In a post made today by Joystiq retelling a story from NintendoEverything.com retelling a story from IGN*, we learn that Nintendo still hasn’t figured out that people who play games might just want to talk to other people who play games. I guess we should be used to this by now, but damn.
Apparently, the Wii U does support voice chat, but it is not on a system level, and developers have to decide if they want to include the option. The statement from Nintendo:
“Wii U will have in-game chat functionality for select games, including, but not limited to, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Assassin’s Creed III and Mass Effect 3. This feature will be supported by licensed stereo headsets that plug directly into the headphone port of the Game Pad. Licensed headsets are available from Turtle Beach and TRITTON.”
Furthermore, the Pro controller doesn’t have a place to plug in a headset, nor are there any wireless options available in the immediate future. As it stands, if you want to use voice chat AND a Pro controller, you need to plug in a headset into the GamePad. Yep.
If there was a good way to communicate via voice chat, methinks we would have heard about it before today, but we still haven’t seen or heard much about Miiverse and other system level features, so who knows!
Not having a plug-in on a controller isn’t the craziest thing in the world. The PS3 requires you to use either a bluetooth headset or plug in a USB headset directly into the console. If Nintendo allowed at least the latter option, this wouldn’t be such a weird deal, but right now all of this news is somewhat of a let down.
The silver lining to this news is that your ability to hear terrible pre-teen voices shatter your eardrums will be drastically reduced. Maybe Nintendo is on to something…
*Yes, I understand the irony of making fun of other sites reporting on other sites.