Napalmhardcore
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2013
- Posts
- 342
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- 47
You know whats frustrating about being a serious gamer? Getting serious sound.
What the best graphics card? You can find that easily within 20 seconds. Buy it. Done.
Best processor? 20 seconds. Best monitor? Maybe a few hours of researching.
Sound? I've spent dozens of hours researching sound, spend hundreds on cans, headsets, amp/dacs, soundcards... and I still don't feel I know what the best setup is in terms of competitive advantage. That is just frustrating.
Personally, I think part of what makes for a good competitive setup is familiarity. Getting used to your equipment and learning how to read the cues it provides will be valuable in the same way that using a controller you are used to or a particular mouse sensitivity is. For example, I use a relatively low DPI setting as I find it makes me more precise and I'm happy with the trade-off of having to make larger movements to do a 180/360 etc. If I were to turn my sensitivity up a whole lot, I wouldn't be used to it and I'd have to spend time familiarising myself with how it will react as opposed to it being second nature. If you are constantly switching sound devices, you won't get used to its subtleties.
In the case of a first person shooter, a mouse and keyboard or a controller doesn't represent the way we interact with the real world, instead it is a somewhat intuitive way of approximating it. Similarly, stereo and virtual surround devices like a soundcard or Mixamp don't perfectly recreate the way we hear sound in the real world. It is a somewhat intuitive approximation and so we must take time to make it second nature as we do with a keyboard and mouse or controller.
With VR, the aim is to interact with the virtual world in a manner that more closely replicates how we interact with the real world (and therefore be more intuitive). Again, a parallel can be drawn with sound devices such as the Smyth Realiser.