The short version (longer story below):
- Do you use surround sound or stereo+Atmos (or neither)?
- Do you feel like you can consistently and accurately identify exactly where sounds around you are coming from, and which team they belong to?
- If you’ve tried both, which one worked better for you?
My old stereo headset crapped out while I was in the middle of shopping online on Black Friday, so I got a new one with virtual 7.1 surround (HyperX Cloud II). Overwatch seemed like a good place to try it out, so I turned off Atmos and turned on 7.1 to play for a night.
The results surprised me. For whatever reason, I had expected “real” (virtual) surround to provide the same or better directionality than Atmos, but it was quite the opposite. I couldn’t tell whether sounds were coming from in front of me or behind, or whether they were allies or enemies. Everything sounded more realistic, but that often meant the sound of gunshots were echoing off the walls so I couldn’t tell which way they were coming from. After not getting used to it at all in 10-15 matches, I had to switch Atmos back on.
The thought occurred to me that this difference might explain a lot of the behaviors I see, which I’ve always assumed were a total lack of audio awareness, but might actually be players simply unable to identify where sounds are coming from. So now I’m curious whether other people have/had the same difficulty I did with it. If so, I’d strongly recommend giving the in-game Atmos feature a try in the sound options.
