Epic Games' New 'Epic Parties' Keeps Your Voice Chat Going No Matter Where You Play

You're on the phone with friends deciding what to have for dinner, and halfway through the chat someone decides to fire up a match of Fortnite. No need to hang up or set up a new group call—the conversation just follows you straight into the game lobby. That's exactly the problem Epic Games is tackling this time: instead of bolting on yet another voice room, they're making the chat itself something that can move across platforms with you.

The new feature is called Epic Parties, and it currently works across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and the Epic Games App, letting voice calls transfer directly between all three. In other words, players can start chatting in the Epic app, and once they jump into a Fortnite match, the call switches over with them—no need to reconnect.

Epic Parties is also built to be cross-platform, so friends can join the same call no matter what hardware they're on. Voice chat can keep running in the background too—switching to your phone or hopping into another game on the Epic Games Store won't cut the call. One particularly handy detail: simply accepting an Epic Party invite automatically puts everyone into the same Fortnite lobby, skipping the whole manual party-forming step.

This voice feature builds on the text chat system that rolled out last year. Players could already send party invites straight from their friends list, and the new change adds a "Start Party" button inside the chat window that lets you upgrade an existing text conversation directly into a voice call.