Epic Games is going to launch a new social tool with its Game Store which will help it compete directly with Discord. The social tool will be known as the Party System, and will look to connect gamers together in a similar manner to the Steam and Discord communal systems. It will support text chat, voice chat, and video calls. You'll be able to launch straight into games with friends, and even make a group before starting a game, load it up, and remain in that same group — game support depending.
That's going well beyond what Steam currently offers, making this not only a potential game changer for people playing Epic Games Store games, but a reason to use it over Steam if games are available on both.
The only thing is, Epic hasn't made it clear when we can expect this system to become available. Currently the social party system is slated as being a "future development" on the publicly available Trello board. PCGamesN reports that Epic will be adding player portraits with additional details about what you and your friends are doing, in the coming weeks. That's a step in the right direction.
There will also be a new system for finding friends with improved search across multiple platforms, and a new Do Not Disturb mode which will help keep social interactions from interrupting your gameplay.
Would any of these potential updates convince you to ditch Discord for the Epic Store?
