threevue

The Xbox 360 voice chat system is a complete mess, and if they really want to move forward with their vision of being a community-friendly console, they really need to do something about it.

When the NXE was released and first introduced “Party Chat,” it seemed like things had really gone in the right direction. Having the ability to talk with multiple friends regardless of whether you were playing the same game or not was a really great idea, and generated some good times. It made the clunky “Private Chat” system for the most part obsolete, which was a blessing in my book, and added a fun new dimension to console gaming. But now, with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and surely many copycats to come, you can’t be in a party chat while playing in most online matches in order to keep people from cheating. This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t all have to deal with reduced functionality just because there are a few people hopping on the opposite teams of their friends and providing intel. I don’t even think that happens very much anyway. Plus, private chat is still enabled, so two friends actually can talk while on opposite teams, not to mention how easy it is to hop on Skype with your friends and circumvent the entire process.

Speaking of Skype, I am led to my next issue with the 360 chat system: the extremely low sound quality. Half the time I can barely hear the people I am talking to, voices cut in and out, and overall it just sounds cheap and gimmicky. Most of the time, I would rather have my laptop next to me as I play, and chat over Skype, which is infinitely more stable and has crystal-clear quality. I imagine a dream-team where Microsoft and Skype hook up and offer an amazingly high-quality 360 chat service. It would be like Kobe and LeBron on the same team (or for our international friends, it would be like Renaldo and, um, some other really good footy guy on the same team). That’ll take some of the sting out of that $50 a year I pay.

Finally, one last little note. Does it bug you as much as it does me when you want to send a text message to a friend and the default option is to send a voice message? How often do people do that? I would say that I send roughly one voice message for every thousand text messages, and that one little “down” button press is a huge pain in the ass. CHANGE IT NOW!

End transmission.