Q:
Why is 3d sound based off camera position?
This is a problem in many 3rd person view games, I was hoping GW2 would shake this trend.
I refer to this as “locus of hearing”.
Related to this are the droplets of water on the camera lens when a character exits water; ahh what magic camera is this following me around? The droplets of water should appear on my character, not an immersion-breaking magic floating lens.
IIRC in one of the MMO’s I have played there was a control in the options that allowed placement of the sound on the character in addition to sound according to the camera view. I know for certain that at least one of the 3rd person games I have played had this option.
It’s ridiculous. I literally can’t hear the person if they’re standing right in front of me. I have to turn the camera to be able to hear them.
(edited by claudekennilol.9251)
I suppose sound being based on the camera makes some kind of sense, since that is where you are physically experiencing the game from, but I do see your point. Maybe some sounds, such as NPC speech, should be based on your character. But I imagine having a mixture would create some jarring inconsistencies in the sound…
It wouldn’t bother me so much it being this way if I could hear the NPC directly opposite my PC from the camera.
I have this problem too. Sometimes it can be real bad in the personal story as even when I am facing the person and they are right in front of me I still can’t hear them. Also sometimes the voice sounds just bugged, and can’t be made sense of, it really gets annoying……
I really wish there were options to ALWAYS hear npc’s that are talking to you no matter what direction they are to you. It should just be determind on their distance to you not their location.
As to those water effects I just think of it as my eyes are wet and blurry for a few seconds when I get out of the water and I’m sure this is what Anet were going for. After all we have no way of drying ourselves off.
In case you still have this problem after more than a year, I found a solution. I had the same problem as you. I couldn’t hear what was directly in front of my character.
It was actually a setting in windows that was the problem: Go to Control Panel -> Sound. There’s a list of your outputs. Select the one you’re using and press “Configure”. Mine was set to 7.1 Surround… I changed it to stereo, since I’m on headphones. And voilá, problem solved!
Since the camera represents your viewpoint, your eyes if you were there looking at your character, why wouldn’t your ears also be there?
RIP City of Heroes
Since the camera represents your viewpoint, your eyes if you were there looking at your character, why wouldn’t your ears also be there?
…except the RPG in MMORPG means role playing game….. you are not the camera….. you are your character.
As far as I know this game is not advertised as a camera-man simulator.
Since the camera represents your viewpoint, your eyes if you were there looking at your character, why wouldn’t your ears also be there?
…except the RPG in MMORPG means role playing game….. you are not the camera….. you are your character.
As far as I know this game is not advertised as a camera-man simulator.
If you want to think that you’re the person in the game, I can understand why this is annoying. But you aren’t. You’re the person outside the game, experiencing the world from a few feet above the head of the character you’re controlling. It’s done to give the effect that you are watching what is happening.
This is almost certainly a problem with the game outputting surround sound but you only having two speakers. If you have a surround sound system, check to see if there’s a Matrix option – this mixes left and right channel audio to form a center channel audio… but with the effect of silencing the intended center channel.
www.getunicorned.com / northernshiverpeaks.org
It’s like when sounds get muffled because your character is standing around a corner or on the other side of a plank of wood (I’m looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins).
It’s a rather odd thing designers decide to make, for some reason.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
It’s ridiculous. I literally can’t hear the person if they’re standing right in front of me. I have to turn the camera to be able to hear them.
This is a classic symptom of having your audio device set to surround sound at the operating system level when you either don’t have surround sound speakers or the center speaker of your surround system is malfunctioning. Check your hardware and/or OS audio settings and see if that doesn’t straighten things out for ya?
Let’s hope the OP found a solution more than a year ago. ; )
Or, in other words, had I not just skimmed over the bottom, more recent comments, I should just say weolgwang and timmyf have already troubleshot the issue just fine. Good job spreading the word about these technical problems!