You just got home from a long day at work. Hoping to unwind, you hop into a match of Warzone in Halo 5. Suddenly, you hear it: the piercing, unforgettable sound of an eight-year-old bragging about his K/D ratio. Don’t worry—we’re here to help.
In-game voice chat is enabled by default in the latest Halo game, which came out for Xbox One last week. Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to get matched up with folks who don’t talk much, you won’t notice this. But this is Xbox Live, so you’ll probably get stuck with a bunch of teenagers with a penchant for unique racial slurs.
Halo 5 doesn’t make this obvious, but there’s a way to turn off voice chat—by muting everyone else in the game. To do this, open up the list of players (by hitting the back button), then hit X for “mute all.” You have to do this every time you start a new match; there’s no in-game option to make it permanent.
Alternatively, you could go to your Xbox Live privacy settings and set it so you can only get voice/text messages from your friends, which is probably the best option if you just want to shoot things in Halo without having to listen to anyone else.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.