Discord’s Overlay Update May Finally Convince Your Friends to Turn On Video Chat

Discord is supposed to be the voice and video chat made for gamers, but in its current iteration it sucks if all you want is to see your gamer friends’ bedraggled, sleep-deprived mugs while you’re in-game. That may finally change with Discord’s new update to its overlay. The new version of Discord’s Game Overlay should make it possible to stick your friends’ faces where you want, without killing your game performance in the process. If you’re like me, now you just need to convince your friends to finally turn on their cameras.

Discord’s current version of Overlay is one of those features you may not know about because it is both limited and too-obtrusive. You need to enable and disable it for your individual games, and getting a call widget to appear on screen takes multiple steps. The new Discord Game Overlay is no longer “hooked” onto the game’s window. It instead appears like it would when you open the Xbox Game Bar on PC, darkening the current screen and offering a host of widgets. This offers controls for your voice or webcam, plus you can see your various voice channels, notifications, and video calls.

You can then move these widgets around, resize them, and pin them to the screen where it will appear overlayed on your game. The update also offers options to change your voice or audio input without Alt+Tabbing from the game, and you can even pin a friend’s stream through Discord’s Go Live feature. Most importantly, this means you can have your friends’ video calls up on screen and position them away from anything you need to see while in game, like your health or ammo counter. The widget should scale to fit several video feeds at a time, which is good because you can pin up to 25 people on screen for a video call.

Discord promises this new version of the Overlay should no longer run interference with any anti-cheat software. Discord noted that previous versions would occasionally get flagged by anti-virus software, so hopefully the new, evolved version of the overlay discards those issues. Previous versions of Overlay didn’t play nice with games like Destiny 2 and Street Fighter V.

My gaming buddies rarely open up video chats, and in their mind it’s for a good reason. When your friends have been marinating in their home all day, they may not think themselves in the right state to show their baggy eyes and unshaved faces on camera. Still, having a friend there on video to see your reactions to their miraculous hole in one on Golf With Your Friends may be worth the price of any inhibitions.

I personally use Discord for online tabletop RPG games, and I use it whether we play on Tabletop Simulator or Foundry. Online browser-based RPG program Roll20 includes video chat, but it’s laggy, glitchy, and not worth the hassle for my older, luddite-minded friends. The routine problem is that video chat always remains outside the game, an Alt+Tab away. The new Discord overlay promises I might finally see my friends without needing any extra plugin or have to split our calls between audio on Discord and video on another, worse platform.