Voice Chat

Ok so another day of reflections on PC gaming.  As an aside, the odd thing here is I spent ages 10 to about 20 being mainly a PC gamer, and took a break over the past few years playing the xbox- now I have to consider if I want to play a game on a gamepad or on a mouse and keyboard.  And I do consider that a significant choice- so far none of the games on the PC I've played that support my gamepad work quite right.  But I like the mouse and keyboard (forgot how much I like it) so good.

Ok so I've made it through the first alien part in Crysis.  The zero-g part.  Spoilers.  I feel like I cheated myself- I turned difficulty down to easy and left it there.  Alternatively- now I get to experience the story, and contrary to what everyone has said- I like the way crytek spins a story.  So good on them.  Anyways that's been fun.

Now last night I played alot of TF2 and experienced something relatively new.  Non team voice chat.  Turns out I was playing on a server with allspeak turned on.  I do not know if this means there is no team voice chat or if you can do either.  I still haven't really adopted to voice chat being normal on the PC yet- with a keyboard right there chatting seems more normal.  Anyways- after playing some of the capture point game, I went to a server that was CTF on 2Fort.  Which is a map I kinda dig because from the little bit of TF2 on the xbox I've played, this is a map I'm pretty familiar with.  So this map had one of the teams largely using voice chat to communicate important details to each other, and it took me most of a round to work out it was all the other team. 

So here's what I noticed- I was playing as a heavy attacking the flag.  Yes that seems ludicrous.  Yes it worked.  It seems that with a couple standard attack classes a heavy adds might and makes getting to the flag room relatively easy.  So does allspeak.  Turns out that when teams use voice chat to call out enemy positions (and when you're playing a heavy on attack) it's fairly easy to also work out where the enemy players are and shoot them.  Huzzah!  So until I realized that the chat I was hearing was the other team (by design it appears) I was about to plug in my headset.  For now I think I'll stick to team text chat when required.  And the Medic button.