Whoever was in charge of sound in Rift did a commendable job. The sound effects, music, voices, and ambient noise are all well crafted and sound great.
So why do I hate the sound so much?
Oh I’m just a crank I guess.
For me, the sound in Rift is like listening to country music. I know a lot of people like it, it sounds very professional and expensively produced, and I’m sure the people who made it have talent. However I do not wish to listen to country music, it is annoying.
Taylor Swift has 4 grammys, how many do you have Spirit Hime!?
It’s as though they decided in Rift you should be assaulted by a wall of sound. A constant hum of dense and layered noise. I can’t escape from it. Even turning down all my audio options, sans the master volume, I’m still left with a barrage of unnecessary and irritating amount of noise.
I don’t want to listen to the thunderous gallop of my mount, nor his saddlebags jangling with loosely packed inventory.
I am a rogue, yet I have to listen to my own footsteps as I run.
I can not escape the sounds of a rift. If I am half a zone away, I can hear the nearest rift. If by some chance I manage to make it far enough away to not hear one, an invasion insures that until it is over, I will hear the stormy winds and thunder that note its presence.
There are a dozen more examples I could bring up, but I’m sure by now my readers are thinking, “Why doesn’t he just turn off the sound completely?”
Well there are sounds in Rift I like. I like the lightning strike and sound when I level up. The voices that pipe up during invasions are amusing, quite over the top in some cases. The sound of another wave of enemies while fighting off a rift is informative, and if you’re not watching your back, hearing enemies yell or cast something at you from behind can be pretty helpful.
Nevertheless I am on the verge of doing just that, turning off the sounds of Rift. They leave me little choice. All that hard work, by talented sound designers at Trion, down the drain. All because they couldn’t reign it in just a little bit.
