As anyone who has played a match of Search and Destroy on Call of Duty will know, gaming voice chat can be incredibly toxic. Hell, text chat can be too, but at least you won't have your eardrums blown out by a man double your age taking out his work stresses on you.
It seems the toxicity of proximity chat is simply too much to risk putting into some modern shooters. Bungie's Marathon, for example, is forgoing the idea, so long as there's not a safe solution to toxic players.
"When it comes to prox chat, I don't think we're against the experience of it, to be fair," game director Joe Ziegler told PC Gamer. "I think the challenge is how to make sure we're creating a safe environment for players inside of that space. I don't think anyone really has a good solution to that just yet. Because we're so dedicated to making sure that we're creating a safe space where we don't have players just flaming each other or doing terrible things to one another."
"I think that's where we stand right now. Like, if it was magical and we could somehow come up with that solution, I think we totally would do it. But right now, it is a challenge that many companies are trying to figure out," Ziegler continued.
There will undoubtedly be people who will say the modern generation couldn't have survived a minute in a Call of Duty lobby, but there's also an argument to be made that games are meant to be fun, and for some people getting constantly yelled at or harassed isn't fun, despite the potential benefits of proximity chat.
Where do you fall in the proximity chat debate?
