When Battlefield 2024 comes out in about a week on November 19th, it won’t ship with built-in voice chat. Series developer DICE told Polygon the feature won’t be available until sometime after launch. The studio didn’t provide a reason for the decision. Whatever the case, the absence of voice chat will likely be keenly felt by Battlefield fans, especially on PC, Xbox Series X and S, and PlayStation 5 where matches will include as many as 128 players.
For what it’s worth, you can still use Discord or the party chat feature on your console to communicate with friends, but that won’t help you when you’re trying to play with strangers. In those instances, you’ll need to rely on the ping system, which is apparently on the cumbersome side. According to Polygon, you have to navigate through multiple menus before you can get to the right ping. All told, it sounds like Battlefield’s already chaotic matches will be a tad more unpredictable in the first few weeks that 2042 is available.