Players who have jumped into Sony’s new car-smashing PS5 game Destruction AllStars may have run into a rather obnoxious issue: voice chat in the game’s multiplayer matches is switched on by default.
In one round, I was subjected to somebody’s music blaring in the background for the entirety of the match. In another, I heard every word of someone teaching their friend how to play the game. Kotaku collected many more examples of people being frustrated by the default voice chat, and it sounds like many heard far worse things than I did.
The DualSense’s integrated mic compounds the problem. Unless you proactively hit the mute button, that mic is going to pick up everything going on around you and broadcast it to your fellow players. Voice chats you hear during a match will also play out of the DualSense’s integrated speaker if you don’t have a headset hooked up, much to the potential chagrin of anyone sitting next to you.
Frustratingly, there isn’t an immediately obvious way to turn voice chat off. I couldn’t find any option to do so in the game’s menus, and I only learned through scouring the internet after playing the game on Tuesday that you have to disable voice chat in PS5’s menu.
To do so, while you’re in a match, hit the PlayStation button, scroll up to the Activity Cards above the bottom row of icons, navigate to the voice chat card, and hit the square button. Annoyingly, though, this only disables voice chat for one match — you’ll have to go through the process again every match to mute your fellow players.
Hopefully Sony addresses this issue soon with a patch or fix of some kind. But for now, you’ll be hearing a lot of voice chats unless you turn them off every game. Destruction AllStars is available now as a free download for PlayStation Plus subscribers.
