Some Xbox gamers are about to get a big new party chat feature
A new feature coming to Xbox Party Chat promises to remove background noise and allow conversations to be free of audio pollution.
Xbox Live was first made available to owners of the original Xbox console in November 2002 and, along with Sony’s PlayStation Network to follow four years later, revolutionized console gaming. While the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube technically offered internet accessibility, Xbox brought online game modes that were previously only available on PC. Unfortunately, for the next two decades, poor audio quality has been a problem with the Xbox Live Party Chat experience, but a new update available to members of the Xbox Insider Program may finally alleviate those issues.
This new update will filter microphone audio through a “noise suppression stage” during a group chat, which should hopefully cancel out any screaming babies, barking dogs, or whatever. unwanted background sound that could be picked up by a party member’s headset and get in the way of a gaming session. However, this won’t improve audio from a lower quality microphone, although Microsoft has released a new Xbox Stereo Headset last year which should serve as a fitting upgrade.
While noise cancellation might seem like a pretty superfluous inclusion for those who don’t spend much time in Party Chat lobbies, in large groups those chats can often turn into a cacophony of hissing, crackling microphones, game audio reverberating off someone’s television and all sorts of background noise polluting a player’s voice input. Years ago, the simple act of talking to friends on the Internet was a novelty to celebrate, but today, especially after Xbox took steps to allow gamers without Xbox Live Gold to access the lobbies of Party Chat, it has become clear that there are higher standards to aspire to.
In 2020, Discord released an update that allowed users to remove background audio that could bleed through their mics, and PC gamers gained access to a host of options to mute background noise during a game. time. Yet while such features would have been fantastic in the early days of online gaming, they are nonetheless welcome in 2022.
While the noise canceling feature is only part of Party Chat, it could have practical applications in some of Xbox’s most popular multiplayer titles for now. The most crucial games such as Among us, Robloxand sea of thieves could benefit, because all these Xbox games offer proximity chat. There’s no worse feeling than revealing a team’s location or leaking secret information due to a faulty mic, and in the future the devs may be able to mitigate these issues. on Xbox.
Source: Pure Xbox
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