We’ve all been there. You’re out on a hike with some friends, solving some abstract puzzles for a purpose that’s not immediately clear, when you get two feet away from your pals and they’re as quiet as a dormouse. Or at least, that’s been the case for a bunch of folks playing Big Walk, Untitled Goose Game studio House House’s latest, as the secret Predator game’s approach to proximity chat has made it a little difficult to hear your friends. But an update seemingly fixing the issue is here! Just don’t expect to be able to hear anyone from any distance.
The issue, as House House explain it, was seemingly because those with quiet microphone setups would mean that the game wouldn’t pick it up properly even at relatively close distances. Big Walk did apparently have “some systems in place to do this before, but they weren’t doing a good enough job for quieter microphone setups.”
This is also a lesson in understanding that sometimes games like these are made without many people testing them, so these sorts of issues can go under the radar. “We’ve had many people play Big Walk before release using their own microphone setups, and none of them were particularly affected by this issue,” House House explain. There are now hundreds of thousands of people playing Big Walk, so people are finding issues we’ve never seen before. Sorry!”
A lingering question here is of course whether or not you’ll be able to hear people from further away, to which House House say, “Yes and no.” They continue, “This change makes quiet voices louder overall, so you will be louder up close, and louder at a medium distance… However we have not changed the distance at which voices drop off. We consider it an important part of the game’s design that you can only hear players who are close to you. This distance is quite specific and shapes the dynamics of the game, the same way that a character’s jump height might be very specific in a platforming game.”
There’s a tension highlighted here between intention and convenience. Of course it would be nice to hear one of your friends from really far away. It would also upset the design! I’ve been playing with my partner, and in the early, backpackless stages, figuring out whether we want to be able to communicate with walkie talkies and go off and do our own thing, or to have a flashlight for when the night arrives is a wonderful process of communication that we are forced to engage with. And there’s no right answer to what we should do! But knowing we can’t hear each other after a while makes those conversations important, and interesting.
In any case, House House also not they still haven’t decided if they’ll be making any other change to the voice chat system through new features or settings (there have been a number of requests for individual volume sliders), but because they’re such a small team, they “want to make sure we get each change right,” so will “will need to take things one step at a time.”
You can pick up Big Walk on Steam now.