The Elder Scrolls Online Likely Won’t Have Text Chat on Consoles

It looks like The Elder Scrolls Online won’t have text chat in its console incarnations, despite early promises to the contrary. Robert Purchese at Eurogamer has done a good job detailing all the steps of the saga. In short, while both the lead gameplay designer on the game and a community coordinator initially claimed the game would feature text chat (via USB keyboards) on consoles too, the company later backtracked and claimed the feature wouldn’t be available. As a matter of fact, the game’s support page makes no mention of the functionality, and only references USB keyboards for a few inputs:

“Console versions of the game will also provide limited input by USB-connected keyboards for features not already supported by voice chat or controller input.”

To clarify the matter ,Eurogamer contacted ZeniMax Online and received a reply from Matt Firor, The Elder Scrolls Online’s game director, who claimed the studio is working on a “quick chat” system, though it’s not clear what that means:

“As with a lot of console multi-player games, player-to-player communication in ESOTU is based around voice chat. That being said, we are looking into implementing a ‘quick chat’ system, and when we have more news to share, we’ll let you know.”

At the moment, the only thing that’s certain is that the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of The Elder Scrolls Online will use proximity-based voice chat as their primary method of communication, which will no doubt affect the community dynamics compared to the PC version.