Brit Gamers Need to Chat More Online
Chet Faliszek: "Don't be scared of a microphone"
Valve’s Chet Faliszek thinks British gamers need to use in-game chat more, according to a recent interview with CVG.
The Left 4 Dead 2 writer thinks that we don’t communicate enough with other players to work as a team when playing online shooters.
“One thing I wanted to add before I go for you Brits: communicate. Don’t be scared of a microphone,” Faliszek told the games mag.
“You guys are notorious non-talkers on both 360 and PC. Americans are just chattering away, working together as a team. If you want to work together as a team you’ve got to talk! You can go into a random 360 game on US servers and it’s crazy talk. It’s fun. I think a lot of people knock that community but again and again I’m surprised by how fun that is. I’ve played expert campaigns where by the end of it we’re best buddies,” he continued.
Faliszek promised (or should that be threatened?) non-communicative gamers will struggle with L4D2’s Realism mode, which eschews on-screen teamwork prompts in favour of an entirely verbal system, requiring shy gamers to come out of their shells if they want to succeed.
“Realism mode will prod you – you have to talk,” he said. “If you don’t talk you’re not going to make it. Instead of being harder Realism’s actually more challenging as a team because you have to communicate. When a Smoker pulls you off somewhere you’ve got to yell because nobody can see where you are.
“The first time you see people play somebody will go in a house to get some stuff, turn around and be like ‘shit, I can’t see anybody’. It’s a scary feeling. We’ll see if that maybe stimulates the British sternness.”
To an extent, we agree with the Chetster: Americans are certainly the vocal majority in most console lobbies. Then again, with Xbox Live notoriously full of annoyingly immature American teenagers is it really any surprise that quite often we don’t feel like saying anything? We’re pretty sure that if Faliszek ever played a game via a local UK-only server he’d find that we can be pretty forthcoming when we’re not dealing with a barrage of abuse and obnoxiousness. His comments about British gamers’ lack of teamwork are also wide of the mark in our opinion: particularly in the world of PC gaming, British clans have been teaming up on their opponents for years.
