The post Indivisible impressions: Directional audio in 2D games is bad first appeared on Killa Penguin.

Indivisible is a Valkyrie Profile-inspired action-platformer jRPG that has some pretty major problems. For one thing, the story’s tone is all over the place; the main character cheerfully recruits people into her party (which exists inside of her head for some reason) just minutes after her family and everyone she knows is brutally murdered, for example, suggesting that not everyone who can write a video game story should. Then there’s Indivisible‘s gameplay, which is technically solid barring one crash I’ve experienced, but completely reluctant to explain how anything works early on beyond the surface level. Your four party members are mapped to the controller face buttons (good luck, keyboard & mouse users) and can attack at the same time, but the benefits and drawbacks of this aren’t immediately clear. It’s hard to improve when you can’t tell what’s happening.

The visuals and music are Indivisible‘s saving graces, but for some reason the developers thought that it’d be a good idea to implement directional audio that pans sound effects and dialogue based on where characters are in relation to the screen. This is a bad idea 100% of the time in 2D games.

The camera’s viewpoint is such that any right/left difference in audio should be negligible, and yet the panning is strong enough that it suggests that the player is actually standing one foot in front of them. This creates a kind of audio uncanny valley effect that I can’t get over, and for what? Directional audio has no positive effects. It’s just aggravating sound design that suggests that a developer is more enamored with gimmickry than creating something that feels natural.

I haven’t made my mind up about Indivisible because I’m still working my way through it, so it’ll have a chance to explain how all of its mechanics work and hopefully surprise me on some other front, but it’s already obvious that I won’t be able to play this with headphones. Directional audio in 2D games is weirdly fatiguing because the panning is never quite realistic enough to sound like someone on your right or left. Instead, it sounds like the audio cuts off in one headphone, and that’s bad when the only other audio is the background music.