Lucid Games has disabled Destruction AllStars voice chat by default after players became annoyed by lobbies full of players being unaware they had a mic transmitting their voices right in their hands.
Destruction AllStars Hotfix 1.2.2 is now LIVE!
Hotfix Notes Thread:
Disabled multiplayer lobby voice communications by default for all players.
We are actively working on longer-term enhancements to the voice communications system.— Lucid Games (@LucidGamesLtd) February 5, 2021
Hate to say we called it, but we called it. Back when the PS5 launched, it quickly became apparent that every DualSense controller having a hot mic on by default would lead to issues in multiplayer games. There have been scattered issues in cross-gen and cross-platform multiplayer titles like Call of Duty, but the problem really reared its ugly head with the release of the PS5 exclusive multiplayer game, Destruction AllStars free on PS Plus.
It’s PS5 exclusivity meant every single player in the game had a DualSense, and unless they’d already manually turned the mic in the controller off, it was open season for voice chat, whether you knew you were part of it or not. What’s more is that voice chat became a lot more than just a little annoyance. Players started reported rampant issues of racial slurs, sexist remarks, homophobia, and other intolerant hate speech coming through the voice channels.
Destruction AllStars voice communication tools are woefully insufficient, and even if you yourself had your mic muted, you’d often be forced to sit through a lot of drivel by way of other people’s mics. Instead of easily being able to mute right in game, you’d have to dive into the PS5’s settings in order to tune out the noise.
After this most recent hotfix, voice chat is now completely disabled in Destruction AllStars while Lucid works on fixing the voice communication system for the game. If you want to chat with friends while playing, you can create a party, but general multiplayer lobby voice communications are gone for the time being.
While Lucid Games is working to fix the issue, the problem really stems from Sony putting a hot mic into every player’s hands, defaulting it to on. There are settings to mute your DualSense controller mic by default when you power on the PS5 (which we enabled long ago), but many players don’t even have any idea this is an issue, so you get to hear everything from terrible music to moms yelling at their kids, all the way to that rampant hate speech that players are shouting at their TVs when they think no one is listening.
Still it’s good to see Lucid Games jumping on the issue so quickly, and it shows a lot of hope for the future of Destruction AllStars in general. In our review, we praised the style and production values but lamented the lack of depth and reasons to keep playing long term.
[Via: Kotaku]