Or whatever you introduced at blizzcon one year. You talked about how the sound helps players find enemies with footsteps and location based sounds depending on where they are. You’d know if a Lucio was about to come because you heard the sliding. Now it’s all just a jumbled mess and it’s driving me insane. I can hear everything, everywhere. I am looking around but the sound is coming from further down the map but sounds like it is right next to me. Is it just me and my PC or did they change something?
Editing in if someone wishes to deep dive into what I am talking about here
Yeah, they messed it up. Nothing sounds like it’s coming from the direction it’s actually coming from. Maddening, honestly. I’m just constantly swinging around looking for danger because I can’t actually tell where danger is coming from…
Yeah I can hear things clearly, but damn the Reinhardt around the corner creeping up a hall does sound like he is RIGHT next to me.
I had to purchase a better headset, and things sounded a little clearer. But I have a large hearing range (unlike my husband that had his hearing damaged in the army).
I should note I went crazy spending hours adjusting my sound settings to try and fix this before. Good to know that was a waste of time.
Now that you mention it, I thought I could hear where players are in OW1 at some point but now I literally can’t remember the last time I heard anything useful position wise.
I mean, you can hear if a reaper is clomping around SOMEWHERE behind or in front of you, but anything more than that no.
I honestly play worse because of this. I noticed this back in November and I believe the sound was like normal before some patch back den. I stopped playing and came back now for Mystery Heroes comp. Still noticing this and blizzard hasn’t acknowledged this issue at all which is concerning. to me the game is close to unplayable.
Nope, theres something very wrong with sound. For starters, Tracer footstep sounds are so loud i can’t hear a thing besides her footsteps from 2 miles away lol
Same, I gave up years ago. The sound system is so messed up, sometimes dolby atmos is superior to 7.1, and then something breaks and now 7.1 is superior.
I may disable 7.1 and try dolby atmos to see if it is any better this time.
I use Ashe as a test dummy, because I never get her location right.
There was a time late in OW1 where they completely messed up the sound, small train areas in route 66 sounded like massive echoey tunnels, but right now it seems fine to me. I can tell where everything is.
They’ve been having off and on issues with the sound system since Overwatch 1. They made some big talk about the “new” audio system in OW2, but it’s just the same old system with new sounds slapped onto it, still has all the old weird issues and some new ones as well.
Gotta give their audio team credit, they know how to self-promote themselves and their work to their Blizzard bosses/managers to look infallible, without ever actually fixing any of their major problems.
I wonder if they will ever talk about this. Because you’re exactly right.
What happend to all the different audio “spaces” you’d get from different areas?
I tried every setting and it’s all just a mess. Headphones might be the worst, but everything else is also not showing the correct spot. Had a tracer shooting in front of me and sounded like she was to the side.
Depends on the game. Ow is fast pace game that demands you to act quickly, in such cases brain could omit some inputs from ears. And becase its all personal this additional filtration on prefrontal cortex level might help to distinguish sounds and help or have quite appositive effect
I don’t hear about half the audio for ults. A bob killed me - where tf did that come from? A junk tyre? Where tf did that come from when I didn’t hear any announcement from the junk he was using his broken ult. Widow snipes as you peek from cover - oh she has walls. Wish I could hear that being announced.
It’s a serious issue with this game. The directionality and volume of sounds is terrible and there is so much going on at once with so many sounds being very loud that it’s hard to use sound at all except to think “oh I hear a soldier, wonder which direction he’s in”.
Very disappointed with sound overall as a tool to help in this game.
I can play other fast paced games fine, I’ll chaulk this up to bad sound design in OW2 and they messed up somewhere. And as seen in the replies here, I am not alone.
An update clearly changed something a while ago, my audio has been really bad for informational purposes.
I have a hard time telling the position (far/close) with sound nowadays, but I can tell you if it’s at the front or the back, but not the left or the right. I can hear someone crouching, which is anormal to my knowledge, but I also can’t hear a rein charging unless I’m getting pinned if I didn’t see the reinhardt in my LoS prior. Something’s really off the park with audio.
This may be the case for some people but the sound is messed up, regardless. Even automatic voicelines are broken, not only for the objective but for character(s) specific kills as well. Unless someone’s age makes them join the enemy team or literally make the person they killed become another character, it’s not strictly an age issue. Sound is scuffed in general.
The sad thing is they did have an excellent 3D sound system, even going beyond the positional elements to emphasize sounds that were important to hear. And then they threw all of it away for OW2.
It’s probably the main reason I don’t play this anymore. It got too frustrating having almost no positional awareness just because they removed a critical feature from the game and seemingly have no intention of bringing it back.
