Fortnite on Switch will support voice chat through the headphone jack and not through some stupid phone app, just like a normal-arse game. It isn’t currently available in the Switch version of Epic’s popular battle royale game that launched today, but will be on Thursday.
Screenshot: Fortnite (Epic Games)
Competitive games such as Fortnite benefit greatly from players being able to talk to each other. Nintendo has previously tried to implement voice chat on Switch, though in classic Nintendo fashion it was via a weird, unwieldy system that required you to use an adaptor to hook yourself up into both your Switch and your phone to use an app to chat with other players.
Fortnite, though, is not going to have that problem. You can just plug your headphones into the jack like God intended, according to developers from Epic Games on today’s Nintendo Treehouse Live stream from the E3 show floor.
Fortnite on Switch supports party chat through the headphone jack. Not through the Nintendo mobile app. Currently turned off but will turn on Thursday pic.twitter.com/TdfVkDZ8qj
— Wario64 (@Wario64) June 12, 2018
While this is great news, it just makes me wonder why this wasn’t the default for Splatoon, the Switch’s other game that uses voice chat. It’s clearly technically possible.
Hopefully if they figured it out for Fortnite, that means I will soon no longer be in danger of strangling myself in several wires if I want to play Splatoon with my friends.
Comments
10 responses to “Fortnite On Switch Has Built-In Voice Chat, No App Required”
So this is pretty much the status-quo of the PlayStation 3. The operating system doesn’t reserve enough resources to provide consistent universal voice chat, but individual games can implement it with their time slice of the machine.
The fact that Epic has implemented this for their game doesn’t really have any bearing on the feasibility of implementing universal voice chat on the platform.
What? Didn’t you have party chat back in ps3 days? Swear you could do it out of game just fine.
party chat in game, not as a chat thing outside of the game or across games.
No. That was one of the features of the Xbox 360 that Sony never managed to patch into the console: it was up to the game developer to implement voice chat, and you definitely couldn’t chat with people playing a different game.
The PS3 was memory constrained compared to the X360, with only 256 MB of system RAM (the GPU also had 256 MB, but the two RAM types weren’t interchangeable). Most of Sony’s OS development seemed to be aimed at releasing more resources to games, and implementing voice chat would likely have required the opposite.
Why would I want to chat with someone who isn’t playing the same game as me?
Isn’t that just a….phone call?
You could use the chat to help organise a shared gaming session.
Imagine that you want to play a co-op game with a few of your friends. They’re online but playing different games. You invite them to a group chat to see if they want to play or not. That group chat can stay active as each person starts the game in question and you start playing.
Oh, Nintendo…
Niiiiiiinnnnnnnteeeeeeennnddooooooooo! Jou got some splainin to do!
*canned laughter*
Well at least they don’t have to use the app. It is something.
Wow…..that is actually really awesome.