The new Positional Audio is...not positional at all.

[Worbane]

I used to have a pretty good idea where baddies were when I heard them mumbling or sounding the alarm nearby. After the update though, no idea. It sounds like they are right on me, with little if any sense of right or left, forward or back, and I hunt and hunt, then they turn out to be 100 yards away behind a building or something. Some of them I never did find...I guess they were in some other room or under the floors or something. So yeah, the patch notes said this was improved...it was made much, much worse.

Anyway, it has me not knowing if something is a threat I should 'clear' or just general unalerted baddie chatter two rooms away. A huge audio downgrade.

[Ragingwasabi]

isnt the new audio stuff only added to the PoE? normal missions are unchanged

[Worbane]

I really could not tell you that. All I know is I went to play as usual and found myself hearing a baddie...that I thought was 10-20 'feet' away (no reverb/muffled effect like a distant enemy should have), went sneaking around looking for them only to find they were nowhere near me. They were '100 yards' away in another room, if I ever found them at all. Up until the patch, they were always pretty close to where I "heard" them to be.

patch notes: "Improved the way players perceive gun fire and explosion sounds at long distances in the Plains of Eidolon. The sounds are now more believable at long distances and give players a more accurate perception of enemy distance."

I read this in the notes and thought hey, good. But now I suspect tinkering with that has made the positional audio in regular areas worse.

Edited October 14, 2018 by Worbane