![]() ![]() ![]() In casual play, voice chat is a misfeature. Communicating with someone quickly and effectively relies largely on shared context and deliberate choices about vocabulary, which are accessible to play groups and teams but not really to lone players. Competitive teams will develop a language to be able to call out game situations to one another, including a heavy dose of map knowledge Overwatch’s maps tend towards sprawl, and often there’s no obvious way of referring to a part of the map by name. Given Overwatch’s fast pace, it’s almost impossible to communicate effectively with people you don’t know, and the visual cues that accompany the game’s quick communication barks are often much more informative than anything you could say. Given that the default tone seems to be hostility already, it’s hard to fault other players for taking your well-meaning suggestions as hostile demands, too.īut even if you get across all of this and still push that button and talk, the chances that people will listen to you are slim. ![]() This is a dramatic improvement, partly because it does stop me from really hearing your “constructive” criticism about my play choices.Įven barring that, using voice chat can often feel like you’re inviting criticism, argument, or hostility. ![]() I admit that often these days I’m turning off the game’s own soundtrack and listening to, say, Janelle Monáe instead. People play the game without sound on or with their volume turned down. Players in Europe probably have it even worse.Īnd, of course, there is no guarantee that anyone is listening. Depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, Overwatch can put me in servers that are seemingly located anywhere between Argentina and the east coast of the US meaning that, if I wanted to use voice chat, I usually don’t know which of three languages I should be trying. And if you have a feminine-sounding voice, using voice chat will often let you know exactly who on your team is going to react to that in an unpleasant way.įor players in some regions, there’s the language issue: In Overwatch specifically, you don’t manually pick servers, so players in some regions will often be placed on servers that are geographically ambiguous. Some people don’t think doing this is a big deal at all others are uncomfortable at the prospect. First, you have to get over the creepily intimate thing that is sending your actual voice over the internet to the randos on your team. But in Overwatch, players aren’t really encouraged by the circumstances of the game to use voice chat. Text chat was always useless in action games because stopping to type something isn’t really feasible. Most players don’t seem to use the communication features at all. Your chances of having your experience worsened by it seem enormous compared to your chances of it being useful. Voice and text chat, in casual play, is worse than useless. When that silence is broken, it’s mostly so that someone can complain or just scream one of their favorite slurs into the voice channel. (I noted at the time that they were grouped with someone else on the team and were really only communicating with that person.) Most matches proceed in silence. Exactly once, when I wasn’t grouped with anyone, did I find myself in a team that had someone making useful callouts over voice chat. Overwatch tells me I’ve played 413 games in its Quick Play mode, at the time of writing. ![]()
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