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We all have that moment when our eyes are opened to the hijinks made possible by proximity chat. For me, it was the night some guy in DayZ drove a truck through the town I was looting while screaming at the top of his lungs, the volume gradually rising and falling as he disappeared over the horizon. Ever since that formative belly laugh, it’s been a treat to watch a once-niche feature of milsims make the jump to battle royales and, more recently, extraction shooters.
Proximity chat is a modern tool for our modern times, but it has a downside: As long as someone’s standing close enough, you’re at the mercy of whatever they have to say—whether it’s friendly or downright awful—until you mute them. That recipe for toxicity was potent enough for Bungie to decide that proximity chat wouldn’t make the cut in its upcoming extraction shooter Marathon.
“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 in an interview at Bungie’s Seattle studio. “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 we’re not ready to invest in prox chat until we have a solution.”
An explanation that will undoubtedly bring mixed reactions. I do have friends and coworkers who wince at the thought of having to put up with the ramblings of nearby strangers, social enrichment be damned, and will think this is purely good news. I’m of the mind that skipping prox chat will shrink Marathon’s possibility space—extraction shooters can’t truly reach their peak without impromptu negotiations, team-ups, deceptions, and roleplay.
“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 said.
Bungie’s not closing the door on prox chat forever, but it also doesn’t seem all that motivated to invent the version of it that eradicates toxicity, so the smart money is on it never happening. One obvious counter to Bungie’s reasoning is that proximity chat can be toggled off in other extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown.
This isn’t a scientific observation, but in 592 hours of leaving prox chat on in Hunt, I can count my toxic encounters with strangers on two hands. In my experience, the open-ended goals of the extraction format don’t tend to attract the mean-spirited, ultra-sweaty jerkwads.
We’ve got a bundle of Marathon coverage coming out of its gameplay reveal stream today, including hands-on with an alpha build and more extraction shooter chat with director Joe Ziegler.
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Kurt Indovina
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