Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE), a worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online games, is poised to revolutionize the way gamers stay connected with sophisticated new voice services where fellow gamers and guild mates are never more than a shout away.

With the 3D voice chat, players will be able to walk their avatars into the taverns in EverQuest II, for example, and strike up a conversation with players like they would walking into a tavern or restaurant in the real world. Gamers can manage their conversations with buddy lists, volume controls and commands to leave and join audio channels at will.

As many of you have seen by now, SOE as a company has decided to integrate Vivox voice chat into many of its games, EverQuest included. We are in the planning stages of the whats and hows of the integration right now. I think this will be a great new feature for the game and the fact that it will be free of charge is even better.

I know that voice chat is a feature that can sometimes be divisive amongst groups of players¡ªyou're a player who doesn't like chat on a raid where most everyone else is on voice chat, or you're in a group where there is no text chat going on because everyone is using voice. We will certainly do our best to make the use or non-use of this feature as flexible as possible, and obvious as to who is using it and who isn't.

Read more about it at the official EQ blog.