Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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Greedy corpos aside, going back to BO1 the audio design was fantastic; everything from the subtle crunch of a boot on gravel to the clack of reloading a gun. Pure ear candy (except for maybe the crazy over-dramatic melee sound). BO 2-5 were good too in terms of sfx but nowhere near 1. I feel like that era had a special attention to detail to audio that modern games don't care to emulate. Maybe they will with 6; either way microtransactions suck and I'll stick to playing the older COD games for this very reason
I think the audio detail was so high because it helped to sell the realism of the game. Go back and play those early games and they don’t look nearly as good as my brain remembers, but the audio helped to fill in the lack of gravel looking texture and leaves tussling sounds in bushes that had two twigs on them.
"For some reason." Money. The reason is money.
Before I read the article I just assumed that the developers put uncompressed audio files into a DLC, in order to both reduce filesize of the game and provide people that car about audio a better experience.
But actually its just an extra charge for spatial audio for some reason. Who will even actually buy this? I wonder if this is a test to see if it is financially valuable to keep in the game engine (spoiler alert, most people do not care about this and wont pay extra for it).
I care a lot about audio and that’s why I don't use spatial. Stereo all the way with a good pair of headphones, or better yet, a really nice stereo monitor setup.
Then again, audio is also a drop in the bucket of why I don’t care for COD games lately. The sound is often weird, and the hit marker sounds too much like a cash register, which reminds me what COD games are really about - in case I forgot about the clowns and gorillas running around for a moment.
Proper spatial audio, ie not the DSP effect that upconverts stereo, but something like Atmos or DTS:X that’s sending object based audio to an arbitrary number of speakers, does sound better to me on headphones in the few games that support it. The only game where use it regularly that I can think of is MSFS, but it does sound better than headphone stereo. You do have to pay Dolby to use it, or buy headphones that come with it, however. Sounds best on my 5.1 home theater, but also does a good job with binaural headphone output.
Shocking. A company mistreats the people purchasing their game like crap with a micro transaction for “better audio quality”. I really hope this bites them in the ass.