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Did you realize how bad the sound quality in Assassins Creed Valhalla is?
- Thread starter Imur
- Start date
Maybe it's hearing damage from never wearing earplugs at concerts or at work but I never noticed anything being wrong with the sound.
Akchually
it is the animus fucking things up when you are in, they need to invest in better tech /s
But, yeah, I can notice this and hope there would be some sound/ texture update pack.
it is the animus fucking things up when you are in, they need to invest in better tech /s
But, yeah, I can notice this and hope there would be some sound/ texture update pack.
90 something hours, 100% achievements amd i never noticed any of this. Maybe I'll notice when I go back for the dlc. Played with headphones
If the average person cared more about sound quality this issue would have blown up instead of being largely glossed over. Did a single media critic review even mention how crap it was? Imagine the uproar if the visual fidelity of frame rate was at the same quality as the audio, there would have been a shitstorm.
I think a lot of people, myself included simply did not notice, my threshold for good sound quality is pretty low, i had no idea the last three assassin's creed games had bad sound quality despite spending hundreds of hours playing them.
In my case it's because of bad hearing in general and being used to poorly recorded music and i think a lot of people do not have particularly good speakers/headphones at home.
I thought the combat sounds were the worst part. For example, the finisher where you kick the enemies groin and then stomp. It had no impact and was almost like sound effects were completely missing or not mixed properly.
In general I would say the combat was where I noticed most of the unusually quiet effects next to super loud effects. It seemed to vary from battle to battle, whether I was using a home theater system, or headphones. The whole experience was bizarre from a sound perspective.
Yep. 3D audio is horrible in this game. The audio quality becomes passable with it disabled in Valhalla.
Unless its a sony first party, or emphasized by the dev team, I'd suggest leaving it off.
The combat sound effects absolutely sound bad, it's one of the most noticeable areas (along with the voices and snow footsteps). It's a huge contributing factor to why people say there's no weight or impact to the combat even if they don't specifically say or realise it's partly due to the poor sound design. A lot of shooters have the same issue where the guns sound weak so it doesn't feel satisfying.
3D audio and Tempest in particular messes with frequency response which can result in downgraded audio quality. Valhalla doesn't have good sound design or soundstage to begin with so any benefits of trying to make it sound "3D" aren't going to dough whilst making it sound even worse in the process.
Yeah another here that hasn't really noticed anything too bad. Running through pretty top end sound system and speakers its all seemed fine for me apart from the VA obviously not being output in 5 1. Its front speakers only and spinning the camera round didn't change where the voices come from.
But yeah, it sounds pretty good to me
But yeah, it sounds pretty good to me
It's unbelievably bad. Valhalla is easily the worst sounding AAA game probably ever. The audio team should be pretty damn embarrassed at the quality.
Ubi straight up refuses to acknowledge it as an issue, so it's never getting fixed.
Its bad enough that I will not be buying the next AC game unless they fix it. I'll be waiting for reviews to know if it's as bad. It kills any immersion in the world whatsoever and actively pulls me out of it.
It is 100% unacceptable.
Ubi straight up refuses to acknowledge it as an issue, so it's never getting fixed.
Its bad enough that I will not be buying the next AC game unless they fix it. I'll be waiting for reviews to know if it's as bad. It kills any immersion in the world whatsoever and actively pulls me out of it.
It is 100% unacceptable.
Game was very glitchy but still very fun. Don't blame them for the issues. They released it for like 15 platforms during a new gen transition in a pandemic
I havent olayed it yet, but I can say I have been playing Watch Dogs legion, im enjoying it I knew what its about but the poor quality sound hit me there aswell, also theres a horrible cracking and pop in the audio, alot in the menu and map, but also now and then during gameplay.
don't blame the audio team — they're always at the mercy of programmers saying "compressor goes brr" when they're trying to lower the file size of the game. no audio team listened to this and was like "yep, this is exactly what i was hoping for!"
(meanwhile, artists continue shipping 4k textures for an NPC's shoe with little scrutiny, but such is the problem with mass asset generation and marketing priorities)
Nah, there's plenty of other examples of AAA games with dire sound quality. Prey 2017, Wolfenstein 2018, Infamous 2 to name a few.
The thing is even without the compression the audio wouldn't be good, it just wouldn't sound as bad. The way it's inherently mixed is a big problem too, and the actual sound samples themselves.
This is absolutely the kind of thing the games audio director is responsible for. Valhalla uses the same engine as Odyssey and that sounded completely fine compared to Valhalla.
Yeah, same. I assume we got the same bitrate as consoles but I didn't notice any "tin can" compression and definitely didn't have audible pops and snaps like others are reporting. The mix did tend to bury voices though, obviously
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I use a 7.1 setup and half the sounds in the game sound like they're coming from underwater. Everything is muffled. Even using sound spatially feels off. Trying to pinpoint certain sounds in the world is way more difficult than it should be. It's a shame because the music is so good. I would love to hear it clear and uncompressed.
I wonder if cheaping out on audio quality is a common thing for Ubisoft. I always had a issue in division 2 where there was no bass in any sound in the game. Even gunshots wouldn't come through as low frequency sound. Now I want to go check some more Ubisoft games.
I wonder if cheaping out on audio quality is a common thing for Ubisoft. I always had a issue in division 2 where there was no bass in any sound in the game. Even gunshots wouldn't come through as low frequency sound. Now I want to go check some more Ubisoft games.
Division 2 is their best sounding game by far, it's not even close aside from Siege.
unless you're working on Rez or something, the audio director isn't going to get the final say on the the audio's footprint in overall package size for the game. they may have bounds to work within, and they have responsibility for how that's allocated, but if you're working with a design that's expanding beyond what can reasonably be fit within your allocated memory-budget, you can't be expected to literally -- i don't know -- invent better compression on the side or something.
it isn't like some AD was like "hmm, I know we had something that sounded marginally better in Origins, but fuck it, I'm feeling lazy today, let's just run everything through a low pass filter for kicks". if ubisoft has a culture where the audio team is the bottom of the totem pole --which based on the last generation of their games certainly seems to be the case -- you can't put the blame entirely on the audio team themselves. they ain't the ones packaging the game's final assets, presumably.
unless the argument is "this wasn't because of memory constraints, everyone working on AC:V audio is just completely incompetent", which... i don't know. seems less likely to me.
Valhalla without the massive compression would probably just sound like Odyssey and Origins (which also sounded compressed though not as much) and those aren't considered good sounding games either. Origins in particular also sounds terrible.
I played Origins on Xbox and it sounded fine. I played Odyssey on PC and it sounded totally fine, no noticeable issues whatsoever. I'm playing Valhalla and it sounds like complete garbage. That isn't "marginally" better - it's night and day. For me, at least. Some people here say Origins and Odyssey also don't have good audio quality, and I am by no means an audiophile - but Valhalla's audio is so bad it completely rips me out of the game every time I play it.
Valhalla's audio issues go far deeper than just the audio quality, too - even if it's the most glaring issue. The audio mixing is easily some of the worst I've ever heard in a AAA game - footsteps are insanely loud, the horn is insanely loud, and yet other elements are unbelievably quiet. The VO quality and volume is inconsistent. Positional audio just... does not exist. You hear a wolf howl and you have absolutely no idea where it's coming from, because the game doesn't tell you.
None of these things were issues in Origins or Odyssey, at least for me.
It's unacceptable, and I don't believe it's a memory constraint issue at all. Why would it be when previous titles for older consoles sounded fine? Why would it be an issue on PC at all after it wasn't in Odyssey on PC?
Ubisoft open world titles have insanely poor audio and they have for the last decade. Somehow, impressively, Valhalla is even worse. It's fucking unfathomable.
Yes! It doesn't feel like a crew singing at all, black flag was such fun to sail with
Yup, it's unplayable with that on. I've never heard anything so broken in a game before.
Holy crap was about to create a thread for this thinking something was wrong with my setup.
Yes the sound quality is awful. Playing on a Series X. I kept changing settings on the game, console, and my amp trying to get it to sound better but it just wasn't.
It's sad really because the music is amazing.
Yes the sound quality is awful. Playing on a Series X. I kept changing settings on the game, console, and my amp trying to get it to sound better but it just wasn't.
It's sad really because the music is amazing.
Yeah, I was a bit surprised when the download was only 46gb, and I am guessing compressed audio plays a part in that.
It's pretty disorienting. I use a two channel setup and I thought maybe I had my left and right channels mixed up, but it's just the game. This is in addition to the bad audio quality in general.
I can relate, it's a reason for me not to get the game.
Imagine that kind of problem in the latest James Bond or any other blockbuster movie. It's completely unacceptable.
If this happened to a movie, critics would tear it apart. But for games, subpar audio quality seems to get constantly overlooked.
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