Epic Games provides details on Season 9 audio improvements

Fortnite has never had pristine audio and Epic Games has been working hard to remedy that problem. They’ve just released a new blog post detailing audio improvements that they are working on for Season 9.

Fortnite’s audio side has never truly been fixed since the launch of the game. Vertical audio and spatial sounds can be extremely dodgy especially in crowed end-game fights.

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Epic Games wants to fix these issues by implementing broad-scale changes to the way audio is handled and received by the client. They released a short blog post about the current issues being looked at on Thursday evening.

Upcoming Season 9 Audio Improvements

Epic wants to ensure that game’s infrastructure gets updated along with its content. They’ve fallen behind on some keys areas of engine-based problems recently, but they look to be turning things around.

In a blog post on the FortniteBR subreddit, Epic listed some of the issues that were fixed for v8.50 and what new issues they’ve detected so far:

‘Release 8.5 Audio fixes and updates:

• “Random sounds” playing issue (‘ghost’ weapon switches, reloads, item use) fixed.

Release 8.5 open audio issues:

• Switch issues were more complex than anticipated, but we’ve dug in and have a speculative fix by v9.00′

Additionally, they gave an extensive list of new audio improvement that will be arriving in future updates. Season 9 is mentioned several times and seems to be Epic’s current target for all these audio updates.

This is extremely good news for all Fortnite players, but especially competitive players. The Fortnite World Cup rages on throughout the rest of Season 8 and all of Season 9. These audio changes will make the game much more consistent and fair, leading to the best players winning the World Cup.

From Epic Games:

‘What we’re working on for the upcoming season:

• Better tactical audio when inside player-built structures:
  • Enemy Pickaxe impact within ~one building tile radius louder.
  • Wallbreak by enemy close/behind player much clearer/louder.
  • Hear the approach of enemy players outside player build structures.
• Better audio tells for jump/landing:
  • Jump tell audio added (so bunny-hopping isn’t as noiseless).
  • Clearer landing sound detection.
• Improvements to issues of sounds dropping outside of player FOV.
• Improvement of close versus distant player gliding sounds, to help clarify distance of gliding enemies.
• Bullet impact and explosive audio improvements- shorter, higher dynamic range sounds.
• Longer sounds properly playing during Replays.
• Fix for PC audio device swap issues.
• Improved differentiation of teammate versus enemy audio.

Last but not least, we are investigating ways to improve vertical and spatial audio in Fortnite. We are actively working on a binaural/HRTF solution that will be a great help to headphone players, as well as other spatialization improvements.’