The Weekly Free Talk Tuesday! Discussion - 25-07-2023
Welcome to the Free Talk Tuesday Discussion!
What are you up to this week? Want to discuss gaming news? Or maybe share your progress in a game. Any non-gaming related posts are also allowed in this thread to be shared with like-minded people here.
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How many of us really give much thought to the audio aspect of games? For me, poor audio implementations, bad music, and lousy sound effects can destroy immersion. As an audio professional in the gaming industry it’s always fun to hear other people’s opinions on the matter.
There's some games where audio can be utterly amazing and completely make the game for me. Persona 4 and 5 are both like this. The music is so iconic that it's the extremely rare case of me actually remembering video game music. I almost never do that. I'm not saying I don't enjoy game music, but most of it just isn't memorable to me and I will never be able to recognize it if you played it to me and asked me where it's from.
Beyond music, voice acting is the other big one for me. But I don't usually have concerns with the voices themselves. It's the animations that I constantly dislike. I swear, 95% of games suck at matching lips to audio. It constantly just feels wrong.
As for sound effects, I don't notice them much. But on the topic of audio, I really hate when games depend on audio or even worse, positional audio. I'm hearing impaired and have a cochlear implant. I basically only hear in one ear. I don't have directional audio. And I'm not good at detecting small changes in sound, so I can't easily do stuff like locate the source of a sound. If a sound is loud and distinctive, I'm fine with sound indicators, but if it's a quiet or subtle sound, I can miss such indicators. Of course, there's also other people who have it worse, so game devs should avoid making sound a dependency to do things.