Anyone who has been online could predict this. Give people an internet connection and a microphone, and some will quickly reveal how much they suck. Following the release of the only PS5 available yesterday Destruction of AllStars, players reported cases of serious verbal harassment almost immediately, exacerbated by the confusing absence of tools to prevent such behavior.
Page by social media, and you will see many players complaining about Destruction‘s penetrating voice chat, which is turned on by default. Even worse, the voices of other players come through the tin of small speakers on the face of the PSSense’s DualSense controller. (Yes, really.) Some players streamed to ResetEra, the popular video game forum, for telling stories about racial blasphemy, homophobia and other cases of inexcusable, derogatory language. In the review of the game for Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech apparently heard that a podcast was broadcast over the dark web and QAnon right over the speaker.
“It’s really a fun game and I’m sure it’s going to be fun with younger kids,” said a ResetEra moderator wrote. “But I do not think they will want ‘YOUR FUCKING TEUK’.” or some awful homophobia screaming from their speaker in their living room. ”
Even worse, Destruction of AllStars offers frustratingly few tools to help players get away from the jerks. As far as I know, there is no way to dampen or report hostile players. You can tap on the trackpad to compile a list of everyone in each match, but there is no way to communicate with any of the usernames. This is just a list. There is also no setting in the options that allows you to disable voice chat wholesale.
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In other words, to keep everyone quiet, you have to rely on system-level tricks. As long as you sit comfortably in the (toxic) party conversation, here are the two easiest options at your fingertips.
Use the activity cards
While selecting your character before the game, you should see a notification appear in the upper right corner of your screen: “Game voice chat has started.” As soon as you see it, it is clear that you are muffling. Tap the PS button. Navigate to the “Voice Chat | Destruction of AllStarsActivity map (this is probably the first to appear) and press Square. You can also do this after the match has started, but you will probably splash. Just a head up.
Another one: it has to be done every game. The PS5 can not remember you muted the previous game.
Mute your DualSense controller
When you press the PS button, you pull up “Control Center”, a series of icons at the bottom of your screen. The control center is customizable; when you open it, just press the Options button. Before playing, adjust the bar to contain the “sound” icon. At any point, you can click on it and turn off your controller speaker completely. It will quiet everything down nicely.
Of course, it is not ideal for players to even fall back on system-level solutions in the first place. It’s a little weird that voice chat is turned on by default, and still that it comes through your controller’s speaker. But it is downright surprising that there is no clear way to mute individual players per game, to report offensive holes in the game and also not to deactivate the voice conversation, which in the worst case is quickly distracting, on his best and condescending. It’s 2021. Anyone who’s been online before could predict that.
Kotaku issued to Lucid Games, Destructiondeveloper, and to Sony, the publisher of the game, to see if any of these issues will be resolved in future updates of Destruction of AllStars.