World of Warcraft’s next expansion adds Blizzard Voice Chat (update)

In a social game like World of Warcraft, players are always looking to chat in one way or another. Blizzard has offered in-game messaging for years, a beautiful cacophony of service sales and players looking for a groups. The problem has always come when players needed more instant communication.

Some guilds use Ventrilo while others play with TeamSpeak or Discord. In Battle for Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s seventh expansion, players will be able to use Blizzard’s integrated voice chat rather than downloading every voice client known to man.

While World of Warcraft first added voice chat in 2007, with the Burning Crusade expansion’s 2.2 patch, players haven’t used it much in the past 10 years. The system is hidden deep inside of WoW’s system menus and most modern players have likely never heard a group mate use it in game.

At BlizzCon 2017, World of Warcraft’s developers announced new social features coming to their game in the upcoming expansion. Guilds and communities, a new cross-server friend group, will be able to talk with their teammates without ever having minimize the game or dig into the system menu.

Instead, players will be able to use Blizzard’s new, clear-sounding in-game voice chat that released in October of last year. Additionally, players that are just planning to hop in for one quick run with a random group can opt-in to voice chat for the duration of the activity.

For more on World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, check out Polygon’s exclusive feature on the expansion.

Update: This post has been updated to clarify that Blizzard is adding the Blizzard Voice Chat product, introduced in 2016, to World of Warcraft.