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.
