• Light/Dark
  • Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.

Dark Souls Switch still suffers with Compressed Audio

Heazy

Heazy

IT Tech
Verified
Oct 28, 2017
3,656
London, UK
Playing with version 1.0.1 and I've noticed that like the beta this still suffers from hugely compressed audio.

If you thought the compression was to keep file size down during the beta, this was wrong.

Update:
 
Last edited:
Astral Lovelace

Astral Lovelace

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,722
I'm really hoping there's some kind of day 1 patch or the like or I won't be buying. Such a shame, I was really looking forward to this but the audio is hugely important to Dark Souls.
 
Chettlar

Chettlar

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,604
Something tells me we should be glad this wasn't released a while ago. Imagine what other horrible thing they encountered that they had to delay to fix, if we're having issues this obvious...
 
big_z

big_z

Member
Nov 2, 2017
7,794
most likely to fit the game onto a smaller card to cut cost. thanks Nintendo.
 
bllymcixi

bllymcixi

Alt Account
Member
Oct 12, 2018
75
sounds fine to me...

most people don't care and will likely be listening through the switch speakers or their tv speakers.
 

Deleted member 10737

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
49,774
big_z said:
most likely to fit the game onto a smaller card to cut cost. thanks Nintendo.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
i love how nintendo gets blamed for everything that goes wrong by other publishers just cuz the game is on their platform

bllymcixi said:
isn't it nintendo who specificies how much storage is on the cartridges?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
nintendo sells the carts. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 GB carts, it's up to the publisher which one they want to use.
 
Last edited:
lazygecko

lazygecko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,628
Bethesda pulled the exact same thing with the Skyrim Special Edition. All the sounds were low bitrate .xwm instead of uncompressed .wav. The public backlash from when people found out made them backtrack and patch it out.
 
bllymcixi

bllymcixi

Alt Account
Member
Oct 12, 2018
75
mazi said:
i love how nintendo gets blamed for everything that goes wrong by other publishers just cuz the game is on their platform


nintendo sells the carts. 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 GB carts, it's upto the publisher which one they want to use.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
fair enough. dark souls is only about 7GB.

still though most people don't care about the audio quality enough for them to spend more on a bigger card capacity i guess.
 

Deleted member 37917

Banned
Jan 10, 2018
7,207
Tokyo
I've written off this game a while ago anyway, but given that it was first revealed on switch, then significantly delayed, we could have expected nothing short of an outstanding port. Instead of that, we get an inferior version in almost every aspect. Thanks but no thanks. This will probably bomb and it'll be very much deserved.
 

Deleted member 10737

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
49,774
bllymcixi said:
still though most people don't care about the audio quality enough for them to spend more on a bigger card capacity i guess.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
yeah probably. at least it's much better than putting half the game on the cart and forcing a mandatory download.
maybe they can put the uncompressed audio as free dlc on the eshop, so if someone wants it and has to free storage they can download it. i don't think they care enough to do that tho.
 
deadfolk

deadfolk

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,525
Thanks for the confirmation. I have been on the fence about this for a while, but this makes it an easy decision and saves me some moolah for another game.
 
lazygecko

lazygecko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,628
It doesn't even have to be uncompressed. Just encoding them at a decent enough bitrate would make them virtually indistinguishable from lossless while still saving a significant amount of space if that were the problem.
 
UsoEwin

UsoEwin

Banned
Jul 14, 2018
2,063
Sample rate is really low, like 16khz low. I don't know what the hell they are thinking. You don't do this unless you are really constraint for size. Something the Switch is in no need of. This is extremely detrimental, and the network test completely put me off of this version.
 
gabdeg

gabdeg

Member
Oct 26, 2017
5,956
🐝
Dark Souls was a tiny game, even at release. Under 4GB on 360. If they had to recompress stuff to keep the game size down, they really messed up somewhere.
 

Deleted member 11018

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,419
mazi said:
i love how nintendo gets blamed for everything that goes wrong by other publishers just cuz the game is on their platform


nintendo sells the carts. 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 GB carts, it's up to the publisher which one they want to use.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
64GB arrive in 2019 by the way, bigger usable capacity than blu-rays. (they should have been here in 2018 but i guess they couldn't secure enough because of smartphones demands).

16GB is about $8 for box+cart, and 32GB is about $20 ? anyway, it's not cheap and nintendo puts a premium on the biggest capacity, because they cannot secure many from the foundries... thank you every-year-renewed-smartphones.
 
Barn

Barn

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,137
Los Angeles
This seems like an asinine decision, but after listening, I gotta be honest and admit that I wouldn't have noticed if no one had told me.
 
Maxina

Maxina

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
3,308
Can easily be patched in if enough people complain. Not something that should be done considering the game was already delayed for "further improvements".
 

Deleted member 10737

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
49,774
MikeNeko said:
64GB arrive in 2019 by the way, bigger usable capacity than blu-rays. (they should have been here in 2018 but i guess they couldn't secure enough because of smartphones demands).

16GB is about $8 for box+cart, and 32GB is about $20 ? anyway, it's not cheap and nintendo puts a premium on the biggest capacity, because they cannot secure many from the foundries... thank you every-year-renewed-smartphones.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
hopefully 64 GB coming means 32 GB will go down in price allowing more publishers to put their games on switch
 

Deleted member 10726

user requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,674
ResetERA
SweetVermouth said:
looked up some examples on reddit and damn this sounds like some 64kbps mp3 shit lol

Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


Menu sounds are fine but the rest reminds me of old flash games.

bllymcixi said:
fair enough. dark souls is only about 7GB.

still though most people don't care about the audio quality enough for them to spend more on a bigger card capacity i guess.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Given that the 360 version was 4GB, this brings up more questions than it answers. I wonder what happened.
 
DSP

DSP

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,120
Isn't Dark Souls on PC like 4-5GB? why they needed to compress it this much.
 
UsoEwin

UsoEwin

Banned
Jul 14, 2018
2,063
I would like to point out that LA Noire on Switch also has some pretty heinous audio issues. And that was ported by the same studio as this.
 
snausages

snausages

Member
Feb 12, 2018
10,337
The question I have I suppose is will this lead to problems reading audio cues. Would a fight like Manus descend into a mess of indiscernible audio soup and make the fight harder that it's designed to be.

mazi said:
isn't this one "remastered"? doesn't that mean better textures and stuff? those can get the size up.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This one has the original textures and effects
 
Herb Alpert

Herb Alpert

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,033
Paris, France
The price of the cartidges is definitely an issue. Most publishers will prefer to play it cheap sadly.
Why not offer a day one download of good audio though ?
 
OP
OP
Heazy

Heazy

IT Tech
Verified
Oct 28, 2017
3,656
London, UK
snausages said:
The question I have I suppose is will this lead to problems reading audio cues. Would a fight like Manus descend into a mess of indiscernible audio soup and make the fight harder that it's designed to be.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The audio itself isn't bad design, writing or production, so it doesn't sound messy at all, everything is still audible.

However, the sample rate is significantly lower, I make a lot of music and use production DAWs daily. So it's noticeable straight away for me, however I believe the average player won't even realise.


Jack Orion said:
This is because Nintendo charges out the ass for bigger cartridges.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I don't think this is a cartridge size issue, even if that was the case, a patch to download the correct assets would resolve this.

We still don't know if next week will give us a day one patch.
 
Richter1887

Richter1887

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
39,148
The way Namco handled this remaster was really bad to be honest.

Add bad sound quality on the Swirch to the list.
 
noyram23

noyram23

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
9,372
Just offer up an optional download for those who want better audio. And it should be offered since audio/music is a significant portion of a Soulsborne experience.
 

Deleted member 9584

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
7,132
I've decided to cancel my order and ignore the Switch version until Namco addresses the issue and patches it.
 

Deleted member 23046

Account closed at user request
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
6,876
Maybe I am wrong, but aren't SD cards more made for linear mass storage than intensive random disc acess ? Could that sound compression be related to data streaming and access time issues, on the port of an old game that wasn't really coded with this in mind ? Just asking, because space isn't the problem apparently.
 
DeuceGamer

DeuceGamer

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,476
Really dissappinting how Namco handled this release after announcing it on Switch first. They sacrificed a lot of sales on Switch. I don't think those sales were made up on PS4/X1. Probably should have made sure all 3 released at the same time and done a better job with certain things like the Audio.
 
Atolm

Atolm

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,826
The original Dark Souls is less than 4GB on PC, iirc. How can they mess this up?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.