If you’re tired of standing alone on Overwatch’s capture points or using your ultimate only for your team to be looking the other way, Blizzard are trying to help.
If communications are your bag then here are the best co-op games on PC to try out.
Encouraging communication has been a big focus for the team, says game director for Overwatch Jeff Kaplan, and the implementation and use of voice chat is still being worked out.
On the developer forums, a complaint that players are being separated into group or team chat to the detriment of whole team communication drew an explanation by Kaplan of how the problem is being approached.
“We definitely want to encourage positive team communication,” Kaplan says. “We had tried forcibly switching voice channels for players and received extremely negative feedback for doing that. What we would like to look into is trying to make players more aware that team chat is available and encourage participation.”
A common complaint of players is that no-one is talking in public chat channels, and that’s something that is confusing Kaplan while they look for a solution.
“I play the game a lot — solo and grouped — and it comes down most of the time to people not talking, even when they are in the channel,” he says. “Maybe they are shy? Maybe they have nothing to say? Maybe their mic is not working? We’ll try to help with all of those issues but you can’t sledgehammer other players into talking over the internet. You can only gently encourage.”
For now, if you’re upset that no-one seems to be talking in your games, try talking yourself or make use of the non-verbal communication options in the chat wheel (use C (default) to bring it up).