Destruction AllStars hotfix turns off its cacophonous voice chat

Destruction AllStars voice chat has been disabled by default in a new hotfix, though it sounds like it's just a temporary solution.

The new PS5 exclusive which launched as a free PS Plus game this week attracted ire from players for automatically turning on team voice in online multiplayer. Since all DualSense controllers have built-in microphones for voice chat, that meant dropping into rooms full of ambient noise, randos shouting at their families, and heavily distorted music coming from somebody else's phone speaker (admittedly Destruction AllStars could use some more music of its own).

With this hotfix in place, you will now have to specifically opt in to voice chat in Destruction AllStars. Developer Lucid Games says it's working on "longer-term enhancements" for voice chat which will hopefully make it easier to coordinate with your team, but at least this is a good first step.

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When you jump into Destuction AllStars, you'll immediately notice a barrage of voices from all the other players, because the game has a default team-speak setting enabled through the DualSense controller.

The result? You can hear everyone and everything happening, ranging from people listening to music loudly as they play, crying babies, trash-talking, and various other aural distractions you might expect to come through while playing a game online.

As it stands, AllStars has no option to disable this in-game chatter in its own menus, an issue which the devs have responded to on Twitter, but there is a nice workaround you can do in the PlayStation menu to completely mute everyone.

The easiest way to completely mute everyone in the lobby, even when the game doesn't have that function, is to create your own private PlayStation party. Even if you're just playing solo, you can sit in your own party and you won't have to hear other people playing in the same online session as you.

To do this, simply press the home button on the DualSense, head to the Game Base icon and select it, doing so will bring up a little menu with all your parties. From this menu, press Square to create a new party.

This should hopefully just be a bump in the road for Destruction AllStars, as the team has talked about the long-term plans they have for the game. Colin Berry, the game's director told GamesRadar in a recently interview: "We're currently knee-deep working on updates, with different people working on different streams and different things, and you never truly just 'launch and that's it' anymore."

Want to jump into the action? Check out our interview with the team behind Destruction AllStars.