It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.
It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.
VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.
It had a built in screen recorder.
Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.
It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.
Agreed. Cutesy emotes are great when you aren't trying to concentrate on multiple other things at the same time. When I'm mid-game the only chat I read needs to be static and non-moving.
This came up in convo with a co-worker recently. I had completely forgotten about it until he mentioned it and then, suddenly, a flood of memories came rushing back.
Also, GameSpy arcade. My parents had McAfee blocking the internet, because the literal first thing I did was save porn to “My Pictures” directory. But it only blocked the browsers. So I used the built in web browser in GameSpy to download Star Wars BF2 mods, amongst other things
For those that didn’t use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.
As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.
It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.
I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...
I remember it being a thing I didn’t use. It was like a voice chat/messenger thing with a built in game browser like GameSpy, right? I used TeamSpeak and some other tool mostly over xFire. I didn’t know anyone else who used xFire so it was kinda useless to me. A lot of communication apps in the late 90’s/early-mid 2000’s had that unfortunate downfall for me. No point in using something nobody I would talk to uses 🤷🏻♂️
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