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XBox caves, adds keyboard

April 9th, 2007 (Visited 3757 times) Tags:

CNet has word that Live handles and MSN buddies will merge soon, but the part that struck me as interesting was this:

Microsoft will launch a new text input device this summer that will attach to the Xbox 360′s controller and will let users type messages using a QWERTY keyboard. Currently, sending such messages from the Xbox requires using an on-screen keyboard or plugging in a USB keyboard.

Why? Because despite debates going on over on the MUD-Dev2 mailing list, text chat is still the universal solution. Yeah, it’s not best-suited for a console, but it’s the best-suited for a range of devices, even over voice. There are some advantages text has — such as asynchronicity — that just aren’t going to go away.

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Sierra Kilo » Blog Archive » Shaking Up wrote on April 10th, 2007 at 8:09 am:

[...] rumblings in the MMO-space prompted me to jot down a few notes. First off, we’ve got Raph referencing the recent discussions on the MUD-Dev2 mailing list. I haven’t been following it very [...]

Reader Comments

Bajeezus said on April 9th, 2007 at 11:52 am:
With console makers seeing the functionality of text chat, what about the opposite? What do you think about the future of voice chat supported by the client in MMOGs and virtual worlds, where text has always reigned?
Obviously, tons of gamers use voice, console players all are very used to using voice, but in terms of having MMORPG players using voice, it’s really one of those elements that can separate the more hardcore gamers from the casuals.
Guilds that can run their own voice servers have a great advantage over guilds that don’t. Players who are experienced with using voice in games have access to guild activities and groups that players who use only chat do not. I can see a big benefit to a game that levels that playing field and makes voice easy to use and accessible to all players, even though there may be still some who decide its not for them at all times.
For the virtual world games, where the focus may be on more casual gamers or more social play, having the voice chat be a part of the game would probably be even more advantageous, since those are players who might not venture into the realm private voice servers but who at the same time would benefit the most from socializing by voice.
Tess said on April 9th, 2007 at 12:12 pm:
Ha. I’ve been saying they were going to have to do this since before they launched the first X-Box, when they swore up and down that it would never have a keyboard, because it wasn’t a PC. I’m surprised it took them this long to see the light.
Derek Licciardi said on April 9th, 2007 at 12:22 pm:
While I have no idea how easy it is to use, I like the idea that its on the controller. If a keyboard became a mandatory option on a console you could kiss the controller goodbye for a large portion of games. FPS, Strategy, Turn-based RPG, MMO and tycoon games all would shun the controller in favor of the far superior keyboard input method.
Still it’s cool that I’ll be able to yell at a friend to get the hell on the Xbox when they are playing WoW. Go figure. Could the OLD rumors of WoW on the Xbox be far behind?
Random Poster said on April 9th, 2007 at 12:43 pm:
From the photos that have been placed on various sites it should be easy to use for those of us who do alot of texting over cellphones/blackberries, basically…use your thumbs to type.
As for WoW appearing I still don’t know that it would be entirely feasible. The keyboard is rather cramped so using WASD (or any keys) for movement and the like would be aggravating, and due to the way it attaches using he thumb sticks plus keyboard buttons would also be awkward.
DarthPixel.com said on April 9th, 2007 at 1:52 pm:
I’m not convinced. Instant voice communication did eliminate 99% of letters and snail mail out there…
I guess they are doing this to please SE, who does not plan to voice-enable Final Fantasy.
Talaen said on April 9th, 2007 at 2:17 pm:
Bajeezus said:
With console makers seeing the functionality of text chat, what about the opposite? What do you think about the future of voice chat supported by the client in MMOGs and virtual worlds, where text has always reigned?
I’ve always said that voice chat is a big dividing factor in MMOs, because for every player out there who can log in to a ventrilo or teamspeak or whatever server, there’s 3 others that for various reasons can’t or won’t. Sometimes it’s for reasons like the environment they’re in (ever have a guildmate on your guild’s voice server with screaming children in the background?), sometimes for roleplay reasons, and sometimes for purely technical reasons, like their sound card doesn’t do a good job with a microphone.
Personally, as a player, I don’t like voice chat because it detracts from immersion most of the time. It’s a lot easier for me to visualize my buddy Rob as a lady wood elf druid when the chat is happening in text, even if in the back of my mind I know that he’s really a guy in the real world. And while immersion may not be all that important to many players, it’s important to enough that voice chat can actually be a turn off for them.
Now, that aside, there are gameplay situations where voice chat is extremely helpful. The example I always use is flying in space in SWG, because your hands are generally too busy with the controls to type. But it also tends to get overused and become a crutch. An example of this is raiding in EverQuest, EQ2, and WoW. All of these games have control schemes that are laid out so that you can control your character and still chat if you can type on a reasonable rate (say 40-60 wpm or so). However, I’ve lost count of the number of raids that require voice chat – partly because people can’t type, I guess, and partly because people don’t always pay as much attention to their chat box as maybe they should. Perhaps it’s a bit elitest of me to say that – I type around 100-110 wpm by touch, my first MMOs were text MUDs, and I used to lead 36-person raids in EQ with nothing other than groupchat and the shout channel (yes, there was a time when EQ didn’t have any raiding tools at all). But still, I think people use the gameplay excuse for voice chat way too easily and too often.
All that said, bundling voice channels into the game is an idea that might have some merit. There’s a lot of benefit to standardizing communication channels, and it would allow the voice channels to be managed via in-game tools instead of having to go through some outside utility. I guess the biggest thing to keep it from happening would be the additional cost to the service provider. Voice eats up (a lot) more bandwidth than text and requires additional infrastructure to support. As well, there’s additional development that would have to happen on game clients to make it happen. It seems to me that the MMO industry either hasn’t really done a cost-benefit analysis on the option of integrated voice chat yet, or they have and they’ve found the costs to be prohibitive for the time being.
Bajeezus said on April 9th, 2007 at 3:32 pm:
…bundling voice channels into the game is an idea that might have some merit. There’s a lot of benefit to standardizing communication channels, and it would allow the voice channels to be managed via in-game tools instead of having to go through some outside utility. I guess the biggest thing to keep it from happening would be the additional cost to the service provider. Voice eats up (a lot) more bandwidth than text and requires additional infrastructure to support. As well, there’s additional development that would have to happen on game clients to make it happen. It seems to me that the MMO industry either hasn’t really done a cost-benefit analysis on the option of integrated voice chat yet, or they have and they’ve found the costs to be prohibitive for the time being.
I’ve just had it pointed out to me on another forum where we were having a similar discussion that EVE has a voice feature, being offered for an extra fee of $15 per year: http://support.eve-online.com/Pages/KB/Article.aspx?id=315
I can’t find anything that tells much about what features EVE voice is offering. It sounds as if the voice is separate from the game, separate client, separate software, giving players access to voice servers for a fee while not offering much of anything that you can’t do with existing voice software.
A voice chat system fully integrated into the game software, where it recognized guilds, groups, individual tells, and other kinds of channels would really push the concept to the next level.
Morgan Ramsay said on April 9th, 2007 at 4:33 pm:
Finally. Now just add a mouse, and I’ll start playing exclusive console games.
robusticus said on April 9th, 2007 at 4:49 pm:
Resistance is futile.
Mike Rozak said on April 9th, 2007 at 5:26 pm:
It’s “ovens vs. microwaves”… Ovens are good for cooking some things, and microwaves for others. Don’t expect either to go away. Do expect voice chat to become both better integrated and more popular.
As far as MMORPGs with voice chat – It’s not just Eve. D&D online has it integrated. My pre-alpha system has it integrated (and with voice disguise for semi-convincing male female conversions). I’m sure there are others.
Bandwidth costs – In the grand scheme of things, while the bandwidth for voice chat is more, it’s still pretty cheap given that bandwidth is now around $0.15 per gig (or less). One hour of solid, non-stop voice chat is around 14 megabytes (at 4 kBytes/sec, 32 kbit/sec)
Derek Licciardi said on April 10th, 2007 at 5:40 am:
I don’t know where you’re getting those numbers from but we’ve ventured into offering Ventrilo and Teamspeak services for guilds that host on mmo-guildsite.com and our numbers are significantly more expensive. One WoW raiding Vent server will eat as much as 250Kbps during peak usage (5pm EST – 2AM EST). That’s the thing about voice. Five 5-man channels has a completely different bandwith usage patern versus 1 25-man channel. Back when WoW was a 40 man centric game, we’d see raid nights peak usage to 300 or 350Kbps. That’s 20% of a T1 line. Most ISPs in our area are still at $90 per Mbps. It’s pretty simple to calculate a price point from your ISP cost. Sure there is bulk purchases but even the $90/Mbps figure I’m getting comes only after giving a 10Mbps committment and $80 is my floor until I’m using so much that it makes sense for AT&T to run cable to my city. In other words bandwith is not trivial at any level.
Something like this on the scale of WoW is a tun more bandwith and a significant cost. I am not sure how DDO puts it in the game for the basic fee though the codec in DDO seems less than what one might get with Vent/Teamspeak so that might explain things. Eve offering voice at a $15 per year discount seems feasible. That’s basically $1 per month per person connected to the server. So $25 per month for a 25-man WoW equivalent server can work and at their bandwith costs it’s probably decently profitable.
Just as voice came to the PC, I think its a pretty good sign that text is coming to the console. For me the jury is still out on the keyboard implementation but then again cell phones with tiny keyboards seem to work well enough for text messaging so this probably has a chance to do well. I’ll at least try it. Hopefully, the dashboard and the profile screens in most games will accept the input so I at least get the benefit from the keyboard there.
Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on April 10th, 2007 at 6:30 am:
It’s not only the async thing, I think. Although that aspect has many different positive sides. Outside of games people use instant messaging and SMS with their friends. I guess the threshold for text oneliners is lower, it seems less intrusive perhaps. Audio is very intrusive. Perhaps also because a single line of text is nothing compared to what we are used to in the text medium (pages or books). Sure, the hardcore might care less about intrusiveness, for them life itself is intruding on their gameplay…
Not that I mind voice, I think it will become prevalent over time in casual games too, at least among groups of friends in a P2P-like fashion (or a local sub-net server like VoIP services today). Those worlds might not be like the ones we know today though… (less hardcore, more hang-out, more satisfying consume-once-or-twice content. “Let’s rent a movie”-worlds). P2P might be scary with strangers, but less so with RL friends.
Aaron said on April 10th, 2007 at 10:12 am:
In Oblivion, the player can name potions, spells, and enchanted items. As that sort of user-generated content becomes more common, the keypad will really come in handy.
The headset has its uses in multiplayer now, but I’m hoping someone will eventually use it to design local voice commands. Beyond broadening the control palette, it could help get the player’s blood pumping. Shouting “fire!” to launch a missile during the thick of battle would be a lot of fun.
Jason said on April 10th, 2007 at 10:37 am:
The biggest advantage of text over voice for the time being is still multiple channels. I defy anyone to actively monitor the chatter of a dozen different voice channels while participating in your own local, group and guild chat the way you can by just joining all the text channels and slapping them in a window that scrolls by…
This move by Microsoft is clear, with this and the Games For Windows initiative and the launch later this year of Live for the PC, they are working toward more integration of the console and Windows PC market.
Tess said on April 10th, 2007 at 2:58 pm:
Aaron, if you ever want to do that with a PC game, I highly recommend a little program called “Shoot”:
http://clans.gameclubcentral.com/shoot/
It’s designed pretty much specifically for what you’re talking about. You can also tell it what your push-to-chat button is, so it’ll shut off when you’re talking over your voice chat program. I’ve used it in turn-based-strategy games before, but it works just fine with realtime games, too.
Sadly, this does you no good on a console. You don’t have the luxury of running any old thing you want. If you did, well, it would just be a pretty lame, but cheap gamer PC, wouldn’t it?

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