Combat Sound Effects Distorted

[SpecG]

Hello!

Since getting in and playing around with Endwalker a little this morning I almost immediately noticed the quality of the weaponskill and ability sound effects are incredibly distorted in various ways. Some are muffled, others crackle, and some others like the sound effect that plays whenever you complete a weaponskill combo action are really quiet and almost unable to be heard altogether.

From what I have been able to tell this issue is only present on the DirectX 11 client. If I launch the game in DirectX 9 the sound effects go back to normal.

As a note: This is ONLY for weaponskill/ability sound effects. Music, UI sounds, voices, emotes, and even character footsteps all sound just fine. I have heard multiple reports from friends who are also experiencing this same issue. It appears to be something wrong with the sound effects rather than an audio balance problem on the players' end.

[Laziel]

Same issue was in Bozja and combat effects starting going in and out then it stopped all together the only thing I can hear now is the pin when pressing actions and background music. No sound on footsteps/combat effects or other players sounds

[Loyan]

Thank you so much for that topic, i was having same problems, and the audio distorced give me motion sickness, i restart game with Direct X 9.0 and is working better now (Not 100%). Hope they ajust that!

Please let me know if find other alternatives to improve it.

Edit: Even with 9.0 sounds still weird, and like you said is ONLY for combat skills

[Catwho]

I started a leveling roulette duty (Castrum Albania) and suddenly all my battle sound effects were gone. And my music started having pauses/cracks and the aforementioned distortion. I took the risk and restarted the game, and thankfully that seems to have helped it.

There is definitely some issue happening with the sound.

[Xerkrosis]

Confirm this. It's like an overloaded microphone, where skill sounds are distorted. None other sound is affected - music, speech, environment all fine. But whenever I'm fighting I want to turn sound off.

[Dalmacus]

Hey I just tested most of the job's skills and can confirm the sfx of the skills are pretty muffled and not as crisp prior 6.0.

[FangsBrightclaw]

I've been playing DRK and have the same issue. Though, this is also on top of random popping that gets worse in combat. DirectX 9 helped minimally with these things but not in a way where I'd consider the game in a playable state with the sound on.

[Fyxation]

I, too, am having horrible distortion and crackle in combat and came to the forums looking for feedback. Amazingly, I haven't had any .dll crashes, but the game became unplayable after trying to deal with it for a couple hours. Felt like it was actually getting worse. The sound popping out and in all at once was actually lagging me in FATEs and roulettes.

[Sicno]

Not sure if it's related to this, but playing on WAR I was getting very confused because the sound effects of combo weaponskills like Maim sounded as if you had wrongly hit them outside the combo. The sound effect of selling something to a vendor or retrieving gil from my retainer was also a lot higher than usual.

[Darkadept876]

Came to report this same issue, but now its gone into my Cut scenes as well, all other sounds are ok except Battle sounds and Cut scenes, doing the first dungeon was hell, started getting a headache.