Thread: Sound Issues after 6.01

Originally Posted by ArcheusWren

The issue still persists and I believe it needs to be officially accepted by the developers as a known problem that is caused by something they have adjusted and not try to shift this onto an issue with users hardware.

Good news, they've acknowledged it.
Bad news, they are blaming user's CPU's.

I'm so heavily frustrated right now, i can't even.
I have this sound issue since Endwalker Early Access dropped.
I have tried every fix and workaround i found in forums, reddit and god-knows-where, to absolutely no avail.
I refrained to just level my jobs and farming Gold Saucer, but...BUT!

I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME GODDAMNIT!

I'm currently in Stormblood and i want to continue playing the story, but I CAN'T with shit like this.
Please please please please fix this!
I'm currently on the edge wether i'm cancelling my supscription and just wait till i see some patchnotes that adress this
(the last patch obviously didn't do jack) or if I continue to be frustrated because i'm just beating a dead horse here.

This is absolutely unacceptable!

Yea, I'm really trying to stay polite but in the end we have paid for the game, paid for the expansions and on top of that a monthly subscription. Besides having been reimbursed for the past 2 weeks, which is nice, this patch did nothing.
So do we now have to wait until the fourth of january? Are we going to get that paid game-time back too?
Since the servers are getting more stable, will that end with us just not having a fix, nor reimbursement until who-knows-when?

As many suggested and the new thread that has been made, at least give us the old audio driver as an option if you can't figure out how to fix the issue. There are too many people with the problem to think it's something iffy on our end. We have tried everything and I'm getting really tired of this now.

I've been having this problem since the endwalker launch.
I waited patiently for these two weeks with the hope that they would fix this problem and they only made the situation worse.
I just canceled my sub because i refuse to ruin my experience with the game.

imagine paying to play a game without sound lmao

If I had to hazard a guess, my (admittedly, poor-educated) opinion is that the issue has to do with the fancy new environmental audio program that you can buy. Since the issue seems to be oriented around positional audio cues (there's a couple of threads about that where moving the camera in certain ways, or changing the audio position from camera to character changes the problems - at least in 6.0), my guess is that something with the audio encoding for the fancy new environmental program is the problem.

It must have something to do with the positional audio! When I play bard, I can get the audio to sound less stutter-y and gross if I distance myself more from the target and pan the camera so that I'm looking at myself (which is a terrible way to play, but it helps). This is ridiculous. I just want to play one day in EW without it sounding terrible.

What makes even less sense is to introduce an entirely new sound system which you have to PAY to use, build an entirely new sound engine around that extraneous paid feature, and then release it with an EXPANSION with no option to opt out of the new changes.

This is actually some Blizzard level of tomfoolery.

Originally Posted by Nisava

We've already paid for a lot, and now we have to pay for working audio too?

Don't even bother. They have a free trial for that spatial audio thing, and going through the hoops to set that up doesn't help. There's even a youtube video where someone was showing off the stuttering and even toggled the new plugin on and off to demonstrate that plugin or not, the problem happens.

That's not to say that the change to support the plugin isn't to blame. As a software developer, I'd certainly agree at this point that the changes just to support the plugin are likely to blame and that the presence (or not) of the plugin itself is clearly irrelevant given the evidence from that video and my own first-hand tests with and without the plugin.

I saw some discussion that apparently this even affects some PS4/PS5 users. Does anyone know of a link to a post/thread about that? Does PS4/PS5 even have any kind of option for spatial audio? This would make for an interesting twist to this situation as I'd be surprised if the console versions were affected by the changes to support a plugin that I'm pretty sure is PC-exclusive. All I see are PC users, and the range of hardware is all over the map from AMD FXes through Ryzens, some Intel i7s and i9s, some with discrete audio cards such as soundblaster (so not Realtek) and both NVIDIA and ATI GPUs.