| BenKenobi88 said: @Non Sequor, that can't be true. Games that have online capabilities where you interact with other people don't change the rating, it simply says "Game Experience May Change During Online Play." |
Every sub-T rated game with online play I can think of either has no communication between players or has heavy restrictions on communication (e.g. friend codes or restricting communication to canned phrases). While I can't find anything in the ESRB's guidelines expressly forbidding real online chat with strangers in an E or E10+ game, it seems like an implicit rule to me.
After all, I remember seeing local news channels doing stories about how pedophiles can talk to your children through Mario Kart DS and pictochat (I'm not making that up). If an E rated game with real online chat were released, it would attract tons of sensationalist news stories. I'm pretty sure the publishers are aware of this, and even if any publisher dared to include voice chat in an E rated game, the ESRB would likely use any trivial excuse to push the rating up to T.
Edit: Case in point: many fantasy MMOs seem to qualify for the E10+ rating (mild or fantasy violence and infrequent or mild blood) yet they're all rated T.
