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EgoMania's avatar
EgoMania
Seasoned Ace
8 years ago

Would it be too much to ask for a fix on the Audio?

I get that BioWare is done with the SP game after the last patch, but one thing that seems like it might be a simple fix is the audio issue caused by distance and being turned away.

I'm sure it sounds like a cool idea to mute audio when someone is standing behind you or you turn away or if someone is at a fair distance but it actually isn't a good thing. 

There are two situations in particular:

1) Conversations: Companions can be far away because the AI is lagging and well, they stand behind you often. This results in their lines being practically inaudible even though they are part of the conversation.

2) Audio logs: Sometimes you can activate audio logs that then run their lines. However, I have to stand there and face it to hear it properly cause if I turn to look around while listening to it. That's just annoying really.

Then there is one more issue that relates to audio. Whenever I open something like a box it cuts off audio. I cannot understand why opening a box makes me deaf but random lines can be triggered from companions while opening stuff and then the line gets cut off.

I'm not thinking my chances are great here but I have started a new playthrough and these things instantly annoyed me again. It's just a few things that would improve the game experience really and I could imagine that these might not be extremely difficult things to fix at least in part, but hey, I'm no programmer. Just seems like some volume settings could be adjusted without too much trouble.

2 Replies

  • The low volume of the rear audio channels is something that also bothered me. I have a surround sound setup and know of no other games that do it like this.

    While they fixed many issues in the months after the game's release, it's still riddled with bugs. The one that annoys me most is that neither of the sprint modes work unless the player also releases the move forward key. For instance: The shift key in 'toggle' mode only toggles off sprint if the press forward key isn't pressed. The shift key in 'hold mode' works as a 'toggle on', but to toggle 'off' you have to stop moving altogether. It's not only mind boggling that they never caught this issue, but that they never bothered fixing it.

    I think we can keep asking, but we shouldn't get our hopes up. No updates are coming. Even before BioWare ended support I managed to communicate my sprint issue with the game's lead designer who acknowledged my tweet, but when I brought it up again later he seemed unaware what I was talking about. I think they were flooded with requests and didn't deem fundamental gameplay issues as important as a wonky facial animation here and there.

  • EgoMania's avatar
    EgoMania
    Seasoned Ace
    8 years ago

    Indeed I have little to no hope but I guess I have just a teeny hope that maybe they pick this up and think....hmmm, there are actually a couple of easy things we could just to take care of at least some of it. I mean simply taking out the volume drop entirely when facing away might possibly be an easy thing to do. I dunno, but maybe. And the same could possible be true for companion volumes never changing individually or letting audio run when opening boxes.

    I really have no idea whether those are easy things to accomplish, but I'm hoping they might be and it's something small they might be moved to do somewhere in between or something.

    So no, I don't expect it, but I figured it was worth a shot bringing up at least. 

    As for the other things you mention, yeah, there's a fair few things I could bring up also and you bring up some valid examples there but I tried limiting myself to things that I felt might be easy to fix somehow and have a higher priority for me at least.

    I mean being able to press M for map but not to close it and having to press Tab for that instead is also one of those little things. But whereas there at least I can manage it I can live with that a bit more easily than the audio bugs that I cannot do anything with at all. Same for some of the overexposed lighting in a lot of places that makes the areas look cold and dead, but that may be something that takes more work to fix. I dunno. Not an expert on programming there.

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