BioWare has commented on the possibility of text chat in Anthem, and it’s not looking good.
Responding to a question on Reddit (via VG247) about global chat, clan chat, etc., creative director Brenon Holmes stated that accessibility requirements are making it difficult to implement. According to Holmes, any text-based chat would need to support text-to-speech, which increases the cost of implementing it. However, he didn’t rule out text chat completely.
“The main challenge is that there are a bunch of additional accessibility options that we are required to implement. This increases the cost of these sorts of features,” he wrote. “As an example I’m pretty sure one of the things we need to support is TTS for any in game text based chat.
“This sort of thing unfortunately complicates what might normally be an easier feature… Right now we’re still figuring out what is feasible to do.”
Destiny 2 launched without text chat on PC, but has since introduced it in social areas.
Anthem launches February 22nd for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
