Remember the good old days of the Xbox Live party chat system on Xbox 360? What wonderful times those were. All that was required was for you to send a party chat invite to your friends, them to accept said invite and then you’d all be able to play and chat together, with nary a problem in sight. Alas, those days seem but a distant memory, as it’s now nearly 6 months into the Xbox One’s life cycle and its party chat system is STILL achingly annoying.
On the other hand, the PS4 was Sony’s first attempt at a party chat system, and initially everything seemed to be going smoothly; you’d invite your friends to a party, they’d join, you’d talk to each other. Everything worked the way it should. But then, one update later, and suddenly the PS4’s party chat became broken. I’d join a party chat with a friend and find that we’d be unable to speak to each other due to supposedly “incompatible” NAT types despite all of our NAT types being set to open, and joining a party with multiple friends would often lead to the same issue, with us being forced to frequently leave the party and join it again
At the time of this writing, Microsoft hasn’t released an official statement on how to rectify these issues because, to put it bluntly, there seems to be no way of fixing them in the Xbox One’s current state. All of the unofficial online tutorials on how to get party chat up and running again have proven useless to myself and many others, so we will therefore simply have to wait until Microsoft releases another update for the console that will hopefully straighten these issues out. However, the last update that Microsoft released, which was intended to fix many party chat problems such as the system restricting players from talking to one another whilst playing different games, has now seemed to make it barely functional.
The same can be said for the PS4. When the console was first released, the PS4’s party chat system was very user-friendly, but after Sony issued the first update for the console, error codes suddenly appeared from nowhere. While joining a party on PS4 isn’t half as infuriating as it is on the Xbox One, as any issues can typically be solved by leaving the party and then joining again, it’s still a mightily unwelcome hurdle we’re being forced to jump over in order to simply talk to our friends while we play games.
These problems can’t really be put down to “teething issues” for the two consoles any longer. Cross-game party chat is a big deal in the world of online gaming, and the fact that both consoles are still experiencing major problems when it comes to implementing this feature after being on store shelves for nearly 6 months isn’t acceptable. Hopefully these problems will be rectified soon, and we can stop pulling out our hair when we want to talk to our friends while playing Titanfall.
