Say Chat (Text Bubble)

[Macka]

Chat bubbles is a hot mess especially in high population areas leave them in Phantasy Star

[Cigaran]

After having played several games that had chat bubbles, honestly the are very distracting and detract from the game world. They also make performance in areas where there is already a high concentration of players even worse.

If they get added, they HAVE to include an option to completely disable them.

[Genesis88]

Yeah I agree, also against that mess.

[Errors]

I have a hard time believing it's just "unnecessary strain" when every freaking MMO - even one almost ten years old - has this feature. This is not some innovative bit of technology here. If you don't want them, you can always toggle them off.

I hope this doesn't come across as snide, but if you don't understand the strain it's because you don't understand programming and resource management nightmare when it comes to dealing with screen rendering, memory, and well a slew of hardware configurations that you have no control over. ie They have to hit the lowest common denominator. Comparing older games to new ones is also a bad comparison especially if you just are trying to compare one feature. You have to look at the whole picture. How different are the games you trying to compare. Are the graphics more intense, can they render the same amount of glyphs on the screen, sounds, textures, animations, events, etc..

The "unnecessary" part is simple because it's not something that is required to play the game. /shrug It's not as simple as I'll just add this new feature to the game, it will be perfect and not effect anything else that's already in the game. I mean don't get me wrong I'd love to see development get to the point where hardware can just provide oodles of resources to play with, sadly we're not there. There is also creative direction to keep in mind, which tends to get pushed aside a lot of times. FFXIV was built with speech bubbles not included in their original design. Will it come in the future? Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But currently the demand for something like this is so low that it doesn't even register on their radars.

For the role playing folks out there, I get it. But in all honesty, speech bubbles isn't how I'd like to RP. I'd rather just have voice integration at that point. And well we all know what type of topic that is.

Out of curiosity, can you provide me a list of MMO's that have speech bubbles? I'd like to do some research and see what they look like, in perfect conditions (low usage) and in the worst conditions (high usage).

Trying to find this speech bubble standard in other MMO's and came across this:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=415849

It's like the same topic we are having here. XD

[Ri_ri]

Bad example. These are merchant shops and chat rooms.

WoW uses chat bubbles and it's great during battles because you don't have to take the eyes off the action to read. It can even be used as positional check.
Imagine passing Rot with a chat bubble. It could be actually fun instead of a raid-wiping chore.

[AliceKaye]

I'm on the side against having visual speech bubbles. I don't care what reason was given about limitations. My concern is the screen clutter. Can you imagine being in Mor Dhona or in towns or FATES? Oh, I can turn it off you say? How about we just not have SE waste time even working on it and put your energy towards actual content for the game?



That's my 2 gil on the topic.

I just want to mention, for the record, that those are not chat bubbles. They're little messages that stay put, advertising someone's little shop in RO.

I can still see your point, but they could also be made to toggle so that if you don't want to see them, you don't have to.

EDIT: Someone beat me to it.

[Errors]

Bad example. These are merchant shops and chat rooms.

WoW uses chat bubbles and it's great during battles because you don't have to take the eyes off the action to read. It can even be used as positional check.
Imagine passing Rot with a chat bubble. It could be actually fun instead of a raid-wiping chore.

I realize that, but we don't have a dedicated merchant shop room/channel/location. Which means that bleeds over to normal open world content. World of Warcraft also has a character limit on chat bubbles to prevent speech bubble from taking up too much screen real-estate, as well as lower graphical textures and models than FFXIV does. Resourcing between the two games are different.

I can still see your point, but they could also be made to toggle so that if you don't want to see them, you don't have to.

Yes, as many have already mentioned. I realize it, but I rather the game's rendering engine not be taxed, the developers spend time on this when they could spend time on other content for the game...like Chocobo raising! (or something silly fun), I believe it breaks the creative look-n-feel for the environment, it's not required to play the game currently, possible spamming potential.

And really, if a feature is being added that is immediately turned off, what sort of feature is that to begin with?

[Austherus]

Chat bubbles are necessary. Without them it's harder to notice someone talking to you on /say, roleplaying get's REALLY boring and a lot of immersion is taken away. No one uses /say because of that, causing the game to look dead.

I know there will be naysayers, so why not add the option to deactivate it if you don't like it?

[Bixby]

Huh, wasn't aware the server only takes into consideration 1 zone at a time and every other zone is unloaded when you're not there.

What's the server got to do with it? Showing chat bubbles is purely a client side function. You're not sending or receiving any new data, it's just being displayed differently.

[Errors]

I'm seeing a running theme here. It appears that RP'ing is the main reason for the request.

Anyone want to take a stab at what the percentage of population of FFXIV are RP'ing?