there are more expensive gaming headsets out there, but the headset is really just for voice (I've also got a nice set of 5.1 speakers on my PC), so it works just fine for my purposes. To tell the truth, if I went for another headset, I'd probably try and get something Bluetooth (the fewer wires running around, the better), but I haven't shopped around too much for that-- anyone want to recommend one?At this point, headsets are so cheap and so commonly used that "I don't have a mic" isn't really a valid excuse for not voicechatting any more (of course, it's always a good excuse if there are other reasons you don't want to speak). A nice USB headset will help you hear what's going on, and will make the experience better for people playing with you, too.
Blizzard posts a Voice Chat FAQ
European CM Salthem has posted a Frequently Asked Questions about the new voice chat feature coming in the next patch (which has got to be just around the corner, right?). There's not much new here, but there is a lot of Blizzard confirming what players have already discovered about the voice chat system. People will be one-click mute-able, and voice chat will be able to be disabled by Parental Controls. Blizzard also makes a few interesting points about bandwidth-- while they say voice chat won't have a big effect on those with high bandwidth connections, they say people who currently experience high latency will likely have bigger problems.And perhaps most disappointingly, they almost sound apologetic about the quality of the sound. They recommend multi-thread processors (as if that's something someone can really upgrade to without getting a whole new computer), and they acknowledge that third party applications will likely have much better quality.Not that their voice chat system is bad-- as I've said before (and as we found out in the voice chat survey), lots of players will definitely use it. But third party applications aren't going away anytime soon either.
70% of WoW Insider readers will be on Voice Chat
Well there you go. I'd like to say that I called it (although I did say that voice chat would find a place in a lot of PUGgers' hearts), but I was surprised to see that 70% of you readers expect to use Blizzard's new voice chat feature coming in 2.2. Personally, I'd rather stick to Teamspeak (and I'm guessing my guild will do just that). And I know, from the comments yesterday, that there are lots of people out there who just don't want to get involved in voice chat, whether there's an ingame system or not.But clearly Blizzard was right to put the time in-- there is a good majority of players ready to plug a mic in and start speaking to each other. Very interesting.Update: You're right, commenters. Title updated from "players" to "WoW Insider readers," since that's who we actually polled. I only got a B in Stats class in college.
Are you going to use voice chat?
Kachra from Ursin asks a question that I'd like to know the answer to: are you going to use the voice chat feature? And just like the guys who built the Six Million Dollar Man, we have the technology. We can find out. So here's a poll. And hopefully, we can get a good, somewhat scientific reading on the community-- are you going to use the voice chat feature or not?Keep in mind that TS and Vent aren't going anywhere, and as I said in my Voice Chat hands on, it's very likely that a lot of guilds (especially bigger guilds), will keep using those. But my guess is also that a lot of people will use both-- TS in raids, and the builtin voice chat in PuGs or more private groups. So if you're planning to use voice chat at all (even if it's in conjunction with a third party voice program), mark yes below.And if you don't think you'll ever touch it, either because you're sticking to third party, or you don't want to voice chat, mark no. Who knows-- maybe Blizzard's overestimating demand for the feature in the first place.%Poll-2866%
WoW Insider's PTR voice chat hands on
Voice chat is now available on the 2.2 PTR, so I downloaded the test realms, rolled up a gnome Warlock, and put on my Logitech headset to try it out. What I found was a pretty intuitive voice chat system that does most everything Blizzard promised to do, and will likely replace Teamspeak or Ventrilo for a lot of smaller guilds.Unfortunately, it's complicated enough that it probably won't be extremely widespread-- players who haven't found the need to join up on voice chat yet probably still won't feel a need to do so. But for guilds who don't want to pay for a separate server and friends who group together often, the ingame voice chat should work just fine.The rest of my impressions, including a complete walkthrough on how the chat system works, are after the jump.
Voice chat coming soon to the PTRs
We missed it on Friday afternoon, but apparently voice chat is coming in 2.2. Previously, we'd heard that Zul'Aman and guild banks weren't showing up until 2.3, but there wasn't official word on when voice chat was arriving. PTR players have reported seeing a voicechat interface, but of course it hasn't been hooked up to any code yet.But Hortus now says we'll be seeing voice chat ingame sooner than we thought-- it will be coming soon to a PTR near you, and pending testing, should go live with 2.2. Wow. Blizzard must have done a lot of work on that behind the scenes, assuming that it is what they promise: a fully featured builtin voice chat client. Think it's coincidence that there have been a few sound bugs on the test realms lately?Which means that at some point we'll have to ask this question: What will happen to Teamspeak and Ventrilo? There's a nice bit of industry there-- players pay for servers all over the place, and while each server is pretty cheap, altogether they add up to a nice chunk of change, I'm sure. My guess is that TS and Vent aren't going anywhere (because players are so used to them, and not just in WoW), but until we see what kind of interface Blizzard has created, we won't know if they're worth leaving or not. Seeing as it's the PTRs, we should get a chance to play with it soon. [ via WorldofWar.net ]
PTR Notes: New music in the inns of Azeroth
After a player says he thought he'd heard something he'd never heard before on the PTR, Hortus says that yes, there is new music in inns all over the world of Azeroth.Which seems like a strange addition to make, and an even stranger change to leave out of the patch notes. Personally, I have music turned off maybe 90% of the time-- while grinding, I'm usually listening to my own music or watching a movie, and while raiding, I'm listening to my guildies on Teamspeak. While I like the Warcraft music as much as the next guy, I can only hear it so many times before I'm ready for something else.But I supposed after the next patch comes on, I'll have to flip it back on again and have a listen. You have to wonder why they're spending time implementing new music when there seems like so much else to do, but maybe these are leftovers-- music written for Outland or other new content that Blizzard didn't have anywhere else to put.
Hearing voices in the World of Warcraft
Clive Thompson (who I've enjoyed reading for a while now) posted a piece on Wired the other day about how voice changed the way he saw fellow players in World of Warcraft. It's a really interesting read, not least of all because of the two academic studies mentioned: one study found that women were "treated differently" when using voice chat, and another found that gamers made more solid and trusting relationships with friends they knew by voice rather than those that knew by text.I don't know if Thompson has heard yet that voice is going to be builtin to WoW very soon now, but it's true: voice is about to play a much bigger part in our game. And it's also true that voice changes things a lot-- in my regular guild, I will often jump on our Teamspeak server just to chat with my fellow guildies and friends, even if I'm not in a group. In It came from the Blog (the official WoW Insider guild in which I occasionally can be seen saying crazy things), we haven't set up a Vent server (although it's coming, guys), and so I had the strange experience the other day of running an instance with only text chat to keep me company. Don't get me wrong, I like all the guys in IcftB, but I don't know if the reason I don't know them better is just because I haven't been with the guild as long, or if I just haven't actually heard their voices.In the end, Thompson marks it down to a generational thing-- some people are willing to share their voices and hear others, he says, and some just aren't. I'm not sure if that's true necessarily (I am pretty conservative on, say, my Myspace page, and pretty free with my Ventrilo joining), but either way, the use of voice chat in videogames has only just started to make itself known.
Voice chat coming in 2.2.0
Coming in 2.2.0: Integrated voice chat.Tigerclaw, who I've never heard of either-- is he a dev? He says he's "in a whole other building than the CMs"-- has bad news for all of those Teamspeak and Ventrilo hosts. Apparently come 2.2.0, you won't need to run any extra programs, as players will be able to speak to each other via the normal client. Tigerclaw also says a PTR for the patch is upcoming, but he definitely does work for Blizzard: he doesn't give any clues at all as to when this might happen.So let the rampant speculation begin! Lately I've been playing a lot of the Halo 3 Beta (traitorous, I know), and I love the way voice works in that game: you can push a button to talk over a radio to your whole team, or just speak into the mic without pushing anything, and only players near you ingame will hear what you're saying. I doubt WoW will be that complicated (not to mention that a lot of players don't like that "feature"), but it's a cool effect, and here's hoping Blizzard comes up with some interesting ways to use voicechat onward. What if Hakkar's whispers were heard only in your own personal voice channel?
Dude, can you get on Teamspeak?
I can't remember the first time I was invited on Teamspeak (some people use Ventrilo as well-- I've got both free programs installed on my PC, just in case) for an instance-- for some reason, I'm thinking it wasn't until I got invited to a raid at level 60, but considering the way that things are now, I'm really surprised it wasn't earlier. Maybe it's just because almost every instance I run is with guildies, but TS is basically a requirement for grouping-- a requirement that most of us are happy to comply with, but a requirement nonetheless.Yakov isn't so compliant-- he says Vent is a crutch, and the fact that every group he enters asks him to "jump on Vent" is rubbing him the wrong way. He says a simple 5 man run doesn't call for using Vent, and that he'd rather listen to his music then his guildies chatting it up on Teamspeak.I disagree-- not only is it more fun to chat with people on Vent (I tend to know the guildies I've talked to on TS better than the others), but it's just plain helpful, whether the instance is hard or not. If you're disappointed that your guild isn't asking you to come on more instance runs with them, and you haven't downloaded Vent or TS yet, that's probably why.Of course, like all things, Vent can go horribly wrong. You can be annoyed by your guildies' voices (I'll just say that some people's accents are a little offputting and leave it at that), or like Yakov, you can rather listen to music then random guild gossip. But especially if you're a player just getting to the endgame where there's a lot to learn, jumping on Vent is one of the best things you can do to make sure you know what's going on when. It's not a difficulty thing, although coordinating a pull on TS is much easier than typing strat in the chat channel. It's more of a communication thing-- the more and the faster comm there is, the better you'll all be.
Voice chat and the virtual identity
Terranova has a great little piece up about what they say is "the inevitability of voice" in online gaming. Blizzard has talked (ha! I just made that up!) about implementing a voice chat system into the default client, but at this point, they don't really have to-- I don't think I can remember a higher level instance run that I've done in a long time that hasn't been accompanied by a Vent or Teamspeak server with my friends on it.But the interesting thing about what Nate writes about online voice is that it's more than just being able to react quickly with strategy in a game-- with voice, we're moving ever closer to a deeper connection between our virtual and real identities. Part of the appeal of online gaming, way back in the beginning, was that players were able to keep their virtual identities separate from their real ones-- if you were an accountant during the day, you could hack and slash away at orcs all night, and no one from either world might ever know about the other.But now, with voice chat, the people you play with get to know more than they ever have about the real you-- first and foremost, your gender, which is why some women still don't bother speaking on Teamspeak. But beyond that, I know much more about my guildies-- their age, their professions, their locations, their situation in life-- than I think I ever would have if I spoke to them only in text. More than ever, as voice chat is commonly and conveniently found in more and more games, it's not just how you play the game-- it's going to be how you sound as you do it.
MMO VoIP: cross-reality calling
Telecoms startup Vivox has an intriguing vision, and an ambitiously-named product; "Immersion" aims to add voice chat to online games, with both persistent chat for guilds and dynamic chat for instancing. The product also seems to tie together various text-based chat methods, including regular messengers such as Yahoo and AIM as well as in-game chat.By supplying the (scalable) infrastructure for this service, Vivox hope Immersion will take the burden of providing voice chat away from game manufacturers, while making communication centralised and seamless for players. However, there are already several products that already achieve this -- many guilds have Ventrilo or TeamSpeak servers, while Xfire provides cross-game chatting. Vivox can go either way; it could corner another segment of this fragmented market, or -- if the company manage to deal directly with game developers -- it could become the one-stop-shop communication solution for gamers regardless of their MMO of choice.It'll be interesting to see which way the company goes; voice chat is certainly billed as the next stage of interactivity with MMOs, with Xbox Live gamers testifying to the added dimensions voice can add to various game genres. A recent press release on Vivox's website points to another direction in which the technology could become useful -- adding voice and centralised communication to online dating and social sites -- but reaching saturation point is going to be a tricky ride.[Via Gamesblog; City of Heroes screenshot from GameAmp]
