Among Us VR – a first-person version of the hit 2018 game exclusive to VR headsets – will introduce proximity chat so players can discuss who they think the Impostor is outside of meetings. The information was just revealed by the game’s latest trailer.
If you’ve played the original game on PC, smartphone, or console then you’ll know that while the in-game chat option is fine, playing with friends using voice chat is a far superior experience.
Having to argue your innocence over a Discord call adds a layer of immersion to Among Us, and being able to crack jokes and just chat normally is way more fun than text chatting. But this Discord setup isn’t faultless; it’s too easy to let slip vital information like accidentally revealing your killer as a ghost.
Mods like CrewLink have tried to improve the situation – by introducing proximity chat and automatically muting ghosts for living players – but it’s only available on PC and not everyone is comfortable installing external add-ons.
Schell Games has decided to cut out the middleman with Among Us VR and has baked voice chat into the game.
In our interview with Among Us VR’s project director Mike Traficante, he explained that the voice chat just made so much sense in VR.
“Among Us plays really well and we didn’t want to screw around too much with the gameplay, but a big difference right away in VR is that your 360 view has been restricted down to maybe like 45 degrees – I forget exactly how much. But it is a very different amount of information that you have to work with.”
Voice chat, and in particular proximity chat between meetings, gives the players back some of that information – letting them hear the world around them as they explore The Skeld. But it also gives them all new strategies for rooting out the Impostors.
“With voice chat, you can coordinate with people between meetings, which is very different from what players will be used to, right? So you can say something like, ‘Hey I'm about to go to med bay and scan, come watch me’ and people can then go to see the scanner checking you.”
But Impostors will also benefit from voice chat too. They can lie in wait and listen for unsuspecting Crewmates to wander past before dropping down out of a vent.
The feature, though, could also help catch Impostors. Mike warned us that while Impostors do become invisible while hiding inside of a vent shaft, they won’t be muted. If you laugh at a Crewmate’s joke while waiting for the perfect time to strike, or like to run through your villainous schemes out loud, you will be caught out.
Among Us VR is set to release during “Holiday 2022” (read November 2022 through to January 2023) and will be available on both the Meta Quest and Steam platforms (as well as PSVR 2 when that headset launches). Players will be able to play and chat across all VR versions of the game no matter what headset they use.
