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Big Walk’s voice chat volume issue has been resolved with its latest patch, but House House are sticking to their guns on its overall design
House House has released a patch for Big Walk that improves the volume of quieter players’ microphones in its proximity voice chat. The change addresses complaints that friends became difficult to hear even at close range, while preserving a deliberately limited communication range that the studio sees as central to the game’s cooperative design.
The studio said earlier systems had not worked well enough with quieter microphone setups, an issue missed during pre-release testing but exposed as hundreds of thousands of players used different equipment. Voices should now be louder nearby and at medium distance, but their maximum audible distance is unchanged; House House is still considering requests such as individual volume controls and says its small team will make any further changes cautiously.
In short
- Big Walk’s patch makes quiet microphones easier to hear.
- Proximity chat’s maximum range remains intentionally limited.
- House House may consider further voice-chat options later.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
House House's proximity chat limitation is integral to their cooperative design, forcing genuine interdependence rather than fragmented communication. Maintaining these intentional constraints and resisting feature creep is how a small studio preserves artistic coherence; their responsiveness to technical bugs whilst holding firm on design shows they distinguish between legitimate fixes and scope expansion.
The case against
Individual volume controls and expanded communication range are reasonable usability improvements that needn't threaten House House's core design philosophy. The studio's refusal to consider such features alongside fixing technical bugs suggests they're conflating artistic purity with rejecting legitimate player feedback; great games accommodate user needs whilst preserving their essential vision.
Explained simply
House House is an independent Australian game studio, best known for Untitled Goose Game. Big Walk is a cooperative game in which friends explore together and use voice chat to communicate.
The game uses proximity voice chat: players can hear one another when they are nearby, while distance limits how far voices carry. That makes sound a part of how players coordinate and experience the game, so changes to microphone volume can affect both how easy it is to play together and how the studio intends the game to feel.