Voice chat has been a feature of online gaming for decades now. In the beginning, voice chat would be reserved to those in the game you’re playing, but over the years, party chats for console players or third party voice communication software for PC and mobile has allowed players to communicate with each other, regardless of what they’re playing.
However, over recent months, there seems to have been a trend where, on console at least, online multiplayer games have a habit of superseding your voice chat settings. While sitting in a party, multiplayer games will now broadcast your voice in game chat too, which arguably defeats the purpose of sitting in a private chat instead of a public voice chat.
While games might have been doing this for a long time now, the first time I noticed it was in Back 4 Blood, which was incredibly egregious considering the fact that I was playing with the person I was in a party with, so both of our audio was being broadcasted twice. Halo Infinite also operated in the same way, though both games were an easy fix in the options menu.
More recently, Rainbow Six Extraction has pushed this same insistence on talking in game chat despite being in party chat, but when looking through the options menu, it’s not immediately clear whether or not you can turn the option off at all while still enabling cross-play. If you have cross-play enabled, the option to automatically mute all your teammates is disabled.
Once in a game, you do have the ability to mute your teammates manually, but it’s not clear whether muting teammates just means you can’t hear them, or if they can’t hear you either. Meanwhile, there’s an option to disable “voice record mode”, which determines how “your voice communication is captured”, and I assume that’ll stop my voice from being broadcasted in party chat, but the language is so unclear. For all I know, it could just be a mode to remove the on screen notifications of my microphone being active while I’m swearing about a teammate running off on their own. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess?
It’s understandable why video games are moving to this “forced game chat” model of communication, as all three of the games mentioned champion cross-play as part of their matchmaking. For console players at least, the options for voice communication that don’t involve using another device with a third party app like Discord are few and far between. Also, they’re just a pain in the ass to set up, especially if you’re just looking to chill in a party chat with your friends.
On top of that, party chats are a great way to enjoy the social aspects of gaming without having to worry about the chance of being matched with some kids screaming down the microphone. I don’t want to be forced to deal with the usual toxic, bigoted stains on the gaming community launching whatever obscenities spring to mind because they feel like it.
For competitive multiplayer games, or high difficulty co-op games at least, communication is a key part of success, and it’s understandable that developers want to ensure gamers on all platforms can easily communicate in game. However, that shouldn’t come at the cost of the player’s own anxieties and preferences. If nothing else, just make it a selectable option at the start of the game, with clear wording (looking at you, Extraction), so that players can make their preferences clear without having to jump into an online game and making a tit of themselves.
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