I got to play with the voice chat in the PTR yesterday.

This feature will change WoW. Why?

First off, it is easy to enable - One check box. As soon as you enable it, a little speaker icon shows up under your placard when you are in a party. This means the party leader or raid leader can determine who has voice chat enabled and who doesn’t. Not on? Turn it on or leave.

You see, you don’t have to talk to make this useful. Listening is just as important. The group leader can mute other players, so only certain players can talk. This will improve voice discipline while on raids.

Next up, when someone does speak, there is a little window that pops up with their name, that you can place anywhere you like. So not only do you see the name of who is talking, but you can click it to target. “Heal me!” the off tank says. Click heal. Target focus back to main tank. That easy.

“Peel!” a mage yells. The paladin clicks, casts his spell to drain all threat, and goes back to the boss. Very nice.

Next up, they made voice activation actually work. I found that around 70% would eliminate breath pops but pick my sentences up fine. You can also push to talk, but why would you if the activation stuff works?

You also get a speaker next to your own placard when speaking, so you know the system is responding to your voice. A nice touch.

The speaker icon on the mini-map is a shortcut to the chat channels. You can form new channels with passwords and it appears that you can even voice chat in those channels, but I am not sure how that works.

All in all, everyone is going to know that my female toon is played by a male. Oh well

I cannot wait for 2.2. Thank you very, very much Blizzard. You rock!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under World of Warcraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.