Guild Wars 2

I’ve encountered an issue with certain audio elements from your character disappearing at times – i.e. the footsteps or running sounds of your character, skills sounds etc. This happens regardless of how the audio latency is set in-game. (EDIT: Please see my comment below about vistas – this seems to tie in directly with this problem).

In addition to that, I’ve also noticed that sounds sometimes “boots-up” very slowly when you use the fast-travel system, or if you use a portal or asura gate to port into another section of the game world – basically, wherever you see a loading screen. Some sounds also never appear again i.e. the footsteps example noted above, unless you completely exit the game.

I’m using a Roland UA-25EX sound card, running a Core i7 2600K rig with 16Gb ram and Win7 64bit. If any other other information is required, I’d be more than happy to provide it. Also, I’ve submitted an in-game bug report, but there doesn’t seem to be a sufficient category for this type of stuff, so I wrote this post as well, just in case.

I’ve noticed this aswell.

The only issue I have with sound is if I watch a new vista in its entirety, the sound mutes for a minute or so. No combat sound, music, jumping or weapon swooshing. After a bit, it returns to normal.

I recently had my sound die while exploring in open world PvE and had to restart the game to get it going again. The only change I’ve made on my computer that might have caused this was upgrading my graphic drivers to the nvidia beta 304.79 drivers. They drastically improved my framerates (from 20fps at medium settings, to 93 fps at highest settings), but I’m not sure if this is causing the audio to die out.

Update: I went into the in-game sound options and changed my sound device from “default” to “headset” and the problem seems to have disappeared. I will update this post if the problem occurs again.

I have been having this issue as well. I don’t recall it being a problem in BWE1.

Making the game use ALchemy does not change the issue. (X-Fi card)

I assume they modified the sound system after BWE1. Unfortunately, it’s for the worse. Some sounds will disappear entirely or come back after a short while.

Reported the bug during headstart, so doesn’t hurt to report it here too.

I’ve had the problem occasionally where I can’t hear specific sounds that later fade in
I also occasionally get times when specific sounds are much louder than everything else as though they are ignoring the game’s volume setting

Yes me too (X-Fi card, it supports up to 128 channels on gaming mode), i think its a sound volume on individual effects, some get too lound and others so low to the point of being muted, it happens randomly, after initial login everything is fine and working, and after a while or doing pve suddenly i cant hear the reain or footsteps, or attaks or the wind, some are very hard to even detect they are missing if you dont know the area, im trying to figure out whats causing it, settings, engine or card. Tested on all mixing buffer sizes and medium to high sound quality.

The audio bug I get is the feedback loop that sounds like a siren or alarm and requires me to shut the client down and restart. I have reduced the audio quality and that seems to have lessened things a little. It is still a surprise to have it happen and a loud shock. It does suck if I am WvW and have to go back into the Q.

this happened to me when I was down’ed at a sniper rifle, I got up after killing my hunt and I had what sounded like super distant sound. Like I would shoot, and a second later I would hear it like it was far away and lagged..

I’ve played around with this issue a bit, and it seems one of the biggest culprits is the vista system. When you click on a vista, the audio follows the camera – so say the vista point is on a waterfall, the sound of that waterfall will fade into the distance, and the sounds immediately around the camera viewpoint, will become audibile – i.e. the wildlife etc.

However, when the vista ends (with that blinding dip-to-white transition they chose to use), the sound of your character doesn’t “return”. The camera is now behind your character as per usual, but the audio coming from your character like skills, footsteps etc. isn’t.

The only way around this issue at the moment, is to either log out and back in again, or try and engage in combat. During combat, the sound will start to slowly fade back in again if you’re in combat long enough. Weird little bug this.