Why the sword sound is Muffled? + Models Popup everywhere + Random Drop FPS

[Misaka Mikoto]

- In the gameplay phase, when I attack with the sword, the swings sound terrible (Muffled), as if the sword audio was in mono compared to the sword sound of FFVII Remake

- Every place I go, I see everything loading in front of me... I understand that the game is not downloaded to HDD (for me), but this popup is too aggressive TT

- (Alt+Tab) It can cause 50% fps drop for me, I had to restart the game to get my fps back

[elegy]

I can second your audio issues; it sounds like all the combat sound effects (maybe all sound effects?) are encoded at a lower bitrate than the music and speech.

I wonder if this is related to the feature where some audio can be played over the DS5 controller's speaker? I'm using one of those to play, but I have its audio devices disabled in Windows and the setting to play some audio over the DS5 disabled in-game.

I wonder if the lower bitrate encoding could be something meant for the DS5 audio that's being incorrectly applied to the wrong channel in the wrong context, because it sounds a LOT like all sound effects are being played over a wii controller, even through my nice headphones.

I've seen a lot of people with 5.1 setups saying that all center speaker audio is fuzzy, so hopefully this gets addressed soon.

[Misaka Mikoto]

Originally posted by elegy:

I can second your audio issues; it sounds like all the combat sound effects (maybe all sound effects?) are encoded at a lower bitrate than the music and speech.

I wonder if this is related to the feature where some audio can be played over the DS5 controller's speaker? I'm using one of those to play, but I have its audio devices disabled in Windows and the setting to play some audio over the DS5 disabled in-game.

I wonder if the lower bitrate encoding could be something meant for the DS5 audio that's being incorrectly applied to the wrong channel in the wrong context, because it sounds a LOT like all sound effects are being played over a wii controller, even through my nice headphones.

I've seen a lot of people with 5.1 setups saying that all center speaker audio is fuzzy, so hopefully this gets addressed soon.

I was thinking about that too, but reading the features of the PC version, it seems to me that this game is one of the first in which there is also support for Dual Sense even wireless on PC and not just via cable as we are usually used to, so it is already implemented within the game in a very heavy way the DS5 on the PC version, so I imagine that is not the problem because it is a setting that you can also change from the PS5 version, you should check the PS5 audio to confirm that it is the PC version that sounds muffled, in that case I do not think it is the fault of the implementation of DS5 support

My fear is that it made heavy use of the PS5 Dolby Atmos software, but I can't confirm that, so... idk, probably if they modder want they can replace the sounds with the sword of the remake versione

if the modder community wants, they can fix these errors by replacing the sword sounds maybe with those from the Remake version or maybe clean up the audio files or replace them with a correct version from the console ver etc... infinite possibilities...

[Sprocket]

I have no sound issues and i use studio monitors for making music on so would 100% hear it.. that is weird. Ill check my audio settings and report back.

The pop in, is the LOD system. This game isn't designed for HDD, and even some SSD struggle. You can try changing background detail to ultra to reduce it but as you on HDD it might make it worse.

I don't have alt+tab issue either tbh, I have left the game tabbed 20 out of the 60 hours of my playtime so far and no issues there (in game timer stops if you are in menu and tab out after a while). No idea what this could be!

[Misaka Mikoto]

Originally posted by Sprocket:

I have no sound issues and i use studio monitors for making music on so would 100% hear it.. that is weird. Ill check my audio settings and report back.

The pop in, is the LOD system. This game isn't designed for HDD, and even some SSD struggle. You can try changing background detail to ultra to reduce it but as you on HDD it might make it worse.

I don't have alt+tab issue either tbh, I have left the game tabbed 20 out of the 60 hours of my playtime so far and no issues there (in game timer stops if you are in menu and tab out after a while). No idea what this could be!

??? spam answer?

[elegy]

Originally posted by Misaka Mikoto:

I was thinking about that too, but reading the features of the PC version, it seems to me that this game is one of the first in which there is also support for Dual Sense even wireless on PC and not just via cable as we are usually used to, so it is already implemented within the game in a very heavy way the DS5 on the PC version, so I imagine that is not the problem because it is a setting that you can also change from the PS5 version, you should check the PS5 audio to confirm that it is the PC version that sounds muffled, in that case I do not think it is the fault of the implementation of DS5 support

My fear is that it made heavy use of the PS5 Dolby Atmos software, but I can't confirm that, so... idk, probably if they modder want they can replace the sounds with the sword of the remake versione

if the modder community wants, they can fix these errors by replacing the sword sounds maybe with those from the Remake version or maybe clean up the audio files or replace them with a correct version from the console ver etc... infinite possibilities...

I'm not saying that Squeenix botched the DS5 controller audio per se, I'm saying that however they implemented it may have resulted in these audio issues. It's a bit unusual for a PC to play audio out of two separate devices without it being set up that way by the user in the operating system, so whatever they had to do to make that work may have left the lower-quality audio intended for fast streaming over Bluetooth or USB playing out of the PC speakers instead. The first game didn't have these issues (at least, not by the time I played it) and it also didn't have the controller audio feature.

Maybe someone with a PS5 and a copy of the game can do some testing and report back but I don't think any of us are dying to go spend $500 on bug testing. I tried to find some non-spoiler, no commentary combat footage on YouTube, but the YouTube audio compression made it hard to tell.

Furthermore, buyers shouldn't have to mod a broken game back up to snuff; Squeenix needs to do better work on their PC ports. They've improved a lot since their earlier titles but they obviously still treat the platform as an afterthought (not even just talking about release bugs; a whole year to bring the game to a platform it was already developed on internally and release bugs is frustrating.)

[Kashra Fall]

The sounds can get muffled after using the menu to attack and or use a skill, normally based around when you used it. Outside of that, the sounds in general combat are fine for me.