If it's not screeching children it will be some extremely embarrassing adult man yelling at his teammates and calling you a f*g for not performing to his standards.
I don't think VOIP in online head to head games has ever worked out as the devs intended. In their minds teammates would be communicating strategy to one another but in reality, well, we all know how that turned out. I remember playing Counter Strike back when they first rolled out voice chat and it was a shitshow back then too.
I think in the early Xbox Live and Halo 2 days they specifically encouraged trash talking because of the Xbox's dorm room college bro image and userbase. There was proximity chat specifically so a killed enemy could hear you as you teabagged them
i only ever played with mathcmaking randos by accident but I had a few alright experiences. proximity chat is sometimes a tactical advantage because you can hear the other team...
buuuuut i don't think it's worth the racism, sexism, queermisia and so on, especially if you don't sound like a white dude, and i said as much to the devs on a game i got to beta test.
oh, and i've "met" people in a niche fighting game as randos but everybody on that game is like two degrees of freinds of friends anyway so the social dynamic is way different than a cod lobby where you'll never see those people again.
One time some kids called me and my friends old and told us to stop playing games and go back to work.
I don't play multiplayer games anymore lol
wow you let that little shit win. you should've seduced their mom
There's actually a meme going around right now about people feeling bad for telling someone they suck and then realizing that their victim was an old person in their thirties who probably has a job and kids.
Probably because it was an easy way to sell XBOX Live to people as an added feature and it's stuck around as a vestige. It's like another axis of interactivity with the game and techno-libs were and still are pretty common in the video game industry, so they're always going to minimize the downsides.
I played a very boomer game once where the voice chat was most of the time civil and people either having a chat about :grillman: stuff or trying to coordinate.
I still had to fucking turn it off for my sanity because they were too stupid. Best predictor of whether you'd lose a match was if you got some arm chair general trying to be "strategic" over voice. It was either turn it off or I would have eventually become the extremely embarrassing adult yelling at my team mates to shut the fuck up.
idk about you guys but trolling bigots on call of duty search and destroy is one of my favorite past times
Look, I really like the ability to quickly turn off voice chat in a given lobby.
But game companies took advice like this to heart during the PS4/Xbox One era and it was a mistake. Everyone's on party chat or they don't have a mic on. The network effect means everyone not in a party gives up trying to ask if anyone has a mic, so nobody even tries to use the mic anymore. Just impossible to communicate with anyone.
I remember being stoked for Battlefield 4, which I bought right after they made a big update that fixed it. There were 32 players on your team in every game, and over a long night of play you'd run into several hundred players. There would be maybe 0, 1, or 2 mics out of the hundreds of players. When I played Destiny 1, it was nearly impossible to get the attention of someone walking by in the shared MMO-esque areas, because adding them required pulling up the overlay and it was so slow they'd get to the other side of the zone and into the next, before you could finish requesting permission to chat. They clearly intended originally to let you wave and say hello.
Every multiplayer game was a totally solo experience.
Contrast that to playing Halo 2 on the original Xbox. Sure 25% of the games had some kid with the voice modification setting on - this was still the era of extreme paranoia about online interactions - and he'd be saying shit to his little brother next to him in this horrible rasping tone. But you could mute him. And sure 10% of games had some freak screaming at you or huffing into his mic or telling you to die or tearing your eardrums off with a giant hissing bong rip. But you know what 65% of games had? Teammates from across the world ready to jump into a team and try to cooperate. People who you might add to a friends list. It was just so much better. I remember jumping into a game with 3 guys carrying on and I thought I was having a stroke but it turned out they were speaking Dutch.
We've boomeranged back to a middle ground and I don't miss the silence.
I like it in a game like Squad where there's a high degree of coordination involved. No infantry game compares to the feeling of a patrol in that and it hinges on multiple layers of radio communication.
It depends heavily on the game. Voice chat in Hunt:Showdown is mostly civil and often funny as people on competing teams yell cowboy memes at each other or express sympathy when someone gets lit on fire and eaten by a zombie. Sometimes different teams will work out agreements where they split a bounty objective, or coordinate to take on a third team. Sometimes people just yodel at you.
Other games are horrific cesspits of racism and hate.
I think a lot of it has to do with how main-stream the popularity of the game is. If it's a big game with lots of market the lowest common denominator of nazi 13 year olds is going to dominate. If it's a weird niche game with a relatively low player count people are somewhat more likely to be civil. Highly tactical shooters almost require the ability to communicate like a normal human being. Meanwhile League of Legends had to turn off text chat because people were so fucking horrible to each other.
I play relatively weird games and have had consistently good experiences. Hunt, as mentioned. Planetside 2 had squad chat, platoon chat, a global leadership chat, and proximity chat. All of them were pretty good the vast majority of the time. Even shit-talking on prox chat was mostly based on in-game memes about how one faction were filthy communists and the other faction were evil capitalists. idk why it worked out. Probably because the game wasn't really fun unless you were playing as a coordinated member of a squad and the level of maturity required meant that abrasive shitheads would get kicked out and blacklisted pretty quickly. We actually had one guy who had "microphone problems' for five years straight, then one day announced he had turned 18 and had been faking mic problems the whole time bc he didn't want to be kicked for being a squeaker.
ARMA, Squad, and a lot of other tactical shooters just require coordination and teamwork or you lose. If you can't be civil and communicate no one will play with you and the game becomes completely unplayable.
Most people on VR chat are chill. Sometimes you run in to racist shitheads but not as often as you expect. it's really straightforward to ban people from voice chat if you need to.
I haven't had any problems on DarkTide yet but i don't think most people know that there even is voice chat in that game.
It probably helps that I'm male with a pretty basic "somewhere in north america" accent.
Games that require strategy to that extent don't really sound fun to me, in fact it sounds really stressful. I just want to shoot human shaped targets that are not on my team and expect my teammates to be working towards that general goal
In Overwatch competitive it's been useful since you're just talking with your team
If can also be toxic but communication is important for Overwatch and doing so over text isn't really feasible. And you can disable text and voice if you wish
Also keep in mind we are used to gamer moments are a feature of English voice chat. World wide it can be different. From what I've heard on Japanese Apex Legends on LoL they are passive aggressive
Hindi voice chat is going to be absolute filth.
I've heard that in the Valorant Indian servers, "Come tomorrow" is an extremely popular trash talk. Just saying, "you're having a bad day maybe next time my guy. "
