RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Co-op puzzle game Big Walk launched yesterday, and it's off to a great start: it peaked at nearly 50,000 concurrent players on Steam this morning, Steam reviews are "Very Positive," and here at PC Gamer we're all having a great time with it, too .
There's one issue, however, that shows up in pretty much every negative review on Steam. In a game that strongly suggests you don't use Discord but instead rely on the in-game proximity voice chat for communication… people are having trouble hearing each other.
"Needs different audio sliders, in-game sounds are way too loud, player voices way too quiet," one player wrote in a negative Steam review.
"It's a game about walking and talking, but the voice volume was so quiet that my friend's voices were barely whispers at MAX VOLUME," another said.
"Even standing next to me, all of my friend's mics (who all sound fine in any other game / app) sounded like a whisper," said another.
"Seems like a massive oversight to release a game that is just walking and talking and not include 5 or 6 volume sliders," another reviewer wrote.
These issues are something I noticed when I began playing Big Walk with Morgan and Tyler. That single volume slider can make it hard to hear voice chat while contending with competing sounds in the game, like the sound of the ocean if you're near the beach. In fact, the first thing I did was open my settings to see if I could make the ambient sounds a bit quieter so I could hear my co-op partners more clearly. No dice.
You also have to be in extreme proximity, no more than a few yards apart, to be able to hear your co-op pals (unless you're using walkie-talkies). The sound falls off much faster with distance than in most games, but I assumed this was by design: there are puzzles where you need to find other ways to communicate with your friends who are only a short distance away, and everyone's voices simply being louder would remove some of the creative problem solving that makes the puzzles of Big Walk so much fun.
At any rate, while some players are having issues hearing each other, House House has heard them loud and clear.
"We understand that some people are having a problem where their friends' voices are too quiet in the game. Sorry about this!" House House said in a post on Steam.
"While Big Walk is built around players getting quieter when they are farther away, we can see that for some setups, players' voices are much quieter than intended even when very close by," the developer said.
"We're working to put out a fix as soon as we can."
It's not clear if that means adding multiple volume sliders or just boosting player's voice levels, but we'll find out soon. In the meantime, if you just can't wait for an official patch, there's already a mod on github (note: I haven't tested it myself) that adds a separate voice volume slider to the menu and lets you crank it up to 200%.
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