Sony crashes and burns with Destruction AllStars' ridiculous lack of voice chat options

I'm a big fan of getting AAA games for free, and I love me a bit of vehicular destruction, so I was pretty jazzed all day yesterday while waiting for the PlayStation Store to update so I could download Destruction AllStars through PlayStation Plus. Destruction AllStars was originally scheduled as a launch title for PlayStation 5, but shortly before the system was released, it was announced that D. AllStars would be delayed until this month, and released for free as a monthly Plus offering. This seemed incredibly generous - and indeed, it is. 

The day got away from me a little bit yesterday, so I wasn't able to hop in for some good old-fashioned automotive mayhem until 10:00 PM last night. And playing through the tutorial, I really liked what I saw. The cars handle great, allowing for tight turns and spinning slam moves that are crazy fun to execute. And while I'm still getting the feel for the portion of the game played on foot (you can eject from your car and try to steal other players' vehicles), Destruction AllStars has a lot of potential to be one of those "Overwatch-one-more-match" games that I can rot in front of on a Saturday afternoon.

Less exciting (and by "less exciting", I mean "ludicrously stupid") is Destruction AllStars' player voice chat - which defaults to "on", with no way built into the game to turn it off. As soon as I jumped into a real match, players' voices started shouting from my controller, and I realized that they could hear me too. No warning, no button prompts. It just happened. The DualSense's built-in microphone seems to be always turned on while playing Destruction AllStars, leaving whatever you say to be broadcast to the masses - or at least the other 16 people in the match with you.

I've had some pretty awful voice chat experiences, and this was not one of them. In this case, I listened to a very friendly and patient dude introduce the game and its concepts to his young nephew. A few other players commented during the match, and it was mostly stuff like "Watch me get this dude!" and "Oh my GOD!". At one point, I said to myself "This is fun as shit!" (because it is), and immediately apologized to the nephew, knowing that he could hear me.

My wife wandered in and asked if the voices would continue the entire time I played. "No," I said, "I can turn them off after this match." So when the match ended, I went into Destruction AllStars' options, and was stymied to see that there is no option in the game to turn off the chat. The developers at Lucid Games, LTD apparently really want players to hear each other. There's no way to mute individual players, no controls to turn the chat volume down, just...nothing.

I actually Googled to see how to turn off the chat, and as soon as I typed "Destruction Alls..." into my phone, Google returned "Destruction AllStars How to Turn Off Chat" (here's a nice Forbes article explaining how to do it, if you are interested). Seems like I'm not the only one irritated by this.

The question is, what on earth was Sony thinking with this nonsense? They must know that a huge swath of players don't want to be in chat, either because stuff is going on in their home that they don't want people listening to, or because they don't want to take the chance of being exposed to toxic gamers screaming swear words and racial slurs through their controllers and into their living rooms.

The ability to turn off chat should be a basic option in games, and in my opinion, chat should always default to "off". Players should have to take action to allow the chat to function. Hell, what if I'm in a party with my friends and we want to play Destruction AllStars? Do I need to have my headset on to hear them, while randos just holler through my controller? 

This is a huge oversight on Sony's part, and I hate to say it, but I'm not touching Destruction AllStars again until they fix it. I don't want to fiddle with the chat settings on a system level, just to have to turn it all back on again when I actually want the chat to function in other games. What are we here, savages? Fix your nonsense, Sony, so we can enjoy this otherwise fantastic free game you've given us. And yes, I know how entitled that sounds. Doesn't make it any less true.