Does ‘Dead by Daylight’ have voice chat?

For a survivor to have any hope of escaping through an exit gate in Dead by Daylight, they need to work with their three other teammates. Voice chat would of course make communicating in the PC and console versions of Behaviour Interactives’ asymmetric multiplayer survivor horror game that much easier ⏤ but is that function even available?

Whether it’s fixing a generator together, dispersing around the map, or unhooking another, survivors must lean on each other before a harrowing killer sacrifices them to The Entity. While there’s always the chance for the sole remaining survivor to find and jump into an escape hatch, besides that long shot, the game is built around four players operating in tandem to avoid the clutches of a star-studded murderous roster.

If anyone’s spent time playing Dead by Daylight, then they likely know losing just one teammate early into a round — or even after a few generators have been kicked on — can spell disaster. But back to the question at hand: Is there voice chat in the game?

Is voice chat an option in Dead by Daylight?

Nope, voice chat is not available in Dead by Daylight, and you can bet the house that there never will be. The game simply wasn’t developed to support voice chat. Although there are four survivors to begin with, each gamer is tasked with traversing the fog and horrifying terrain with little information. There are perks that give them information, like seeing the aura of their teammates and the killer, or items like a map to help locate generators. But the whole point is that the player is navigating a nightmare with a bleak chance of surviving it. Communicating with voice or text would take away a lot of the dark ambiance and frankly disrupt both balance and gameplay.

It goes without saying, but a killer also can’t speak with survivors during a round. There are in-game gestures survivors can do, like beckoning a teammate over, but that’s it. The PC version supports text chat for when players finish the round and are on the end-game screen, but that’s not available for console. Who has time to wait around for someone to type something out via a controller, anyway?

Even though Dead by Daylight doesn’t support in-game voice chat, there is still a way gamers can speak with other survivors. Specifically, they can make a private party with a few friends and queue into a match together, and they can talk through a third-party system like Discord or Xbox party chat. So while there’s no voice chat for Dead by Daylight (and no, Behaviour Interactive didn’t forget to put it into the game), there are still ways to enjoy it with your fellow gamers.