VoIP do we need it?

[Kappinski]

From my experience I can tell that in theory all those nice encounters via VOIP seem nice. And if they happen, they are.
But if a game is tagged with "Sandbox PvP" chances are that the tone on the server gets rough pretty quickly. I think the Dev's are aware of that problem hence the Dev run Groups.
I see the idea of VOIP through two different hats.

As a streamer I would not stream a second of any MMO that has VOIP which is either opt-out or global or proximity only or whatever. If I am not in control of what is happening in my stream I have a problem. Twitch's TOS are strict and DMCA strikes are a common thing by now. If some dude is blasting copyrighted music while I am close I would hit alt+F4 one time and never start that game again. The troll potential is insane. What if someone wants my channel to be banned and waits for the time I take a break and leave the game running.
You have to be in control of VOIP which is one point. Implementing VOIP in general is easy. You can use the Steam VOIP or Vivox. But you have to code all the game logic that it's safe to use.

As a Roleplayer VOIP is absolutely neccessary. But here comes the catch. If you want to develop for Roleplayers you have to make sure every system is troll safe OR let people host dedicated private servers where they can curate players and set their own ruleset. But this some extra Dev time on top of that for the VOIP. It's a harsh truth but I think Vexus is right.

It seems to me that they focus on PvP first. And adding VOIP to a Sandbox PvP game does no good. Big groups use Discord or TS3 anyway because they don't want to have some spies lurking around. And strangers count as spies.
It is more important to keep players that are not into Hardcore PvP and that alone is the biggest challenge this type of genre has to overcome. Because if they leave, and they will if this turns out toxic, you don't need VOIP anyway.

Would I wish for VOIP? Yes!
Is it a good idea for EA? Maybe not.

 

[Kodey]

Here’s what I see, a voice line system like the once CSGO/TF2/Mordhau has. Hell, i’d Say mordhau benefits from not having a VoIP because the voice lines are just so great.

However, I do think that SB needs somekind of voice, more specifically, an radio system. That way people don’t have to worry about trolls as much, and people can still use somekind of voice in the game during close quarters combat.

 

[Kyuhau]

Just make VOIP a opt-in or opt-out, and add general dialog lines you see in counterstrike for those who don't wish to talk. Should be good that way.

 

[Recatek]

Planetside 2 has a hotkey that you can press to immediately mute anyone currently talking. It's great for quickly weeding out trolls without having to mute people you actually want to hear and talk to, or having to disable VOIP entirely. If you accidentally catch the wrong person in the process, there's also a separate interface you can use to easily unmute them.

 

[Junebug]

A Location based VOIP may be good, similar to Garry's mod or Rust.

 

[Beepinex]

voice chat is critical to a game like this, any communication during action other than holding a key is too distracting, and text can be easy to miss unless its right over what you're looking at

 

[Popster]

Voip isnt in for quite a few reasons one is of course the devs want people to use discord or other voip services over in game, two because having voip is a lot of upload and download required as is the game has issues with lag already it does not need more required upload or download

 

[ChaosRifle]

An idea to cut down on bandwidth, is to have a system not disimilar to Escape from Tarkov, where you have F-keys (F1,F2,etc) (or any key really, EFT uses F-keys through for consistancy) allowing you to bind your common voice lines and a menu to pick from any unbound, or quickly bind them on the fly. its not hard to learn the system, and you get used to it very fast.

For example, in my settings, having not played for months I can still tell you F1 is to taunt your enemies, F2 is to agree, F3 is disagree, F4 is telling them to cease fire, F5 telling them 'good work', mostly used for taunts in PVP, F6 is telling them to repeat their last, I didnt catch what was said.. useful for gunfire masking the voices, or also taunting them if you want to be mean.

The voices are all consistant with difference voice types and such, where voice1 may say, 'hands up!' and another says 'freeze!', but they all match the theme of the game. In the case of tarkov, gruff male voice of a PMC that has been through war. In the case of starbase, we could get cool modulated voices not tooo disimilar from boltcrackers, just speaking english, and other languages could be done too, since all 'cease fire' commands are the same binding. this wouldnt be hard to have a client hear it in their own language either, though the only downside to autotranslation there is that some languages have longer or shorter phrases, so english user may be fast enough to talk with his keys to hold a conversation like normal speech (this only took me about a week to get to this level), but a german recipient may not have enough delay between commands, thus overlapping.

The idea being less bandwidth used, no mic spam trolling ruining the immersion, no low quality mic's or background noise, to both save on eardrum destruction, and again, maintain immersion. VOIP isnt the only answer for dealing with other players in game, other games have shown alternate solutions exist just fine, and I personally prefer a more immersive experience of not having weird and loud background noise from someone I am trying to interact with.



As far as companies go, managing large logistics isnt hard for a faction/company to use Teamspeak. I have personally run a multiple events with several hundred people using Teamspeak3, using channel commanders and dynamic whisper lists, allowing for a chain of command to get everyone doing what needs to be done, and keeping communications clear of unnessisary clutter. The whole setup takes about 70 seconds if the commanders havnt done it before. The server setup only a minute or two, and as low as a few seconds if you just have commanders make their own subchannels with three button clicks.




TLDR; No, we dont, other options exist that can be used in place of it just as effectively, and in some cases, more effectively and I hope that said other options are also considdered before jumping into a decision.

 

[sbinterested]

No one has ever heard of commo rose, or voice emotes? "ATTACK,'" "SURRENDER" "MEDIC" " I give up, STOP SHOOTING" etc this would eliminate the need for voip You quickly bring up the menu, and your robot says it, this also doesn't break immersion.

Seriously sick of voip elitism guys, if I didn't need a mic in insurgency ( fast paced tactical shooter) because it had in game character voice commands, then this game doesn't need voip.

Half the time people are screaming on voice contributing nothing to the battle when you can be just as useful with in game voice commands. This is just a general observation of playing various PVP games, or any game with voice honestly.

And these voice menu commands could be used to talk to other people too.

 

[sbinterested]

And do we really want to hear all of the annoying brats yelling at people in this game? Just give it a rest please, voip is overrated.

 

[Yasko]

No one has ever heard of commo rose, or voice emotes? "ATTACK,'" "SURRENDER" "MEDIC" " I give up, STOP SHOOTING" etc this would eliminate the need for voip You quickly bring up the menu, and your robot says it, this also doesn't break immersion.

Not everyone is going to want to play this game with mouse and keyboard though, and not every flightstick or whatever will be used by people has a ton of extra buttons for voice lines

 

[ChaosRifle]

Not everyone is going to want to play this game with mouse and keyboard though, and not every flightstick or whatever will be used by people has a ton of extra buttons for voice lines

You dont nessisarily need to bind everything to seperate keys, you can have that as an additional feature. You can bind a single key to a selection menu that has a wheel, and much like Mass Effect, you could hold a key, and use a stick, or hat to quick select instantly one that you use frequently, or navigate the categorized options of all voice lines. Nothing stopping this system allowing a user, if they wanted to, to make a file folder style system to bind several lines in a custom made category for power users.

For the unfamilliar, hold a bumper to open a wheel, moving one stick can aim to target your powers, the other will select the items around the wheel. letting go of the stick will return it to center, and letting go of the bumper again chooses what you selected. In the case of Mass Effect powers, you could choose one from each squad mate my using 'A'. A speech system wouldnt need that obviously (unless allowing a custom folder system support then it may be useful for user ergonomics), though it could be a fun and easy feature to implement in its basic principle. Anyone who has played Mass Effect games with controllers can attest to how fast you can get used to the wheel selection to perform complex, coordinated actions in less than a second realtime. You could also take it a step further and implement an autotranslate to your games locale, where an english user could hear a finnish user in english, and vice versa, seemlessly. You could take this one more step by also allowing a queue of commands, so the voice lines chain nicely in their locale, though reply times may be a weird challenge to overcome, with a fin able to issue an order, and the english user agreeing to it, before other finns, have even heard the full extend of the first order. Another option would allow all locale's to speak all languages supported, but default have the users locale selected, so multilingual players can bridge the gap in yet another layer of faction interactions.

I know personally from playing PVP ArmA3 with ACRE radio mod (allows you to designate a language (basically a variable name) to a player, and garbles languages they are not supposed to understand. if a user flagged as english hears german, ACRE garbles the audio in a way that mimics human speach, but is almost entirely unrecognisable, where you may be able to pick out single short words from a sentence if you know the real language they are speaking well in real life) with setting languages and only some players to understand multiple, it makes for some interesting gameplay very quickly and you suddenly care about your translators lives for the significant tactical advantage the can afford you if you overhear enemy communications in the area.

Obviously such systems would need some tuning done to it, but it is feesable and I hope a comms menu for ingame robot voices is seriously considdered as one of the options available to FrostByte.

EDIT: also, for those that want all commands at their fingertips and want to use fewer keys, things like voiceattack exist for precisely that.

 

[Yasko]

You dont nessisarily need to bind everything to seperate keys, you can have that as an additional feature. You can bind a single key to a selection menu that has a wheel, and much like Mass Effect, you could hold a key, and use a stick, or hat to quick select instantly one that you use frequently, or navigate the categorized options of all voice lines. Nothing stopping this system allowing a user, if they wanted to, to make a file folder style system to bind several lines in a custom made category for power users.

In theory, yes. For games like this one I use a HOTAS, which theoretically has hundreds of buttons to bind, and looking at Elite: Dangerous for an example, I tend to run out of them and have to resort to using one button as an "Alt" button.

Having one button for Push-to-talk would be (at least for me) much more convenient to use. I don't have to dedicate a hat (or several, in case of more than 8 possibilities) to emotes, and can have more functions used for actual gameplay like piloting my ship.

While not as much a problem to me, looking at the amount of hats and buttons on my hotas, we also have to think of people using setups with less buttons to bind.

 

[ChaosRifle]

Not dedicate a hat or stick (thats crazy talk lol) , repurpose one. A temporary repurposing of a lesser needed stick or hat that you may use for freelook (or something), only changed for the contextual wheel via proper hotas/dual stick compatability.

 

[Yasko]

Not dedicate a hat or stick (thats crazy talk lol) , repurpose one. A temporary repurposing of a lesser needed stick or hat that you may use for freelook (or something), only changed for the contextual wheel via proper hotas/dual stick compatability.

that's probably what I would do, if VoIP won't be implemented. But I use an X-56, so I have no issue finding a lesser used hat to bind to. But looking at someone using something like a T.Flight, they may not have the option, since they already would be limited by simply not having as many buttons and hats.

 

[MoneylooJr]

No one has ever heard of commo rose, or voice emotes? "ATTACK,'" "SURRENDER" "MEDIC" " I give up, STOP SHOOTING" etc this would eliminate the need for voip You quickly bring up the menu, and your robot says it, this also doesn't break immersion.

Well, beyond the fact the robots make weird machine noises instead of speaking, are you really sure that would work in a game like starbase? This whole game is designed around dynamic gameplay, a set of cookie cutter voice emotes could never match every scenario. That's not even mentioning the fact half the time you'll be in the middle of piloting a ship. It's hard to scroll through a menu while you're dodging enemy fire and piloting a fighter at the same time.

And do we really want to hear all of the annoying brats yelling at people in this game? Just give it a rest please, voip is overrated.

Just make muting people easy. Letting a few bad apples ruin the experience for the rest of the community doesn't make sense.

 

[Tada]

Either VoIP or something like CS:GO has with the voice lines

 

[Venombrew]

in Sea of Thieves they gave us megaphones so we can yell out in direction much much further than normal voice chat. This way people can yell "stop or you be fired on", or even "are you peaceful?" its a system that game has had going on 2 years now i do believe, so its simple system if they put it in the game.

 

[sbinterested]

Well, beyond the fact the robots make weird machine noises instead of speaking, are you really sure that would work in a game like starbase? This whole game is designed around dynamic gameplay, a set of cookie cutter voice emotes could never match every scenario. That's not even mentioning the fact half the time you'll be in the middle of piloting a ship. It's hard to scroll through a menu while you're dodging enemy fire and piloting a fighter at the same time.

Just make muting people easy. Letting a few bad apples ruin the experience for the rest of the community doesn't make sense.

or just add some kind of in game voice commands our character talks and it doesn't ruin the experience for anyone No point adding voip just to add mute

 

[Venombrew]

we just need a in game voice chat with directional chat. many games already do it, Sea of Thieves not only do it, but created megaphones to extend out your voice in a direction you are facing. Its very important in Sea of Thieves, because well your playing against other Pirates and its easier to talk than text a situation. thats super easy and super cheap to implement. I hate to say steal Sea of Thieves voice chat idea, but its pretty good since you can basically yell further out from your boat to another player, while at same time being able to talk within close proximity of your crew and not have anyone hear what your saying if they are not close enough. If you play the game, you will at times see a guy on his boat really far from you, can't hear the guy unless he uses his megaphone to carry his directional voice out further. Good tool when seeing if another boat of players could be friendly or have something worth trading over. Starbase can easily do the same with ship speakers to warn or at very least get another ships attention more directly to engange in a coversation at a distance. Since every game nowadays is coming out with a in voice chat system i wouldn't worry to much.