Guild Wars 2

After logging in and pressing ‘Play’ from the launcher, as soon as the actual game window opens on my machine there’s an extraordinarily loud distortion sound for a fraction of a second. It’s actually become necessary for me to turn off my speakers before launching the game because it’s so extraordinarily loud.

Once in game, there are no issues and everything functions as expected, but I want to express again how horribly loud this is – it seems to entirely disregard system volume settings hence outright disabling speakers before launch.

This began when I updated to Windows 10, and my first though was imperfect drivers, but precisely the same thing happens on two Windows 10 machines – one running an integrated Realtek the other a Creative Labs X-Fi discrete soundcard. It also occurs on both machines when using a USB headset – so I’m disinclined to suspect individual drivers, rather some odd behaviour when the game’s audio engine initialises in Windows 10.

I can provide System Information from both machines if desired, but it seems to be readily reproducible without specific hardware.