Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer - Glad to hear. Is there anything else you wanted to share about what’s going on with APB and Vivox at the moment?

Ray - They’re just a really great team to work with at every level. On the business side, on the technical side, they’ve been great at supporting Roland and his team in Scotland. Just a really great team to work with.

Roland - It’s pretty amazing how easy it’s been to get Vivox integrated and working. I think it would have been a lot trickier had we not gone with Vivox. They’re very prompt at replying, you get direct contact with people over the phone when you want it. You couldn’t really ask for anything else.

Vivox's Monty Sharma, no relation to the Bollywood composer.

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the Vivox perspective on this deal? What does APB bring to the table that maybe you haven’t worked with before?

Vivox Founder / VP of Business Development and Marketing Monty Sharma: I think there’s two things. One: the concept’s unique, in particular APB is set in the modern era. A lot of the stuff that we do doesn’t make sense in other games - ‘should we really be able to talk to someone that far away?’ No, you shouldn’t, but you need to, so get over it. (laughter) In APB, no one’s concerned about metaphors. Also, this is one of the first MMOs that will launch with Vivox built-in from the beginning, and we think that that will have an interesting impact on the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: The Realtime Worlds folks mentioned that they are definitely planning to use voice fonts and positional audio in the game.

Monty: And they’ve been digging into that stuff harder and earlier than anybody I’ve ever dealt with.

Ten Ton Hammer: One thing we’ve discussed in previous interviews was how the look of your character - broader chest, larger head, nose placement - would impact the voice of your character. Is that something being considered as well?

Monty: It’s part of what goes into it. The thing that we’re finding is that when people start messing with the voice fonts, there’s the mixture of reality and fantasy. They want something that’s giving you a feel of the size of the character but there’s also the ‘this guy’s a little weasily and I want a weasily undertone to it.’

Ten Ton Hammer: So you have a starting point for your voice font with your character, and you can customize it from there?

Monty: Yea. Nobody likes to hear their own recorded voice, so players are going to want to tweak their voice in various ways, make it a little brighter, sharper, that’ll be interesting.

While APB isn’t yet slated to go cross-platform, Monty explained that Vivox is way ahead of the multi-console curve. This week at GDC, the Vivox booth will feature a PC, a PS3, a phone, and a webpage all connected to the same channel at extremely high quality. “There’s a lot of moving parts!” Monty joked.

Ten Ton Hammer thanks Ray Miller and Roland Peddie along with Vivox’s Monty Sharma for taking time to talk to us during this very busy GDC week.