Combat sound issues

fred4 · March 2022

Does anyone else have these? It's inconsistent, but half the time when I'm in combat I hear no sound from my ultimates anymore. This goes equally for the Meteor I use in PvE and the Soul Harvest in PvP. The lack of audible feedback is driving me nuts, especially in PvP. I don't always hear the ultimate fully charged bell anymore either. This may be affecting other sounds too, but the lack of sound for ultimates is what I notice the most. Not sure when this started. Ascending Tide, I would say (PC EU).

EDIT: The busier combat gets, the more combat sounds get lost. It's not just ultimates. There was possibly always some of that happening (on my machine at least - PC), but nowhere near as extreme as now. It's subtle enough you might not notice, if you didn't know the game, but it's also consistent enough that practically every ultimate invocation sound is lost in anything that's more than a 1v1 fight.

Janni · March 2022

Not just sounds, but animations too. And no I don't mean animation canceling. I mean a lot of times players exhibit no animations for actions at all. They just slide around looking silly. Once I even saw them at a keep all in their default T-pose. As funny as it was, it's almost impossible to fight effectively when you can't see anything they are doing or that you are doing back!

Same deal with particle effects.

LesserCircle · March 2022

I have the same issue OP, it's really annoying and it's hard to play like that because I use sound to know which skills I'm using.

FeedbackOnly · March 2022

Have you tried doing a repair?

LesserCircle · March 2022

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

Have you tried doing a repair?

I tried repairing the game, uninstalling and installing again, updating all sound and graphics card drivers and it's still the same.

Cuddlypuff · March 2022

I'm pretty sure this is related to the 100% CPU utilization / FPS drop issue posted in other threads. Any large fight in Cyrodiil causes most sounds to drop out or buffer.

fred4 · March 2022

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

I'm pretty sure this is related to the 100% CPU utilization / FPS drop issue posted in other threads. Any large fight in Cyrodiil causes most sounds to drop out or buffer.

Well, it could be related to that, a side effect of ZOS' multi-threading optimizations, although those date a bit further back. I have an old 4-core CPU, no hyperthreading. Since I posted this, I restricted ESO to 3 processor cores via the user settings file. I am not sure this has 100% fixed the sound issues or whether I'm just getting used to how the game is now. I think the sound is a bit better. More noticeable is that the game now runs smoother! The frame rate may be a bit lower, I don't really know, but the game no longer stutters when you pan the camera. The change also improved running other apps, most notably OBS. The latter had become completely unusable on my PC with all but a frame every half a minute dropped. My PC uses nvenc for the encoding, but OBS also needed some CPU power, which it wasn't getting anymore after ZOS' "optimizations".