Crucible Devs Will Be Rolling Out Voice Chat, Anti-AFK Measures, And Heart Of The Hives Changes

crucible boss fight bannerThe ability to communicate with your team through voice chat is an important feature for PvP shooters, especially since stopping to type a message in the chatbox will almost always get you killed during a firefight. Unfortunately, the said feature is still missing from Crucible more than a month after it launched on Steam. The good news is that voice chat is on the top of Amazon Game Studios’ priorities along with other important game changes. The studio says that they originally planned to roll out the feature last week but had to push it back to iron out a few bugs.

“[. . .] In a recent playtest we realized that the implementation at the time just didn’t meet our quality bar—it needed a few more features (push-to-talk, for example), more polish, and we needed to hammer out some bugs that were causing performance problems,” says Amazon. “Making the decision to hold a feature back is always difficult, especially when we know the feature is as important as voice chat, but we feel that this was the right call.”

Amazon says that they’re also working on ways to discourage players from going AFK and have recently added a surrender option to allow players to safely quit out of bad matches. They’ve also made changes to the battle pass system to give players more incentive to win matches instead of just AFKing and riding out the match. The developers plan to take anti-AFK measures a step further in the next update by preventing AFK players from earning achievements and progressing in battle pass and challenges.

The developers will also be making significant changes to the Heart of the Hives game mode which includes an overhaul of respawn points, non-Hive creature locations and difficulty, and how match events interact with each other. “One thing we’re considering, for example, is having events like Cloak Plant Bloom or Mini-Harvesters affect the entirety of a match, with only one such event being part of each match. We’re currently thinking that change wouldn’t apply to objective-based events like Damage Amplifiers.”

Of course, these changes won’t count for much if Amazon doesn’t find a way to increase the game’s playerbase which has taken a significant hit over the past few weeks.

Head over to the Crucible official site for more info.