Considering my experiences with in-game voice chat over the years, I think there’s a reason I have yet to run into even a single person with it enabled in Helldivers 2. And it’s not the poor quality that ingame voice chats usually have compared to dedicated programs like TeamSpeak and Discord.

I should correct myself and say that I’ve never turned text chat off in a game though. I can’t actually say I’ve ever even seen that as something you can do. That’s easy enough to ignore, or, like the text chat in Helldivers 2, is barely used by anybody.

You have an incredibly narrow idea of what constitutes communication and “meaningful interaction,” to the point where it’s clear that you’re a guy who only plays a very particular type of game where voice communication is key, or you only play with friends. The majority of people play games with voice chat disabled because of how toxic gamers are. Hell, LoL had to disable text chat and make bad behavior a bannable offense because of how toxic their community was. Being an asshole gets you put into a queue that’s only other assholes.

But go ahead and tell me how my and the rest of the team’s experience is enriched by having to listen to a kid a third of my age scream into his mic about how he’s going to face-fuck me for being a woman in a video game. I’m dying to know.