Platform: Windows 10. Xbox Gamepass
You'd have thought they would've learned by now but apparently not.
For those of you that haven't played it yet and care about audio fidelity at all I'm just going to save you a lot of time and say 'don't bother'
For my books this is the worst sounding video game I've heard outside of those bad Genesis emulators. Sounds is drenched in booming bass, distorts, missing entire channels of sound and the mids and highs are completely inaudible.
Enjoy Halo for it's music? Too bad
Want to hear the NPCs dialogue? For the most part you can forget, one in 10 sentances come in loud and clear.
Situational and spacial awareness? Nope, it's all inaudible
But the guns sound good right? I mean they might, I couldn't tell you, I haven't heard my gun once. Same goes for the grenades which result in a barely audible *pss*
The worst part about is Microsoft and 363 acknowledged this issue after launch and clearly knew about it ahead of time but pushed the game out anways. Please refer to this official statement
To update Halo: Reach for Xbox One and PC required entirely changing the encoding for the game’s audio which has resulted in it sounding different from the original release. We are aware that areas of the title don’t sound like what you or we ideally want them to. It will take some time to work through solutions to improve the overall experience for audio and that work is already underway. When it is ready, we will flight to test the fixes we can make prior to updating the title. We also plan to go into more detail on our Reach audio journey in a later blog.
Consider this post a warning for anyone looking to try this fantastic game for the first time, in this state I would not recommend it at all. Multiplayer might be functional but if you want to play the story the state of the audio is far far far too distracting. There is currently a manuel fix where you need to lower your windows sound quality to 31khz in order to prevent distortion.....
Oh and also they forgot to include the HDR which has been promised this whole cycle but thats not a major issue.
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