My enjoyment of multiplayer games over the years has had an inverse relationship with the proliferation of voice chat.
hot take but the only upside to voice chat in games is that your hands are already busy, although that might be the voice dysphoria and bad hearing talking
i used to play tactical shooters and tbh those are one of the only genres where i find voice chat really important
situations where you absolutely need real-time high-bandwidth communication and have to be able to talk while doing other things
what i really want is a game where the voice chat behaves like a non-duplex radio system and only lets one person talk at a time. would really help with the “everyone is talking at once and you can’t tell what’s going on” issue (also i use real radios like that at work and i’m a big fan of it)
granted i’m also lucky in that voice dysphoria is not a big issue for me, and i don’t really play those games anymore anyway so the point is moot
idk i don’t really have a point here i just find it interesting how different my relationship with the topic is from a lot of people’s
Heyy, guys. Make sure you’re not sitting on your radios.
— the maintenance guy, about once a week
[Snowmobile noises]
— whoever is sitting on their radio, on and off, for like ten minutes
the one time I've had to use a radio system at work we were borrowing someone else's and the levels of experience were me (played Arma), my mum (used to help at stage shows), and like 10 people who'd never used one before, and holy shit, like half the air time was people treating it like a leisurely intra-office phonecall, telling someone to hold on and then narrating what they're doing while checking something, asking like 3 questions at a time before letting the other person speak, one point I was trying to find someone and someone just said "yeah, here" and I had to ask who said that, etc. even after we'd given them a crash course in how to use them
