Players who jumped into Sony’s new PS5 game Destruction of AllStars may have encountered a rather unpleasant problem: voice chat in the game’s multiplayer games is turned on by default.
In a round, I was exposed to someone’s music appearing in the background throughout the entire game. In another one, I heard every word from someone teaching their friend how to play the game. Kotaku collected many more examples of people frustrated by the default voice chat, and it sounds like a lot much worse things than I’ve heard.
DualSense’s integrated microphone exacerbates the problem. Unless you proactively press the mute button, the microphone will pick up everything that is going on around you and broadcast it to your teammates. Voice calls that you hear during a match will also be played from the DualSense’s integrated speaker if you are not wearing headphones, to the potential remorse of someone sitting next to you.
Frustratingly, there is no immediately obvious way to eliminate voicemail. I could not find any option to do this in the menu’s menus, and it was only after I played the game on Tuesday that I learned that you should deactivate your voice chat in the PS5 menu.
To do this, press the PlayStation button while in a game, scroll to the activity cards above the bottom row icons, navigate to the voice chat card, and press the square button. However, it is annoying that voice chat for one match is only eliminated. You will have to go through every game again to dampen your teammates.
Hopefully Sony will address this issue soon with a patch or fix of some kind. But for now, you hear a lot of voice chats, unless you turn it off every game. Destruction of AllStars is now available as a free download for PlayStation Plus subscribers.