There’s been no question that for the last few years the console gaming market has been growing in leaps and bounds rapidly eclipsing the PC gaming market with each generation. It has even lead many to believe that the PC is dead as a gaming platform. But there are still certain genres that are still better played on a PC. One of those is the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game or MMORPG. The primary reason for this advantage is the need of a keyboard (and by implication a stable surface for the keyboard) for efficient communication with other players. There’s no getting around the need of some method of easy free form communication. Mike Smith writes in his Virtual Worlds column that this keyboard issue is one of the things holding back the MMORPG on the console.
In the column, he writes that while voice chat is an option for player to player communication over services and games that support it, for more than a few players the ensuing bedlam would be totally unworkable. At least with text the player can see who is talking, when they are talking and what their relationship is to them via color coded text. Voice chat alone cannot do that, but what if we added voice recognition into the mix?
Voice recognition could be used to convert the player’s spoken words into text. Then all of the strengths of text communication would be available without the need of a keyboard. Something like this is described in the new .hack//AI Buster novel. The conversion would not even need to be perfect to get the message across in most cases. The next generation of consoles should have enough horsepower for the recognition task and if not, let the game servers do it. A good implementation of voice to text could be the killer feature in console MMORPGs. Ironically, I bet we’ll see this on the PC before it hits the consoles maybe as a hack or third party addon.