In-game voice commands in End of Nations

[LFC18]

I just watched the trailer of End of Nations on internet. I found this game interesting and being of MMORTS type, I think I will start playing it right away. I showed the trailer to my friend who already joined the game yesterday. He says that there are voice commands in this game. I don’t if what he is saying is true or not, but it would be great fun to have voice commands or voice communication in this game. It would be a unique idea and also fun to play with. I haven’t yet started playing End of Nations and I will be starting it after some three days. So can anyone who has played this game tell me if there is involvement of voice command in End of Nations?

[Rashid]

End of Nations has in game chat box that you can use to communicate with other players in the game. But there is no voice command in this game. Anyways, how do you plan to play a strategy game like End of Nations using voice command? If you want have some units attacking and some units standing in a position, how are you going to mark these units. I mean, you will go on calling each unit till you gather desired number of them. This sounds tedious and slow process. It would be easier to directly select the units and order them to attack. I watched some videos of games that can be played using voice commands. Let me tell you they were complicated and very slow. It bored me enough to make me sleep. Also the speed at which End of Nations is played, I don’t think any person will have capacity to think and go on speaking at a same time. As in while playing manually using mouse, one can easily select desired player quickly, send him anywhere on the map, bring him back, make him stand very fast.

[Esmond Ivers]

Developers can at least have voice commands for this game. I think, if not voice command, at least they can provide option for the players to communicate with each other using audio device. This would be fun as it won’t need anyone to keep typing and also play the game at the same time. We don’t need voice commands for the game for each and every thing like calling certain unit at certain part or selecting a batch of units. Only basic voice commands like attack, hold position, standby or maybe defend would suffice, unit selection and their movements can be done manually using mouse and keyboard. Having full voice command will enable the physically handicapped people to play this game and enjoy it too. Also Voice commands are in built in Windows 7 by default, the developers of End of Nations can just integrate them with the game itself.

[Non-$ensoi]

Your idea of having voice commands in a MMORTS game is a good idea, but let me tell you that its implementation is very hard. It will be fun for the gamers to use them and enjoy the coolness, but what efforts will be needed for the developer is beyond explanation. Having voice commands from Windows 7 into use of game means it will bring a need for developer to access user’s computer. This won’t be accepted by many people as it they might think it as evasion of their privacy and data’s security. Also to modify the voice commands, developers will need to send in cookies regularly, if any user has cookies disabled, then it won’t work. Maybe some anti-virus might block it thinking as malicious content. Also End of Nations uses a completely different user interface. So connecting it with user’s Windows 7 will be difficult.

[Lennon Norris]

Sending voice commands will need to have audio files to be sent from user’s computer to the game’s server. Also in voice communication, the systems will need to send voice files to another user. This whole thing will need to use a lot amount of bandwidth. So for players using internet connection less bandwidth or limited data usage plans will be at disadvantage. Also sending all this data over the server might make the game to lag as the server might fail to evaluate audio and visual data of the game all together. Also if the user is playing from a server that is at a distant place from the game’s server, then the commands will need to travel many other servers and hops to reach to the main server. So it might happen that voice commands might delay the actions instead of making them take place at real time.

[Kunal_R.One]

Also having voice commands means having them in English won’t suffice. Developers will need to have voice commands for End of Nations in many languages like Spanish, Italic, Polish and many more. So this will become more problematic as the developers will need to record all the commands in many languages. Implementing them will again create problems. This whole process will take a lot of time and resources from the developer’s side. I mean, they will have to hire recording artists to have the commands recorded. Again if they will have to hire recording artists of different languages. They will have to pay their engineers to implement this development in game which will need more resources from developer’s side. But the work doesn’t end here, they will have to test if the commands are working right or not, they will have to try with different voices like of male, female, child, old person, men and women with light voice and many other types of voices. Again a major problem might happen is that of multiple voice compatibility. For example, if two players with voice commands are playing in a single game, then it must be also seen that two different languages can be processed by the server at a same tie or not. So this whole process is much more difficult than you can think. That’s why you shouldn’t expect such a large development from developers of End of Nations.

[Elias Blackman]

I don’t think that idea of having voice commands and voice communication in End of Nations is practical. I mean every language is spoken in different accent in various regions. So if a person gives the command in his own accent, then it might happen that game might not accept it or misinterpret it. So this again will lead to wastage of developer’s efforts and resources. Now developers can’t go on designing commands for each and every accent for every language. Also speaking about voice communication will be harmful for developers. In text chat, developers can have some words blacklisted that won’t be shown because they might be rude or offensive to some people. But having censorship in audio will be next to impossible. A single swear word can be spoken in many accents and in many different ways. Monitoring the audio communication and censoring it will be another mammoth task. Now just imagine a child playing End of Nations and hearing all these words. To implement it, developers will need to hire another team to hear in game conversations.