Speech Bubbles

[Jeston]

The fact that NPCs have chat bubbles and players cant is really irritating, don't like chat bubbles? simply turn them off, Also give them a fade-out radius slider so you can control how close you have to be to someone to see their chat bubble.

[Holydruid]

I literally came here just to say this basically, I really really really miss chat bubbles. Like trying to interact with players in game is impossible, cause it's just a message in the chat. You don't know if it's aimed to you or someone else cause, hey why would someone just randomly talk to you.
But if you see a bubble pop up next to you whilst someone is looking at your character it way more obvious. Usually all my interactions with other players go unnoticed and it's so boring, I really don't understand why this isn't a thing.

You do need an option to adjust where and what chat produces the bubbles such as party chat and say. And the option to disable them if you don't want them.

Seriously add chat bubbles its actively making my game experience worse cause it's not there, and apparently I'm not alone.

[Arohk]

I see, my post got deleted, understandable. I hope that doesn't invalidate what i said.

[Roda]

Once again I take a break to play another mmo in the content drought.
Once again I come back to the utter VOID of social interaction because the game treats social interactions more like a twitch chat than an mmo.
And once again I am having to resist the temptation to download a specific third party mod that allows me to have the perfectly functioning chat bubbles that this game could totally support. :T

Please SE, let us turn on /party and /say chat bubbles.

can we please get an option to give players the same speech bubbles that npcs have?

I've got this real problem with how xiv's emotes and chat functions work.

On one hand we've got the most extensive and detailed animation and emote list that I've seen in any mmo. Unique motions for each race and gender (and clan if you're hyur!), all context sensitive depending on where and how you place your character.

And on the other hand, I can't see any of it, because if I'm interacting with another player, I'm focused on the lower left hand corner of my screen, nowhere near where any of these beautiful animations are happening. I don't even bother to use them in any social context anymore, really they're only for gpose for me right now. :T


Take this scene as an example


Take note where my chat box is, and where my characters. I've got the chat box where it is so that I can see the game world while running around and engaging in combat, this means it need to be fairly far away from my character. And to be honest this placement is the standard for mmos.

Now, if I were engaging in a real conversation and I wanted to talk with someone while still observing the animations my eyes would have to dart from the chat box, to the center of the screen, then immediately back to the chatbox, and since our brains aren't wired for multitasking it'll go a little something like this:



Not getting enough information from either chat, or emotes, depending on how rapid the chat scrolls and how naturally the emotes are triggered. This method is inefficient at best, and fatiguing at worst. Plus it causes you to miss chat or react sluggishly, so to avoid being rude, I, and I assume many people, experience their social interactions like this:



Ignoring the entirety of the game screen save for the chatbox. Ignoring all those animations, all the work on character creation, and glamour that both you and the people you're talking to have done, and just using the game as a massively resource intensive IRC

pmuch the same as using chat rn:

So, to fix these (admittedly personal) issues I suggest allowing players to toggle on player speech bubbles for each individual chats, like they can toggle on visibility of different channels in their chat box. The bubbles could even be tinted for the different chat channel colors you've selected. (like not exactly, but if you have a bright green FC chat, maybe the fc chat bubble could be a light, desaturated, lime green. If party chat is a bright sky blue, the bubble could be a light powder blue, etc.

Just something to bring my eye back to the center of my screen and interacting with people with all the tools available.





(side note, party speech bubbles would help immensely when trying to guide someone in the middle of a pull. People rarely are looking in the corner of their screen when they're fighting something, so having your message displayed right where the fighting is happening would be a boon to party communication!)




Here's how other games handle their speech bubble sizing:

Keep in mind these are the maximum lengths I could force. Regular use of these things rarely see the entire length used.
GW2

The best imo, roomy but not too much, and the textbox fits in nicely with the whole aesthetic of the game's UI

Wildstar

Not great, but better than nothing. It allows you to fit a LOT into it, and people rarely use that much (and the length might be due to an addon idk). The transparency is nice, but not for everyone.

Blade and Soul

Simple and fits in with the UI. I enjoy that it shows the player's name on it. Though the image doesn't show it, these bubbles have a problem with not being scaled with distance. Meaning if someone far away has a bubble visible, it is hard to distinguish from the foreground/more relevant bubbles, and its actual graphic could eclipse the speaker's entire character and those behind them.

Tera

Kinda weird behaviors when the character is close up. It has a good length, but it may be too wide and have too few lines. I much prefer gw2's use of text wrapping.

SWL

Not a fan, but once again, better than nothing. Imo it's too small and cuts off waaaaaaaay too much of the sentence. Due to the cut-off it's hardly useful for anything meaningful.

[Shurrikhan]

Once again I come back to the utter VOID of social interaction because the game treats social interactions more like a twitch chat than an mmo.
And once again I am having to resist the temptation to download a specific third party mod that allows me to have the perfectly functioning chat bubbles that this game could totally support.

XIV is a believer in WoW-style "meaningful choice". You can have (A) all the functionality one would reasonably think possible or (B) the ability to stream and take screenshots of your game without the threat of being banned.

[Xathyr]

First thing i turn OFF, right after the profanity filter, is chat bubbles.

They're distracting. And my wow guild has a policy of not showing them if you're streaming or recording for YouTube, along with no chat being shown and no discord audio.

Party chat would be horrible. Especially with some of the ASCII art macros I've seen used.

Yeah but i don't think that having the option to enable/disable them would be an issue for anyone, i mean from a roleplay or immersion perspective being able to see them is kinda nice but if it bothers you simply turn them off.

No one loses, everyone wins.

[Roda]

Hell, for those macros you could probably have a command that doesn't display a bubble like we have /(emote) motion

[Alfeira]

Hii, just wanted to say that I'd love to see chat bubbles as well. It's always so hard to try to work out who is talking. These would make it so much easier and enjoyable to make friends and stuff <3

[CheshaSolttiri]

I would like to add my preference for speech bubbles. I play on a TV with my ps4 and the chat box is too small and fast. Also I like the idea of proximity. Obviously they can turn off chat bubbles during combat just like they can with fast travel, or mounting ext.

[Bissonnettzi]

Yep chat bubbles would be neat it'd be more enjoyable to look at a bubble popping over a character's head rather than staring at some chat box in the corner. Though it would need an option to turn it off.