So, before you downvote out of spite because you heard it from Pestily and Veritas and other streamer/people that the old audio was good because in factory you could be in the office and hear people at forklift, hear me out.
I was there 2000 years ago, and it's true, that audio, especially on factory, was like godlike, a bit too much if you ask me
It should be physically impossible to hear somebody in a room, while you are in another room 100 meters away (Pestily example of yesterday video). You shouldn't be able to track with millimetric precision a person going up 2 flights of stairs while you are in the basement (Veritas binatural audio test), even with enhancing audio headset, do you want to know why?
Because audio behaves like a wave, it can bounce around or pass through walls, but the latter only if the sound has low enough frequency and it will get muffled and spread around, so it's difficult to pinpoint the source of the sound. If you ever been outside a disco, you know the music comes from that building, pinpointing the position of the speakers it's a completely different thing.
There are a ton of demo video about steam audio and how it should work, spoiler: it doesn't work that way in tarkov, and binatural audio is not up par.
But basically, if we take the factory example if you are third floor in factory office, and you hear shuffling ceramic, you shouldn't be able to know exactly what part of the bathroom the enemy is occupying, but you should hear it come from one of the 2 stairways (maybe, if the sound can travel that far before the volume fades out completely).
What Veritas and Pestily are preaching (and probably other streamers too) is an audio system that fits their way of playing, engaging, flanking, and pretty aggressive at least in confrontation to half of the player base. Stealth in that condition is basically unusable against anybody with high enough perception and a good headset because they will hear you when you are close enough, even if it's 2 floor downstairs.I clearly remember videos at the time of very early beta of people hearing the faintest of shuffling ceramic noise just to go down, knowing their EXACT position, and dump mag the poor stealth guy
That old audio system puts stealth gameplay in a position where it's very weak to sneak around or even flanking, because you can't get the jump on anybody, unless you were stealthing before and somebody happen to run in your face.But wait, didn't you say just a second ago that flanking was better with the old audio?-Yes, for people like Pestily that hear very well and have an headset that cost 700+€ and probably a compressor that cost 3 times the headset so while they flank they can hear if the enemy moved out or is at the ready for them.
So, in a perfect world, we would have raytraced audio, but I guess that it's going to be hard to achieve without tanking the FPS, I hope the new system they are migrating too fits better their idea of audio and it's somewhat realistic and balanced enough for every playstyle.
That is my 2 cents, keep the conversation civil I'm not trying to spread salt
edit: I don't have source on Veritas claims, so I crossed it out, as I might have confused with another streamer, but it's a sentiment that lately I have heard from multiple sources, streamers, content creators, and simple users
