Other player abilities/spells too quiet

[gilmorej]

Why are other player skills still basically almost silent even with "Other PC" effects volume at 100%? I can hear them grunt and kiai but their actual spells and abilities are super quiet like they're far away. This has been an issue since 6.0 dropped.

Example:

https://youtu.be/sRI4LBP9utQ

I need to be able to hear what other players are doing, especially when in a group with them or fighting them in PvP.

This really drove home the issue for me recently when I was tanking in a group with a white mage healer, and I couldn't hear the WHM casting Holy so that I'd know if I needed to move out of the pile of enemy AoE.

I know that I could just "look at the WHM cast bar" but that's not the point. I want to be able to look at my feet, and where I'm positioned, and I should be able to hear the WHM winding up a Holy and I should be able to gauge by the sound whether the stun is gonna hit in time and if I should move.

The sound design in this game is so good, but subtle and deliberate audio cues that played important roles in awareness and perception (such as the weaponskill combo sound) have been lost since Endwalker and all in a poor attempt to integrate some half-baked 3D audio (that costs extra money ofc). It's frustrating.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Do you have the listening position set to 0 or 100? I have mine all the way slid to character and I haven't noticed any changes with audio.

[Rongway]

Possibly also check your Listening Position setting on the same page as the effects volume sliders. I like mine set all the way to the Camera end, but you might not. It sounds, based on your Holy example, that you want to hear sounds that are closer to your character rather than the camera.

Edit: Oh, Lenneth beat me to it.

[gilmorej]

Do you have the listening position set to 0 or 100? I have mine all the way slid to character and I haven't noticed any changes with audio.

Possibly also check your Listening Position setting on the same page. I like mine set all the way to the Camera end, but you might not. It sounds, based on your Holy example, that you want to hear sounds that are closer to your character rather than the camera.

Other players are super quiet regardless of what the listening position slider is set to.

In Shadowbringers, other players using abilities and spells were just as loud as your abilities and spells. But now there is a huge difference in the loudness of skills you're using and skills others are using.

In the video I posted, at the end, I'm standing like 10 feet from a monk and you can hear basically nothing she's doing but grunting.

[Rongway]

I'm not sure because I don't PvP, but other PCs in PvP might not actually be "other PCs" as far as the game is concerned. What are your other Volume Settings sliders set to?

[gilmorej]

The white mage example I wrote about was an example PvE, so it's not just something that comes up in PvP.



And, yes, I know that listening position is close to "camera", but this is the exact settings I've always used since I started playing in 2019 and these issues didn't come up until 6.0.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

These are my settings and other people can be too loud sometimes.

[Jeeqbit]

There was a big change to sound in 6.0 which caused my tank combos to sound like I had hit them out of the combo when I hadn't. In the next patch I saw that the volume on these was increased, so it could be a similar issue.

[Rongway]

Sound in this game has always been *gestures vaguely*.

I thought things had gotten better, since my last sound issue before last night was in January, but last night in the middle of a trial my game sounds cut out entirely.

Something I discovered back in December/January, after EW launch but before I seemed to stop having issues, was that sometimes some sound categories were being routed to specific audio devices that I had not assigned them to. I have my game set to output through a virtual audio device designated for "Game Audio", and that audio device is then set to play on both speakers and headphones, but in 6.0/6.01 I would be playing and suddenly just one or two sound categories, say BGM and system sounds, would apparently cut out entirely but other categories would still work. It turned out the missing sound categories had actually been rerouted to Headphones while the sound effects and voice were still coming through Game Audio. In the middle of a play session, with no changes to any of my OS sound settings.

Maybe something like that is happening? Check your other audio devices to see if stray game sounds are coming out of them.

[gilmorej]

There was a big change to sound in 6.0 which caused my tank combos to sound like I had hit them out of the combo when I hadn't. In the next patch I saw that the volume on these was increased, so it could be a similar issue.

I think its 100% related. The volume of this sound you're talking about is still too low in my opinion, it's nowhere near as loud as it was during Shadowbringers, and in a heavy fight I still find myself thinking I've dropped my combos when I haven't.

Other players using combat skills/spells should be just as loud as other players Teleporting or Crafting skills. For some reason, though, sound effects of other players using combat spells/skills are far quieter than any other sound that those other players could make.

(And the combo "ping" sound effect you should hear for yourself hitting combos is still too quiet, even after it was increased in 6.01)