Suze'Rain
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Posted - 2006.05.18 14:16:00 -
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Edited by: Suze''Rain on 18/05/2006 14:17:50
Could'nt resist doing a design ramble.
VOIP could have been spectacular: As a designer, I'm amazed at how unoriginal and conservative CCP have been with this.
Imagine, if you would, ingame skills that could allow greater integration with the VOIP system - tiers of control and access through Command sections, down through each Wing to defined Squadrons, and on if needs be to the individual pilot. Imagine your gang leader giving voice orders on the strike on the war target, while he in turn is feeding your status back up to the commander whose ingame skills are giving your force a tangiable benefit from the controller whose leadership skills are being transmitted to an entire wing by the VOIP, instead of just by being there in person in a command ship, etc.
Imagine, perhaps, that an overhaul of Eve's currently awful audio was implemented, that sound started to become an integral part of the game, something that can be used to know where targets were, and what's happening, without even needing to be looking..
Can you hear, in your head, eve, with full 5.1 positional audio, The ringing of a enemy ship locking you coming from your left hand side, and being able to instincively swing the camera to the side to see where the enemy is coming from based on the targeting alert... and then the changing tone and pitch of strikes making muffled electrical cra*kling across shields, and the change to the heavy bass impacts of armour, before the higher pitched, urgent rending tearing metal of your hull disintegrating.
imagine the subtle humming of power coursing through a frigate, the tone dropping half an octave as the ship is directed to move, the sound dropping lower still as afterburners are kicked in, a doppler effect in the tone rising and falling, in front and then behind you in 5.1, as you approach and pass another ship. Imagine the same sound, magnified and dropped by octaves for the rumbling bass of a battleship or dreadnought, the sheer mass of the machine implied by the sound that comes from the ship.
imagine the subtle underlying sounds of mechanical action as a rack of autocannons spin up, or the electronic hum of lasers. Now combine that with the proposed "heat" system, and the tone and pich can be shifted as a system comes closer to the point of critical overload - can you forsee (forehear?) the advantage of listening to the sound of the guns turned up to 11, hearing the rising tone and instead of seeing the situations just on a display, being able to recognise the point when the gun Heat will go supercritical, by sound alone?
Now, imagine that the environment around you is dynamic too. inside a gas cloud, and you can hear the same sounds, quieter, from another ship, yor ship's sensors able to collate the information from an enemy, and be able to recognise what damage he's doing, taking, and the likes by sound alone - being able to tell he's at 110% on afterburner trying to keep up with you by the pitch, being able to work out his guns are overloading, knowing you're tanking him when he's trowing everything he's got, and more.
Imagine all that being fed back through the integrated voice and audio.
Instead, CCP have taken the "quick and easy" solution, tacking it on in such a way that this potentially spectacular asset has, frankly, been wasted.
the division into "do you use VOIP or not" will split forces, not bring them closer, the additional fee threatens to undermine CCP's superb selling point of all additions costing nothing beyond subscription.
What a waste.
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