Back when I was in college, Quake (the first one) was the game that everyone played over the network. In fact I don’t think I ever played it in single player mode. While playing games we would sometimes organize ourselves into teams and play against each other. However, we really didn’t have any way to communicate other than by typing messages to the screen which, as you may know, is difficult during the game.
Today you can use a voice system such as Mumble.
[Mumble is a] low-latency, high-quality voice communication for gamers. Includes game linking, so voice from other players comes from the direction of their characters, and has echo cancellation so the sound from your loudspeakers won’t be audible to other players.
You can read the details here, but basically you have a centralized server set up that everyone connects to. Once connected you talk via a headset. The design is simple, but the system is built around low latency (you don’t want your bandwidth used up on chatting) and background noise reduction.
I really don’t have any need for a system like this, but have any gamers out there tried this and if so, does it work well?
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Never tried it or heard of it. Ventrilo and Teamspeak make up the vast majority of voice servers for gamers. However they’ve both sold out. Since Mumble is free, I might have to consider setting a server up and playing around with it.
Seems to have some good comments on its sourceforge frontpage.