Add an accesibility option to disable custom skin SFX#412

A large part of fighting games (especially Rivals 2) is reacting to what you opponent is doing. Human reaction time is faster on average to audio stimuli when compared to visual. As such, the sounds made by all the characters in a match are very important to the ability to react to their moves.

I appreciate the charm and character provided by the unique sound effects crafted for the various skins in the game. (The Loxodont Chef pizza peel thwack is especially satisfying.) However, many times these unique sound effects can be different enough to cause issues.

Take Clairen’s baseball skin for example. The tipper sound is changed from an electric zapping noise to a satisfying metal bat hit. Clairen’s tipper sound is essential to react to for DI and other reasons, and this difference is enough to make it challenging to adapt on the fly.

The skin that finally convinced me to post about this though is the latest low poly skins. Their sounds are so bitcrushed and low frequency that they have almost entirely muddied any distinction between the sounds made. For Wrastor, the slipstream sounds very similar to several of the aerials, which makes it hard to react to the projectile coming out. I could be imagining things, but it feels much harder to fight these characters when the sounds are harder to react to.

I think this would be entirely addressed by an option in the sound settings to force all characters to just use their default SFX on my end.

I feel this way about Rockstar and Salaryman Kragg. I love these skins and believe they came out great, but the first time fighting against them was very jarring. I’ll say the same for the low poly skins (pre- and post-hot fix); great idea, but a lot is affected when important sounds are completely changed.

I was just about to make a post about this. I have a hard time concentrating when I’m up against the low poly skins. The SFX are super annoying. It even affects my own SFX when hitting them.

Agreed, the change to the sound of me hitting my opponent is one of the most aggravating. The sound of a hit on shield vs an actual hit are very similar with the low poly skins.

I also just discovered that the low-poly clairen skin had her sounds changed retroactively, which is like the worst combination of all things. The tipper, non-tipper, and whiff sounds all sound so muddy and similar that it is much harder to react. This especially hits hard when you go to game 3 and your opponent switches to a low-poly skin…

Very valid feedback, but we’re discussing this internally since being able to add unique SFX adds a lot of personality that we like to skins. We acknowledge there’s certain ones like Low Poly that certainly go a little farther than normal