A few months back we announced that SOE and Vivox were teaming up to bring you free in-game Voice Chat in our lineup of games. This partnership allows us at SOE to focus on what we do best – make great games, and Vivox to focus on what they do best – voice technology. Greg “Rothgar” Spence and I have been working hard since then to bring a quality voice experience to EverQuest II and helping some of the other teams at SOE add Voice Chat to their games.
There’s a writeup with screenshots of how EQII’s voice chat will work as well as a specific place for feedback over on the official EQII forums. I highly suggest you check them out! The voice chat system has been available on the Test server since Monday and it’s been exciting to see the compliments and feedback pour in! Occasionally, Rothgar and I will hop on the Test server and chat with the players there too, answering questions and helping players get set up.
In the future we’re planning to expand the Voice Chat system with features like listening to multiple channels, proximity-based voice chat and the ability to change the way your voice sounds through “voice fonts.” In the meantime you get automatically created voice channels for in-game Guilds, Groups and Raids and the ability to create any number of password-protected custom channels. An amazing (and oft-praised) feature of our Voice Chat is that you can individually adjust the speaking volume of everyone you can hear. Being integrated in-game also means that the Group and Raid windows have gained speaking indicators so you can tell at a glance who is talking without the need to divert your attention away from the game. We’ve also added in Logitech G15 Keyboard support!
Early on in the planning process for our Voice Chat feature, we wanted to design a system that was intuitive and accessible. We wanted to remove as many of the barriers to entry as we could. With this in mind, we thought about all of the difficulties of setting up third-party voice chat applications and tried to make the problems go away. With our integrated Voice Chat, you don’t have to worry about setting up, paying for and maintaining a voice server. With our integrated Voice Chat, there’s no additional software you need to download and install; it’s just there in-game, waiting to be used. With our integrated Voice Chat we’ve provided diagnostics to help you get your microphone set to the input device so that you don’t have to hunt around in Windows.
To make sure our system was intuitive, we did a lot of usability testing in SOE’s new Usability Lab. This involved bringing in people ranging from those who have never seen EQII before to players who raid twenty-plus hours a week. Based on watching their reactions, where they looked for things in the UI and the roundtable discussions at the end of the sessions, we made significant tweaks before launching to the Test center. We’ve also had the entire EQII team using Voice Chat for internal playtests and providing Voice Chat feedback.
We’re proud of EQII’s Voice Chat feature and feel that it will be a boon to all manner of play-styles! Hope to see (and hear) you in-game!
Joshua “Autenil” Kriegshauser
Technical Director, EverQuest II
