Ingame Voice Chat Sucks

I've never liked in game voice chat. I love talking to my friends while gaming though. As a PC gamer I was exposed to the ability to chat while gaming via voice earlier than most console gamers, but it was via third party apps which while clunkier offered significantly better voice quality than the ps3/360 generation of consoles. When voice chat on console games became common (before the ps3/360 generation but that didn't penetrate my friend group) devs made a damning but understandable trade off: quality for latency.

People got used to this crunchy, staticky, awful audio where it was normal for people to be on an open mic because push to talk is hard on a controller with limited buttons and configuring sensitivity is a pain in the ass. Especially with the headsets and microphones common during that mass adoption phase that were lower quality than even bargain basement call center headsets. I had mentioned this to my brother once at the tail end of that generation and he blew my mind when he said "it sounds fine to me, but I have insert name brand GAMER(tm) headset that's still junk so that must be why it sounds bad to you, your stuff just isn't as good." Meanwhile I'm rocking a semi decent professional mic and studio cans and am just shocked that people think that awful styrofoam audio was normal. I asked other friends, same replies "your equipment must suck, this sounds fine to me." while actively listening to the same audio I cannot stand.

The main difference between PCs and consoles was that the console voice audio bitrate was 8 or 16kbps which is on par with the worst over seas call center you can imagine, meanwhile the shittiest ventrilo server I ever ran from my house was 128kbps and more or less crystal clear by comparison. I'd join public vent or teamspeak servers for EQ raids and sometimes they would be set to 8kbps and it would be the same trash audio, so I wasn't immune from it, but in my friend group we lived the good life. Then came the friendslop and prox chat.

Look, prox chat when handled well is cool: The We Were Here series is a stellar example of prox chat used well. The way the walkie talkie becomes the most important tool to solve these collaborative puzzles where you are physically split up is great stuff. I wish I had someone to play the newer entries with but that's a different blog post. But the modern friendslop trough: Repo, Phasmophobia, Demonologist, Peak, Escape the Backrooms, you name it. I don't think prox chat adds anything that adding a global chat option takes away from. Phasmophobia in that regard gets a partial pass from me, it does have global comms. I get what the rest are trying to do, they're trying to make it more spooky or atmospheric, and it can be hilarious when your friend runs by you screaming and you're left wondering "wtf" as a monster gets you but that isn't really what happens normally. You either bunch up never leaving prox chat range or play a lot of the game in silence and dude these are not the kind of games that NOT interacting with your friends benefits. These games thrive on the fact that I could have fun watching paint dry with my friends. As soon as you start thinking about what you're actually doing these games lose their luster so quickly.

And then there is the quality: we've left the days of 8kbps audio but not only does audio in these games tend to sound pretty crunchy there isn't any noise cancelling in it so frequently players are once again either hot mic-ing it constantly or having crazy amounts of background noise when they talk. This is a solvable problem, and I don't think devs are lazy necessarily but I wonder how much "bad audio funny" has just been normalized by twitch and lets plays as "good enough". Bums me out man.

And if you want an argument that's not from the aesthetics of audio and aggravation angle this has always been an accessibility issue. I now have hearing damage (self inflicted, I'm an idiot. Wear hearing protection during loud times kids.) and this crappy noisy audio is impossible to make out what people are saying half the time, and for people that have audio processing issues this poor audio makes that harder too. Basically I think we can do better, and I wish we were. We've started adding arachnophobia modes to game which affects like 5% of the population. So does audio processing disorder. And something like 20% of the planet has hearing damage. Last aside before I stop: I think arachnophobia modes are added not because it's so common but because it's so easy to add. It lets devs point at a list and say "look, we're accessible!" meanwhile colorblindness modes are still not super common, nor are audio accomodations beyond closed captioning.