I have the need. The need for smarter voice control in my videogames.
So I'm sitting in my living room with a friend, and he's playing Need for Speed Rivals on Xbox One. It's a tight racing game, with really cool online features, and it looks spectacular on the next-gen consoles.
But my buddy was having trouble. Every so often as he was speeding around the course, the map would pop up, filling the screen and stripping control of the vehicle away from him. He'd crash his car and lose the race.
At first, we figured that he was just accidentally thumbing the menu button on the Xbox One controller. But then I took the controller and the same thing began happening to me.
Eventually, we fingered the culprit: The Kinect camera was screwing everything up.
Need for Speed Rivals may not be constantly watching you (as far as we know), but it is definitely always listening to you. In theory, you're supposed to be able to shout out certain commands to access the game's special features without having to take your hands off the wheel. In practice, Rivals over-enthusiastically interprets background conversation as voice inputs, playing havoc with your race.
Say anything remotely similar to "look around," for instance, and the game's camera will go into an insane 360-degree spiral around your car, making it impossible to drive in a straight line for the duration. At no point does Rivals display a confirmation pop-up or any indication that it has just heard and executed a voice command. The camera just spins around for no discernible reason.
Say "open map" or anything that sounds like it will do as I described above. Other voice commands that had this result included "ropin' slap," "pokin' lap," and "the Kinect is a piece of crap."
From there, it got worse. You cannot turn these voice commands off. The only way to get Rivals to stop incorrectly interpreting your conversations as game-killing voice commands is to shut the Kinect off entirely.
Before I found that out, I spent a good 10 minutes on a wild goose chase looking for voice options in Rivals' menus. Finally, I turned to the Internet where I discovered many others were having similar problems and that there was no good way to fix them.
How did this game make it through basic play testing? You can't have a conversation with anyone else in the room if you want to play Need for Speed Rivals and have a shot at winning, because Electronic Arts and Microsoft are pushing this gimmicky "feature" down our throats.
Maybe after EA finally gets done fixing Battlefield 4 they can work their way around to its busted racing game.
And all Xbox One developers can take note: If you're going to include voice commands, give players an easy method of disabling them – and let us know when you're listening.
