Hey, we have a general thread for Japanese Music so why not a general thread for surround in Video Games?
Video games, being an "immersive" medium tends to have support for surround sound. Overwhelmingly so, compared to most other forms of media, except maybe movies. With videogames, most of them are guaranteed to have surround (with the exception of Nintendo first-party titles).
Most video games have the standard 5.1/7.1 orientation, however some as of recent have started bitstreaming Dolby Atmos to your receiver if you choose, with varying results.
For PC Gamers, we have this handy-dandy list to refer to whenever we want to check if a game has surround. Some surprising entries here!
Matrixed surround has been in video games as far back as the 90s, with the SNES and the Sega Genesis, however discrete surround didn't really kick off until the mid 2000s with the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 (Nintendo was doing their own thing at the time with the Wii). Games tend to have less dynamic compression, which is very good! ("Are you playing a video game again or did that explosion come from outside?")
Implementations vary. Most games tend to offer a realistic approach to surround. Some games, like the Yakuza series, allow you to adjust speaker azimuth settings in game to your liking. Some older games, such as Final Fantasy X, only have surround sound during cutscenes (short movies in the game to advance the story). Some games do bafflingly cool things too, like Race Driver: Grid for the PlayStation 3, which mixes 224 simultaneous streams of audio at the same time to deliver real-time 7.1 audio with third-order Ambisonics.
With the advent of people just not giving a crap about fidelity anymore, surround support is now delegated to the major studios only, with everyone else not bothering to try to implement it anymore.
I don't know what more to say.
I personally prefer games with in-depth stories and lots of cutscenes, but some people say these games don't offer enough in-depth gameplay. Also, do NOT play horror games in surround. Trust me. Never again.
Video games, being an "immersive" medium tends to have support for surround sound. Overwhelmingly so, compared to most other forms of media, except maybe movies. With videogames, most of them are guaranteed to have surround (with the exception of Nintendo first-party titles).
Most video games have the standard 5.1/7.1 orientation, however some as of recent have started bitstreaming Dolby Atmos to your receiver if you choose, with varying results.
For PC Gamers, we have this handy-dandy list to refer to whenever we want to check if a game has surround. Some surprising entries here!
Matrixed surround has been in video games as far back as the 90s, with the SNES and the Sega Genesis, however discrete surround didn't really kick off until the mid 2000s with the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 (Nintendo was doing their own thing at the time with the Wii). Games tend to have less dynamic compression, which is very good! ("Are you playing a video game again or did that explosion come from outside?")
Implementations vary. Most games tend to offer a realistic approach to surround. Some games, like the Yakuza series, allow you to adjust speaker azimuth settings in game to your liking. Some older games, such as Final Fantasy X, only have surround sound during cutscenes (short movies in the game to advance the story). Some games do bafflingly cool things too, like Race Driver: Grid for the PlayStation 3, which mixes 224 simultaneous streams of audio at the same time to deliver real-time 7.1 audio with third-order Ambisonics.
With the advent of people just not giving a crap about fidelity anymore, surround support is now delegated to the major studios only, with everyone else not bothering to try to implement it anymore.
I don't know what more to say.
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