Lacking Audio Presentation?

Hiya!

So I just grabbed Prey for the PC. Booted it up today for the first time and have played about 10min but then quickly turned it off. Is it just me or is the audio presentation really off? The mix is all over the place in terms of sfx and voices. The synth track kicking in when you're about to get on the helicopter seems to trigger a bit strangely. The timbre and volume of characters voices doesn't appear to be affected by their position relative to you? So talking to Alex for the first time, it borderline sounds your character is having an inner monologue.
Is this a known issue or am I being weird?
If there are known fixes or if it gets better I'll push through but as it is now I don't really feel like continuing.

Just to double check that I wasn't insane I put together a short video. I've never edited anything before so apologies for quality...

Im playing a used copy of the game from gamefly on PS4 and had a difficult time getting it to install (disc is a bit messed up). When I finally got it to work I noticed some of the weird audio stuff you mentioned and assumed it was caused by the borked install. Have you noticed any audio glitches around breaking glass/stepping through broken glass?

The mix for the game is weird, though I found it less of an issue once actually playing the game. A lot of incidental stuff isn't positional until you are outside of the room it is in, but necessary things such as enemy sounds are positional regardless of room.
And that music jump is weird, I never had that on my PS4 copy.

Saying anything more relevant to support this idea would be a hell of a spoiler, but yeah, it might be a stylistic choice rather than a bad audio mix.

That said, I personally didn't have any problems with the mix. I do not currently have the game installed so I can't test it, but I did finish it earlier this year and I thought the whole thing sounded pretty good, so I don't really have much to add to this thread.

In dialogue it seems like they don't calculate volume drop off due to distance, probably so they can make sure that you can always hear what's being said to you... I would rather they trust me that I just don't run too far away!

In general they just treat the properties of the audio coming from sources in a few different ways, as well as rooms having different audio properties. It seems that every sound emitting source has variables that modify the rate of volume drop off and sound diffusion (etc) over distance, and entering new rooms/environments automatically modifies those values. This feature in their audio engine, which was probably designed for dynamically adjusting the audio when entering vacuum environments, looks like it was liberally used for gameplay and stylistic reasons... such as being set to no drop off during dialogue, or bizarrely altering those variables when you moved in and out of that bathroom... Needless to say, there were some questionable liberties taken with the audio engines usage that bend how audio should behave.

Still though, for the most part, it's generally used well. The intro of the game is home to some of it's worst usage. Positional audio from enemies and other important things all pretty much work as expected, so it shouldn't effect your game-play in any meaningful way.... just try to ignore it, and you will eventually not notice it when it pops up.

This is something I realized immediately but promptly forgot about and it wasn't a problem for the rest of the game. So just try to overlook it?

it sticks out a bit at the beginning but I found that it was not an issue the more I played it.

I had no problem with voice but the music was so goddam loud I had to knock it down 50%, even then after awhile turn off completely the loud audible chime got really grating.

@yabbering_yeti: I'm normally not one to to complain about stuff like this but the sheer amount of weird stuff going on with the audio was off-putting and made me worried for the rest of the game.

But if you're saying that enemy sound is fine and that it's just the intro being extra messed up, I'll give it another shot!

Still, super weird how it was released in the state it was! Extremely curious as to what happened and what led to the final product.

@slasktotten: Prey was a decent game nothing more the interconnected world is fun to explore but the combat doesn't feel fleshed out and becomes tiresome and the story after a great intro is just forgotten for most of the game then felt rushed to finish. If your a Bioshock immersive sim fan definitely give Prey a shoot if not you'll probably find it lacking or even boring.

@thepanzini: I deffo picked up Prey because I was specifically after an immersive sim. Replying far cry 2 was what led me down this dark path, turns out I've severely underrated it all these years and it's design kinda makes more sense 2017 then 2008... But then I wanted to check out something more modern, hence Prey!

I also picked up death of the outsider on the steam sale, so if Prey doesn't stick I was planning to give that a shot!