Dear 343 Industries,
I have been and always will be a huge fan of the Halo series. I've always felt like it's the one game where I can continually be excited about. Unfortunately, I feel as if the ball was dropped (quite hard) in the Sound department for Halo 4. (Sorry for the incoming text block)
I went to school for audio engineering and received my Bachelors degree in Recording Arts. So I can easily say that audio is an extremely important aspect in my life (I'm an aspiring sound designer myself and have worked on a few indie games). In school we had numerous classes and projects where we went through the process of field recording, sound design, mixing and implementing our audio assets into the game engine. From there we were able to test out the game (In UDK) and hear how our audio assets corresponded with character motions, explosions, guns, ammo, etc. We learned that some audio assets have higher priority than others. For example: Picking up an awesome weapon is going to have this great memorable sound and deserves to be higher quality than a waterfall in the distance or something. The point is, I understand that the sound department is allocated only so much room and has to downsample their work sometimes for it all to fit on the game disc. I'm not trying to discredit the sound department for not creating amazing sound assets for Halo 4. The sounds are pretty awesome for some of the guns and re-loading them and I'm sure they sound even better in their full quality!
In the High resolution cinematics, the audio quality was great! Everything was mixed very well. No complaints there. However, I do have my complaints in the game-play cut-scenes. All of the SMFX, LGFX and Foley sound quality were just noticeably off. In fact it was so noticeable that it's the first time I've played a game where the audio quality intruded on my gaming experience. (I played the entire game with the headphones I use when I'm mixing a project: Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro's.)
The scene where Master Chief is flying a ghost through a portal and drops out of it so he doesn't fall off a cliff is where I really noticed how "weird" everything sounded to me. After that scene I couldn't stop listening to every little detail and how badly mixed it was in the game. It seemed (to me anyways) that almost every Small Effect had a very "crunchy" sound to it. Master Chiefs Foley for his armor movements were mixed way too loud at some points and became extremely irritating. There were even some moments in the game where sounds were TOO quiet, resulting in me dying because I couldn't even hear an Elite standing behind me (in the past, Elite mobs usually make a battle cry before coming up next to you) or a Grunt shooting a needler from across the room, I would wonder where the hell I was being shot from so I could kill it, but I couldn't even hear where the enemy fire was coming from. Some of the spaceships and explosions were mixed very quiet and didn't even seem believable what so ever. And lastly, the sound of the Warthog is just god awful. It sounds like a redneck monster truck on meth from Florida.
After beating Halo 4 I popped in my Halo 3 disc and started a random mission just so I could hear if the audio quality in Halo 3 was different from Halo 4. There was a HUGE difference in quality. Obviously, Halo 3's audio assets sounded of much higher quality than that of Halo 4's. I was a bit shocked because I'm sure that Halo 3's budget was significantly less than Halo 4's.
These are my only complaints about the newest Halo. I thought the storyline and everything else was really really good. I just wish that the audio department was given more room for increased audio quality.
If anyone else would like to add or contribute what they think about this subject, please feel free to comment. I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks.
Thanks!
