reddit (captainstarpaw)| Analysis: Assassin's Creed highlights a very concerning trend regarding how game audio is being poorly handled.

[Plax]

Not surprised. I had also noticed sound issues. Even something as simple as walking through the snow just sounds off compared to the rest of the sound mix.

 

[TacoSupreme]

Even aside from any quality complaints about the bitrate of the actual files, I've noticed some awful sound bugs in both Watch Dogs Legion and Valhalla. Sometimes sounds just wont play, other times things will sound like they're in the wrong environment, and sometimes the directional audio is completely busted. It's kinda shocking how bad it is.

 

[-Tetsuo-]

The sound is pretty bad in Valhalla. Absolutely the worst part of the game.

 

[Muitnorts]

Well, I guess we know which studio Mark Cerny is refering here, lol
"There's a pecking order within the game teams. The graphics folks get the lion's share of the hardware resources and the audio team has to struggle to get much anything at all," says Cerny. Once, while briefing a developer on the PS5′s high performance audio processor, he says he was told, "Great, we'll use that unit for AI." During one of his studio tours, Cerny recalled meeting 120 workers — none of whom worked in audio.

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Yeahhh I was going to say that both new consoles having dedicated audio hardware could cause this to shift as the generation continues.
Then you reminded me of that Cerny story. At least there have been games with good audio recently. Demon's Souls sounds amazing and for a big third party example I remember Modern Warfare being strong. Sad that AC seems shit for audio, it puts me off buying it.

 

[Pargon]

You have to wonder how much of this is due to poor content delivery systems.
Last-gen in particular, many games were hugely inflated in size due to shipping content that most people were never going to use.
I'm only ever going to want to listen to the original language track, or the English version.
Many AAA games are delivering audio tracks for 5+ languages, and compress the hell out of the audio to keep the size down. Give me the language I need at 1/5 the compression rather than five highly compressed tracks.
Some games were even delivering multiple copies of pre-rendered videos, rather than using a single video and multiple audio tracks to go along with it. Resident Evil Remake HD delivered its videos in three different resolutions on PC for some reason.

 

[disparate]

You have to wonder how much of this is due to poor content delivery systems.
Last-gen in particular, many games were hugely inflated in size due to shipping content that most people were never going to use.
I'm only ever going to want to listen to the original language track, or the English version.
Many AAA games are delivering audio tracks for 5+ languages, and compress the hell out of the audio to keep the size down. Give me the language I need at 1/5 the compression rather than five highly compressed tracks.
Some games were even delivering multiple copies of pre-rendered videos, rather than using a single video and multiple audio tracks to go along with it. Resident Evil Remake HD delivered its videos in three different resolutions on PC for some reason.

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IIRC Titanfall 1 had this issue where they shipped uncompressed audio for multiple languages and the size of that game was fucking enormous at the time.