Post Script
How will the game industry fix its crossplay communication problem?
Not for the first time, a Battlefield game has left us wondering whether the series really is a mainstream shooter in spirit, or has something more niche at its core. Yes, the speeding rickshaws and intuitive tanks lend themselves to rollicking escapades that any solo player can hop in and enjoy. But beneath that is a game that values coordination above all else. Battlefield’s quintessential class is the medic: a support role built to keep a squad’s roving spawn point alive, and thus enable glory for the team, not just the individual. Perhaps DICE’s peers aren’t Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer after all, but the teams behind Natural Selection, Squad and Hell Let Loose – tactical games in which victory is more a matter of effective communication and wellmaintained hierarchy than shooting straight.
With that realisation comes frustration: how can a shooter as team-focused as Battlefield 2042 launch without voice chat? It’s an omission DICE has already had to address in its post-release blogs. “We want to give you the assurance that we’re carefully evaluating your desire to see legacy features return,” the developer wrote shortly after launch. “End-ofmatch scoreboard, server browser, and features like voice chat are big topics for us to cover all at once, and we have plenty we want to say around them. We’ll come back to you when we have things that we can show to you, including details about our long-term vision for certain features and functions.”
While it’s amusing to hear voice chat listed as a ‘legacy feature’, you can see how DICE was caught off-guard. During the prior generation, in-game voice support became surplus to requirements. Xbox One and PS4 included fully featured party chat functionality, and on PC – well, PC players have always run thirdparty VOIP apps in the background. Just try getting them to do anything else.
So why has this non-issue spun back to trouble developers again? In a word: crossplay. With Fortnite, Epic used its newfound heft to pressure platform holders into allowing rival machines to connect. Even a reluctant Sony ultimately committed to supporting and encouraging crossplatform play, albeit after initially asking companies for compensation. Since then, crossplay has fast become an expectation among players of online shooters. And one that benefits studios, too, because by consolidating their audiences, battle royale developers can quickly source 100 players from a much larger pool during matchmaking. But communication tools have lagged behind. Now players on different platforms are joining together, they’re finding their voice chat platforms aren’t connecting in the same way.
It’s a problem we’ve run into on multiple occasions, notably having spent Warzone’s lockdown season balancing laptops and phones near a PS4 so that PC squadmates could shout out warnings from Discord – a less-than-ideal arrangement given the noise coming from the television speakers. Unlike Battlefield, Warzone does feature its own in-game chat, but it’s temperamental enough that we never succeeded in persuading our friends to stick with it for long.
That particular, painful setup will be fixed once PlayStation’s new partnership with Discord bears fruit in the new year. And Game Pass users are already well accommodated by the Xbox Game Bar, which easily enables chat between PCs and Series X/S. But even these solutions are siloed, leaving cross-console combinations uncovered. An app that bridges Xbox and PlayStation looks unlikely (though if the two companies happen to be looking for a name, may we humbly suggest Red Telephone, after the Moscow-Washington hotline).
For now, as DICE is discovering, the onus will be on developers to provide reliable voice chat in-game. Either that, or to abandon the crossplay dream. And that latter ship appears to have sailed. As Epic’s Joe Kreiner once put it in an email to Sony: “I can’t think of a scenario where Epic doesn’t get what we want.”