Audio quality is all over the place

[Yuusou Amazing]

I hope to see an improvement there, because I feel like there is such a missed opportunity to shine in this area.

First of all, bugs from the predecessor repeat again, where voices are either placed statically in the room or the voices move, but not with the direction of the player. I don't recall the instances where this happened, but it is really annoying to not have a consistent implementation approach here.

Then, music is way too low in the open-world environments. In the predecessor everything was leveled as it should be and you could also adjust the volume for voices. In my opinion, the audio levels have to be adjusted or I can't really enjoy the work of the audio guys to the fullest with the limited audio settings I can adjust.

Lastly, I notice a lot of times that voices sound a bit muffled or scratchy. For some voices, it's all the time like this (specifically Ulrich sounds like he had a bad mic for his recordings) and sometimes quality changes between different scenes for the same character like Hans. Most people may not notice that, but I have a very decent set of studio monitors and those quality differences stick out like a sore thumb. I'm not sure if there's a way to re-record those sessions or try to apply some fixing with Izotope RX or some other tools. For me, it's very distracting to hear clear voices and muffled voices in the same room and scene. I hope, you pay good attention to this in future recording sessions for the DLCs.

[beetloot]

Oof I've noticed this a lot in the first game and it bothered me quite a bunch. There were also scenes in which characters were speaking outside yet it sounded like they were inside a room, despite adjusting the levels on the menu.
Maybe they should have payed more attention to reverb inconsistencies for each scenes? IMO it's sad that it hasn't been properly improved.

[Yuusou Amazing]

Yeah, the reverb is still an issue and I assume it's because of the engine. You can sometimes notice an increase of reverb between a few footsteps and if characters stand on one of each side, one character sounds like in a cave and the other outside in the wild.

I wouldn't say it's easy to fix, because it pretty much depends on the engine. From the very few basics I learned about game audio, the placed areas in the world (sometimes called zones) receive each their reverb settings and they might have some envelope applied to the borders, so it's not full on reverb as you step into a certain zone. However, I don't know how the CryEngine handles it.

In general, most issues may be related to the CryEngine itself. But the varying loudness of voices is very annoying and can only be explained by static placement of sound sources. Oftentimes, this doesn't get caught in QA because you would need to talk with the people at different locations to figure out, if there is such a static placement for some of these dialogues

I hope these issues will be fixed this time ... and I have a very slight hope for a remaster of the first game, ideally with the improved graphical fidelity and adjustments to the game mechanics.