Hello. I develop on both Heroes Battlegrounds (fighting game) and Checho’s Deltarune RP (roleplay game). In the wake of Legacy Chat being removed entirely and TextChatService becoming forced, we’ve been looking at how our games will be affected by this switch.
One major downside that the new chat system has over the old one is that it does not show chat messages sent before the user joined the game. This helped a user acclimate to what was going on and feel engaged before even doing anything. I’ll provide two examples of how this old behavior personally positively affected the games I work on.
- In a roleplay game, this lets a user see any active roleplays the moment they join, along with any active RP advertisements. Additionally, it lets them view a brief snippet of how everyone talks, letting them single out people who match their preference for quality in an RP.
- In a fighting game, this lets a user see if the current server is unsuitable for any number of reasons (toxicity, teamers, different language etc.) and serverhop accordingly. On the other side of the coin, a more competitive and rowdy user may choose to stay in a server with other actively chatting users.
There are of course more examples to be made in other genres of games, but I can’t speak to them personally.
Both of these positives are now completely moot with the new chat system. Adding this feature would help alleviate some of our growing pains in moving to it.
Personally, I’d suggest adding it as a property on the TextChannel instance (eg. RetainChatHistory), but Roblox may decide how best to implement it.