When they are released for Wii U this fall, you’ll be able to voice chat with other players in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Assassin’s Creed III, and Mass Effect 3. This is no newsflash; voice chat has long been a staple of online multiplayer games, though you could be forgiven for wondering how it will work on Wii U. After all, as Kotaku notes, we’ve yet to actually see a Wii U headset of any sort. And, for that matter, we’ve yet to hear much about Wii U’s online setup. As it turns out, there’s a reason for some of that.
The three aforementioned titles are among the “select games” that voice chat will be supported in on Wii U, according to Nintendo. The manner in which you’ll do so is less straightforward than one might hope, however. The company revealed to Kotaku that the GamePad’s built-in microphone can’t be used for voice chat. Instead, you’ll need to plug a headset into the appropriate jack on the GamePad — only Nintendo itself won’t be selling an official headset; it’s leaving it to companies like Mad Catz to sell licensed headsets. No slight to Mad Catz or other third-party-accessory makers, but some people feel more comfortable having a product made by the platform manufacturers, even if Microsoft’s efforts to create a wireless headset turned out poorly (to say the least).
