Thing is people manage to voice chat around the dinner table when they go out for a meal. I guess a lack of visual cues and lag mean people start when they think there's room to, and then trip over each other. But there's otherwise nothing intrinsically unmanageable about it, as long as those partaking in the discussion handle themselves. No different to conference call on a phone, or video conferencing. If you've ever used PS3's video chat, that's the same thing as voice-only. Now enable that within games, so you can chat while playing instead of having to run a discrete application, and you get the best of both worlds.
The lack of visual cues is (even without lag) very much something that matters. People give each other piles of clues on when they're about to say something or want to say something. It's just that in the context of playing a game it matters much less, because you're not continuously discussing something, but only respond to certain incidents. There voice chat with a lot of people works perfectly. But if you're having a discussion with eight people, even if you're all together in a room it's pretty hard to manage. In real life, you can also easily focus on just one conversation when many are occuring together at once, because of volume differences, but with four people talking at once over voice chat, that's just a mess.
Text chat itself does have the problem of multiple threads of discussion getting intertwined, and you have to parse the text stream to make sense of it. Nothing's really perfect.
I wasn't saying that. I'm just pointing towards advantages in text chat that are easily overlooked.
We just need the options to serve different people with different needs. I'd really like to know more about the underlying tech here, if it's a very forward thinking protocol that'll connect up to any form of chat? Tiny video windows could be pretty cool, showing people who are just shot or made a kill. Anyone remember Wing Commander when your victim would phone you up to scream their death-throws down the videophone line?
This is in Burnout Paradise, basically, although there it's currently static shots through the webcam, not live video. And yes, it's quite fun. I also like in Killzone where you can hear your opponents when they're in close enough range, which typically includes after they killed you. Especially nice when playing with friends - with the games I had with Phil and Chris for instance we'd compliment each other on nice kills.
I think Home is good. It just needs wide support for game launching. Hopefully within the year most games will have it and they'll make it a requirement by 2010, a lot like trophy support was introduced last year with games releasing from 01-2009 requiring Trophy support. I certainly think that Home beats a lot of online lobbies in terms of quality of chat and text support, and having it as a unified interface to games can, I think, really work very well. Namco Museum also used booting from Home cleverly to bypass a lot of in-game menus and take you straight to the game you wanted to play, by logging on to the arcade cabinet for that game in Home. Ditto for Warhawk. Logging into a game from Home and back is a lot faster than people realize.
Anyway, the chat features are a great addition when taken in the context of the PSN, and the chat rooms are very well implemented and thought out. And I think everything points towards this feature being expanded to voice eventually - all the icons are already in place, just greyed out during in-game chat. As it is, I am very happy with the text-chat support and the chatrooms.
