Topic: Voice chat/text chat options?

Hello everybody!

Are you all enjoying Mario Kart as much as i am? It blew my mind, such a fun game! But over to the question that's been flying around inside of my head since my friend also bought MK8 and we tried playing it online together. Does Wii-U not have the ability to talk with mic or at least text message (ingame)?

Playing online is extremely tedious and boring because we can't chat while we do it and when someone ends up spectating and the other one in the race we have to call each other on the phone and play with one hand..... you get the picture. I figured since we are friend's on our consoles that we could call each other somehow from the main menu/ingame menu and keep the chat going while we play.

HOW can this not be "there"? I know Nintendo is restrictive because of their policies and what not but since we are friends on the console etc i really don't see why we shouldnt be able to talk through a mic while we play....... Is anyone else suffering because of this restriction? It's making my online play with friends useless.

Sorry for the rant, i just got so frustrated after getting disconnected while my friend got into the game, i pick up the phone to call him and he has to leave and retry.. etc over and over again. This feature should really be added to the console, to be able to call your friend and have a chat w/e your doing on the console, kinda like a skype call but on the Wii-U. Thats just my two coppers, im sure there are some of you that agree with me.

Unfortunately, chat and communication on the Wii U is stuck in the stone age.

So we noticed, it is such a shame.... :/ i mean one should at LEAST be able to talk to your friends however you want.. it's quite absurd.

I was ctually just thinking about the same thing. I dont know if I'm missing something, or if it's just not possible to voicechat. Texting would be useless anyway in such an intense game. My guess is that it is nintendos way of shielding kids from the horrible things said on the internet by the people who arent thinking about the impact of whats said. I really hope nintendo makes the wii u chat function capable of running in the backround (audio only) behind everything your doing on the console. No more online chat problems, pluss you can talk while on e shop etc. Fingers crossed!

I think it's to protect kids. I have plenty of people on my friends list which i don't know and with suspect nicks Need For Speed has voice chat.

I hope they add mic chat I would like to socialize more with people

I wouldn't want it on during races, but during spectator mode (which is pretty boring) and the waits between races, i would like the option to chat. The pre-determined responses are not good enough.

Although mixing all the little kids with adult man-children could potentially turn sour.... so Nintendo wants to avoid it altogether?

That's very likely the case. Hopefully they'll realize that this is only an acceptable solution for part of their playerbase.

I heard you can at least voice chat during Friend Only lobbies; seems reasonable. (Havent tried it though)

So does Trine 2 and Ninja Gaiden 3. I can see why this was left out, but as far as a fix goes don't we live in an age of Skype and FaceTime? I would think you could voice chat with people on your friends list at least, but I haven't read the manual to see if that's supported. In the lobby (as far as I got trying to pick up a match last night) it's just canned phrases, but there are a lot. Research I've done backs up whodatnjnja's comment; it's not clear to me if it's only lobbies or if you can talk to friends in a lobby with a mix of friends and non-friends.