Riot Games has finally confirmed that voice chat functionality is officially coming to League of Legends in the future.
Riot was forced to issue a statement confirming this after the datamine that unearthed its existence in the first place.
The company recognizes that in the modern competitive game landscape, an offering without a voice chat functionality is not something that would satisfy the playerbase. Most of League of Legends’ rivals, both in the MOBA genre and esports in general, have in-game voice: even Riot’s own Valorant has it.
And while League has also had the rudimentary implementation, which only allows the party members to talk with each other (and let’s be honest, friend groups that play League of Legends are much more likely to talk in a dedicated program like Discord), there were never open plans to expand it to the whole team.
Riot has always maintained that the biggest hurdle for the voice chat implementation was toxicity and the severe difficulty of catching bad actors in the act and punishing them. But the technology has progressed substantially, and now the company is confident in its ability to protect the playerbase and punish toxicity.
Still, the community is unconvinced, as many fear that joining the voice calls will be perceived as mandatory to stay competitive, and many representatives of marginalized communities will inevitably get harassed, even if the punishment for bad actors arrives in the future.
Riot aims to extensively test this feature before it’s anywhere near launch-ready. The baseline for using the feature is to already be in good Honor standing within League of Legends, so the most toxic outliers will not be able to access it to begin with. Still, with how popular smurfing is within League of Legends, those people still find ways to ruin everyone’s day.
As of now, Riot Games hasn’t committed to any release dates, nor has the company shared any concrete details about how the voice chat will be implemented, and whether this means that the existing party voice is getting deprecated. The company promised to give us more information later this year.
