Anyone who has been online could have predicted this. Give people an Internet connection and a microphone, and some will quickly reveal how bad they are. After yesterday’s PS5 release just AllStars Destruction, players reported almost instantly instances of severe verbal harassment, exacerbated by the disconcerting lack of tools to prevent such behavior.
Scrolling through Social media, and you will see many players complaining about Undoingintrusive voice chat from, which is enabled by default. Worse, other players’ voices come through that tiny speaker on the PS5’s DualSense control panel. (Yes, really.) Some players reunited to ResetEra, the popular video game forum, to share stories about racial slander, homophobia and other instances of inexcusable and derogatory language. When reviewing the game for Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech reportedly heard “an alt-right podcast about Dark Web and QAnon” broadcast over the speaker.
“It’s a really fun game and I’m sure it will be fun with younger children”, a moderator at ResetEra I wrote. “But I don’t think they’ll want to ‘DIE, YOU BITCH!’ or some horrible homophobia screaming from the controller speaker in the living room. “
Even worse, AllStars Destruction offers frustratingly few tools to help players stay away from idiots. As far as I can tell, there is no way in the game to silence or report hostile players. You can press the trackpad to pull up a list of everyone in each match, but there is no way to actually interact with any of the displayed usernames. It’s just a list. There is also no buried configuration in the options that allow you to disable wholesale voice chat.
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In other words, for everyone to shut up, you’ll have to rely on system level tricks. As long as you’re cool about sitting in the (toxic) party chat, here are the two easiest options at your fingertips.
Using activity cards
When selecting your character before the match, you will see a pop-up notification in the upper right corner of the screen: “The game’s voice chat has started.” After seeing this, you can silence. Touch the PS button. Navigate to the “Voice chat | AllStars Destruction”Activity card (it is probably the first one that appears) and click Square. You can also do this after the start of the match, but it will likely crash. Just a warning.
Another warning: you have to do this every game. The PS5 will not remember that you silenced the chat in the previous match.
Silencing your DualSense controller
When you press the PS button, you open your “control center”, a series of icons at the bottom of the screen. The control center is customizable; when it’s open, just click the Options button. Before playing, adjust your bar to include the “sound” icon. At any time, you can click on it and turn off the controller speaker completely. This will make everything pleasant and peaceful.
Of course, that players have to resort to alternative solutions at the system level in the first place is not ideal. It is a little strange that voice chat is enabled by default, and even stranger that it comes through your controller’s speaker. But it is totally disconcerting that there is no apparent way to silence individual players per game, to report offensive idiots in the game, or to disable voice chat altogether, which quickly proved to be a distraction at best, and derogatory at worst. . It’s 2021. Anyone who’s been online could have predicted that.
Kotaku got in touch with Lucid Games, Undoingto the developer and Sony, the game publisher, to see if any of these issues will be fixed in future updates to the AllStars Destruction.