Voice chat has arrived in League of Legends

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Voice chat is one of the most heavily-awaited features to come to League of Legends in the last couple of years, and as of today, it’s finally here.

The road to voice chat has been a rocky one. First, Riot’s stance on the matter was a firm “no,” because it wanted to alleviate toxicity in League as much as possible, and it viewed voice chat as a step in the wrong direction. Last year, though, the company changed its mind and announced that voice chat would eventually be in the game before explaining that its previous stance against the feature was wrong.

Then, updates on the development of the feature slowly rolled in over the course of the year. When winter came around, Riot finally had an idea of what it would look like, and it shared some visuals and plans for the first draft after some production.

It would be a voice feature for premade groups exclusively, at least until Riot figured out a better way to reduce intra-team toxicity through the channel. That’s essentially the same version that was launched today, so it seems a better method was never devised.

The new feature has its own UI menu in both the client and another one in the game itself. There will be a small microphone in the bottom-right corner of both. In the client, it’ll be near your missions and friends list, and in the game, it’ll be right by the camera-lock icon.

From this menu, you can control the volume of those in the voice channel, and you can even leave the channel altogether to opt out of the chat entirely.

That’s how voice chat in League will work for the foreseeable future. If Riot decides to implement the feature for the rest of your team rather than just premade groups, it will most likely make some sort of announcement. That probably won’t happen anytime soon, though, as it was just released today.