Worried you’ll miss a message from your friend while you’re engaging in an epic battle? Worry no more with the Game Overlay!

What this article covers:

• How to Enable Game Overlay
• Customizing the Game Overlay
  • Text
  • Voice
  • Call
  • Pinning
• Technical Issues with the Game Overlay
  • Less Compatible Games

How to Enable Game Overlay

If you experience lag, game crashing, or any other issues while the Game Overlay is enabled we recommend disabling Game Overlay for that specific game.

1. Open up your User Settings by tapping on the cogwheel next to your Username.

2. Press the Overlay tab and enable in-game overlay.

3. After enabling the in-game overlay, then go to Registered Games by heading to User Settings > Registered Games.

4. Here you can toggle to enable or display the overlay and what games it will be displayed on. The monitor icon with a slash through it means the overlay won’t display. 

Customizing the Game Overlay

Text

If a server, DM, or group message is currently muted or you have Streamer Mode turned on, messages will not be displayed.

Adventuring through Azeroth and worried you might miss a new message from your friend? Try turning on Text Chat notifications! 

If you want to see messages displayed through the Game Overlay, go to  User Settings > Game Overlay and make sure that Show Text Chat Notifications is enabled.

Once enabled, new messages through DMs, group messages, or servers will be displayed right over your gameplay.

Voice

While in a Voice chat or call (DM, group message call, or voice channel in a server) you can see who is talking, or who might accidentally be muted.

Under User Settings > Game Overlay, you can change how these are displayed. Let’s go over each setting!

Avatar Size

Avatar Size can be Large or Small depending on your preference.

Here is what a Small avatar will look like:

Here is what a Large avatar will look like:

Display Names

You can have the display name shown for each user that is in the voice call or channel with you. This can be set to one of the following:

Always - The display name will always be shown

Only While Speaking - The display name will only be displayed while the user is actively speaking

Never  - The display name will never be displayed

Here is an example of the variations of display names being shown and not shown that can be set: 

Display Users

Finally, you can change how a user is displayed. They can be shown always, or only while speaking.

Always - Selected users will only be displayed as long as they are in the voice call or voice channel. If a user is also muted or deafened, an icon will be displayed next to their name.

Only While Speaking - Users will only be displayed when they are actively talking or any audio is being picked up from their microphone.

Call

You can receive and answer calls with Game Overlay! You can answer a call by using your designated keybinding or hovering your mouse over the incoming call and tapping on Join Call or Decline.

Pinning

If you’re worried you’ll miss a message while battling monsters in a game, you can always pin a specific channel, direct message, or group message.

You’ll need to make sure you have a keybinding for Toggle Overlay Lock. You can set this by going to User Settings > Game Overlay and then setting your own custom keybinding, or use the default one.

1. Once you’ve set your own keybinding make sure the game overlay is turned on and go ahead and open a game of your voice. 

2. Press on your keybinding that you set (default is SHIFT+`) and that will pull up Discord. 

3. Navigate to your channel, DM, or group message of choice and press on the Pin icon to the left of the Search bar.

4. After being pinned you’ll see a new icon appear to the left of the Pin icon, this will help you with changing the Opacity of the Discord app. You can move the slider to the left to make it more opaque or right to make it less opaque. Once you’re happy with the setting, you can tap on the “x” to close the Opacity menu.

5. Next, you can resize the pinned window so it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay. While the game overlay is unlocked (SHIFT+` unless you set another keybinding for it) place your pointer over the bottom right of the chat window and then click and hold and drag it to your desired size. 

6. You can also move the chat to anywhere on the screen by clicking and dragging on the chat window. 

7. You won’t be able to chat directly in the pinned message, however, you can respond to any message if you unlock the overlay (SHIFT+` or the keybinding you set). Tap the keybinding again or press outside of the Discord window to lock it back into place.

Technical Issues with the Overlay

At the moment, the overlay is some pretty intense tech with a bit of arcane magic going on under the hood. Unfortunately, our various Anti-Virus software buddies haven't quite finished prodding Discord's files for the 100% good to go. Enabling the overlay might get Discord flagged by your Anti-Virus software. This is ok! We can guarantee it is a false positive. We're working with all the different companies to get Discord allowlisted.

As you go into your software to add Discord to accepted processes, know that any file path that matches this one is 100% organic, certified, robograss-fed, homegrown Discord goodness:

%appdata%\discord\0.0.***highest-number***\modules

(the ***highest-number*** refers to the latest version of Discord. Your path will have different text here.)

You can allowlist files with that path with no problem.

Less Compatible Games

We’re currently experimenting with the Discord Game Overlay! If you are using the overlay while playing Baldur’s Gate 3, Roblox, or Counter-Strike 2 and you’re experiencing issues, try changing your game display settings to either windowed or borderless windowed. This temporary experiment should only impact a small group of Discord users!

There are some games that we know that do not work with the Discord Game Overlay. Unfortunately, if the overlay is not working with these games, there is nothing that we can do on our end and this is working as intended. Here is a list of known games: 

There are a few other cases that overlay will not work with. The overlay is currently not supported for Mac, games with Vulkan support, and generally older games.

If you do experience a game crashing while you have the overlay enabled, please grab this log:

%appdata%\discord\0.0.***highest-number***\modules\discord_hook\hook 

And then submit a ticket to our Support team along with what the issue is and what game this happened with, so they can take a closer look.