The environment frequently sounds too quiet if you're used to the older version of the game. Again, they sound more "realistic," but it means that Rapture is no longer quite the lurching monster with old records spewing out of it that it once was. Voices are now a little more distant, mixed more like they're coming from a real radio in the environment and less like they're blasting directly into your head. This is more "realistic," but it also makes them less intelligible to the player, especially if you're fighting enemies at the time.Ĭombat sounds still come through loud and clear, but environmental ambience and music are reduced in the mix. All of the audio is still there, and it all still pans correctly around.but the dynamics are all different. ![]() When voices come in over the radio or audio logs, they're front and center, crisp and detailed over the top of the environment. And in the original mix, this all comes through loud and clear, helping to give Rapture an intense audio vibe that's almost oppressive, in a good way. ![]() However, in the case of Bioshock, it was key to the mix.īioshock's soundscape is rich with detail, environmental audio, diagetic music tracks, and background noises. Most audiophiles don't love dynamic compression, because they feel it lessens the overall quality and excitement of audio. There's lots of cool sounds in there, but they all play at more or less the same intense volume unless they're very far away from the player. The original Bioshock has a very deeply layered, though generally dynamically-compressed sound mix. Which I'm less excited about, as a weird sound person. They're not so much better or worse, as they are entirely different. It seems like a lot of work to relight and shade several scenes, and change up the use of specular mapping, but they did it. The lighting and shading changes were more controversial when the remaster launched two years ago. The original game doesn't hold up as well in that department. In many cases, the new assets perfectly recapture the original artwork, but drawn/rendered at dramatically higher resolution, so you can jam your face right into the textures on a modern TV and not worry about it looking bad. I revisited the original 360 version of the game thanks to the Xbox One Backwards Compatibility program, and I could definitely see how people having a meeting at 2K Games would look at those textures and go "I guess.I guess we have to pay to have these assets remade." The visual overhaul of the game is great, and super obvious in a side-by-side comparison. I just wrote an article gushing about Bioshock Remastered, and I still stand behind it.
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