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winknugget

What are the best games that utilize voice chat?

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I just picked up a new mic/headset for my PC and I'm excited to try it out. Games I'm planning to use it for are:

Left 4 Dead

Portal 2 Co-op

Splinter Cell Co-op

Maybe things like TF2

I was wondering if anyone could provide more games that get a LOT better through the use of a voice chat function.

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As long as the people you're chatting with are cool guys, I think all games get better, co-op ones in particular. For competitive games, it's also better, but then more as a social thing. I'm basing this on having played a lot of thumbs co-op games (Portal 2, Arma 2, the L4D games, Resident Evil 5) and a whole lot of GTA IV. In Portal 2 PiratePoo could use voice chat to easily deride and taunt me into figuring out puzzles for him, and in GTA IV everyone but me could talk about Pokémon and shit.

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The most rewarding experience I've had with voice chat was during a company tournament of Battlefield 2.

One of our teammates had military experience. The first thing he did was have us label every area on the map ("The beach", "The construction yard", etc). During matches, he had us call out every single enemy movement. "Three enemy dismounts in the village, heading toward the beach." "One enemy armor heading north to the construction yard."

You suddenly had this hive mind, where everyone was able to more or less achieve the equivalent of wallhacking via sharing each other's eyeballs. That's when I realized how voice chat was able to completely change a game.

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Why did you never join in the GTAIV chat, Mr. Toblix?

I did! I just never said anything.

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I love a good voice chat. Especially in a squad based game like Battlefield (Brendon's example is spot on). And it's absolutely essential in a coop game like Splinter Cell Conviction, because unless you're willing to luck your way through everything you have to communicate constantly. The best moments in that game so far have been when we set up traps for the enemy AI, like me shooting out a light bulb near where my friend is hiding and then having him throttle the solder who comes to investigate. I love when a plan comes together. *chews cigar*

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The most rewarding experience I've had with voice chat was during a company tournament of Battlefield 2.

One of our teammates had military experience. The first thing he did was have us label every area on the map ("The beach", "The construction yard", etc). During matches, he had us call out every single enemy movement. "Three enemy dismounts in the village, heading toward the beach." "One enemy armor heading north to the construction yard."

You suddenly had this hive mind, where everyone was able to more or less achieve the equivalent of wallhacking via sharing each other's eyeballs. That's when I realized how voice chat was able to completely change a game.

That's awesome, and what I imagine is what serious gamer klanz are doing. I'm more the kind of person who says "enemies to the right!" referring, of course, to my, personal and unique right.

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Battlefield 1942 was a favorite voice-chat game of mine during big Shacknews battles, since so much of the game was the incidental comedy.

Are there any games that use voice-chat in a really unconventional or pivotal manner? I can imagine a Mario Kart that does something hilarious like cartoonishly doppler-shift voices, but can't think of any game that actually tries anything like that.

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Are there any games that use voice-chat in a really unconventional or pivotal manner? I can imagine a Mario Kart that does something hilarious like cartoonishly doppler-shift voices, but can't think of any game that actually tries anything like that.

In Mario Kart DS you had to blow into the mic to fill up your balloons (your hit points, essentially) and in this DS game called Spectrobes you had to say "waaaaake uuuup" at a unique pitch to hatch your Pokemon. I mean Spectrobes.

Also, voice chat is absolutely integral (in the exact way Brendon describes above) in DOTA. (But not necessarily uniquely integrated).

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In Mario Kart DS you had to blow into the mic to fill up your balloons (your hit points, essentially)

Haha, I forgot about that. There were a few DS games that were awkward to play in public like that, like yelling "Objection!" in Phoenix Wright.

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Somewhat related:

I saw this on Rock Paper Shotgun today and thought that more games should add this stuff. :D Except the terrible pitch stuff!

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One of my favorite uses of voice chat in a game was Chromehounds.

Having to capture communications towers and then hold them to maintain contiguous radar coverage across multiple towers, so as to be able to communicate with your team across that network.

An enemy capturing a tower in the middle of the map could cut your team into two groups with no way to communicate with eachother. (It would affect your commander's radar too, he would no longer be able to see on his map what is happening in the team-controlled radar field he is not connected to.)

Chromehounds was awesome.

Like, really awesome.

(I realize this is not a PC game, i'm just running with the theme.)

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CHROOOOOOOMEHOUNDS!

Best time playing any game ever.

I played as a little light scout mech, so I always had to head out of communications while the killers slowly and carefully advanced. My JOB was to make contact with the enemy soon enough to either lay a trap or allow my team time to maneuver to defeat the other team's strategy. Naturally, this meant that I had to make it BACK to communications range. This lead to many MANY rounds of my frantically bobbing and weaving away from incoming artillery, trying to make it to my team (who I didn't really know where they were) without alerting the enemy to my team's presence. If I did my job well, I would die knowing that my team had vital intel against the enemy. If I did my job REALLY well, I would have delivered my info, then gone BACK to shadow the enemy and hopefully, and this was the best, dogfight the enemy scout in the no-mans-land between the big battle where the heavies were duking it out.

Best multiplayer game ever.

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Chromehounds was badly balanced, and some massive game-breaking bugs were discovered near the end of its life, but that is a game that sorely needed a sequel and the fine-tuning that would have come with it. (Party chat also broke the whole communications conceit, though Microsoft has allowed games released since the introduction of that dashboard feature to disable party chat under certain conditions.)

Seriously though, a game just absolutely filled with brilliant, wonderful ideas.

God damn, what a great time i had playing that.

I usually played a scout too, one of my favorite builds was to pack on fire mortars and smoke mortars.

Set down the vision-obscuring smoke mortars, flip on thermal, and start pounding the enemy with fire mortars. (Leading to a situation where the same equipment, if they even had thermal imaging, would do nothing for them, because their vision was obscured with fire.) They'd be completely helpless as their mech slowly overheated.

It was so inefficient, it was such a trolling build, I got so much hate mail for playing like that.

My main was a four-rocket wheel base that just ran circles around all the howitzer builds that eventually dominated the game.

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Chromehounds is one of the most fun games I ever played - it had a great variety of options, that fun persistent war mode, encouraged teamwork and strategy, and was entirely unique. And unfortunately, due to the temporal nature of multiplayer games, it can never be experienced again by anyone ever.

Fuck Video games.

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Chromehounds is one of the most fun games I ever played - it had a great variety of options, that fun persistent war mode, encouraged teamwork and strategy, and was entirely unique. And unfortunately, due to the temporal nature of multiplayer games, it can never be experienced again by anyone ever.

Fuck Video games.

Who knows? Thirty years from now you might be able to go to a video games museum and play a stylish installation of Chromehounds (From Software, 2006) set aside other great art like Bad Dudes.

Me? I just ducked in here to say that I'd heard Chromehounds had the best gameplay-based voice integration of all time, though I wasn't in a place to buy and play a 360 until the servers were just about shuttered anyway. I'll have to echo Brendon Chung and agree that the squad voice chat for Battlefield 2 was pretty great all-around. It's really a misfortune that the game assumed competent people would be squad leaders, because a lot of the features they had available encouraged great teamwork.

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Chromehounds is one of the most fun games I ever played - it had a great variety of options, that fun persistent war mode, encouraged teamwork and strategy, and was entirely unique. And unfortunately, due to the temporal nature of multiplayer games, it can never be experienced again by anyone ever.

Fuck Video games.

Armored Core V was, in theory, From building on a lot of the teamwork conceits from Chromehounds in the more well worn Armored Core framework.

In practice, it was all for naught, because its metagame was completely and tragically broken for some really dumb reasons.

Just one of the most crushing disappointments i've had in a long time, a game that completely implodes because a poorly designed match-making system.

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To continue on Brendon's point I think what Shac tac is doing with ARMA 2 is absolutely incredible. Mods make it possible for people hear you relative to how close you are to them and the volume of your voice, you will have to shout to make yourself heard long distances. Different radio sequences for if you want to report to command, call your squad, air support etc. By setting high standards for who can join, many in the clan actually have military experience they can create an atmosphere where they can take the game to a way other level in terms of tactics and skill but still have damn fun.

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Yeah guess so... I think you can enhance your volume too so you don't have to shout if you´re in that kind of situation.

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Steel Battalion: Line of Contact featured a Vertical Tank (mech) equipped with a bunch of sensor junk that would allow you to tap into the opposing team's voice communication.

Unfortunately, the online implementation in that game was an enormous disaster, but that feature was cool.

This is the VT in question:

post-8618-0-91654600-1344608325_thumb.jpg

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you will have to shout to make yourself heard long distances.

I don't think that's how radio works.

Relating to the first post, I don't think we've ever been able to make the Steam voice chat work in those games. Last time we first collected everybody into a big group in Skype and then split the teams for the versus match, and then cobbled together a new call for a co-op session. That would have been a lot quicker if the voice chat would have just worked in-game.

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Anytime where you desperately need to communicate and the other person does not speak your language. Hilarity! Or in my day z experience, kinda awesome when I didn't know how to tell fhe guy helping me that I really needed water. Really any co op or team game is good for that stuff

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