I play a lot of Halo 5: Guardians at the moment, on Xbox. Most of the time in anonymous multiplayer, there’s a good amount of radio silence. Most people don’t have headsets, so there’s not a lot of team comms going on unless you manage to pre-organise a team.
I’ve also been watching some streams on Twitch. The communication is epic. There’s a whole host of callouts the skilled players make to their team.
- Enemy position and direction
- Enemy health status
- Enemy power-up status
- Their own status
- Their own direction and intention
- What weapons they’ve grabbed
- What power-ups they’ve grabbed
- And a host of other tiny cues.
Two paradigm shifts came out of this stuff.
- I’ve started seeing multiplayer FPS games as a sick place to train team communication and on-the-fly tactical development.
- I’ve started doing call-outs during online play, and it transforms the game level for me. When I have to call it out, I have to notice it, and the game becomes mentally taxing, and far more athletic in nature.
- I’m going to continue developing this area, and I’m exited to see if I can get some tests done with team development at some point.