In praise of Fortnite's visual sound effects setting
Hello! Today we’re taking a look at one of Fortnite’s greatest features – the option to visualise sound effects.
Chris: After a decade of mishearing people in the office, I’ve been wearing a hearing aid for most of the last year or so. It’s been absolutely incredible. I have mild hearing loss, mostly high frequency sounds, which is why I have had trouble with human speech – I can’t hear the consonants anymore. When I first put my hearing aid on at the hospital and then walked outside, I don’t think I’d ever heard so much birdsong in my life – all the birds in the world came back to me.
Anyway, one of the things I’d noticed slipping before I got my hearing aid was fast-paced games like Fortnite. It’s a game you play with your ears a lot of the time – I wasn’t hearing chests or the sounds of people healing or approaching – all sorts of things. My daughter introduced me to the Fortnite Sound Ring – the official term, I think, is the visual sound effects setting – and it’s been transformative. For someone with hearing issues like me it’s a game-changer, but I’ve been talking to a number of people who don’t have hearing issues and who also use it and also find it to be a brilliant thing – is that a fair way of putting it?
Tom: I always play Fortnite with the Sound Ring on now, and have told equally hearing friends I play with to turn it on for themselves as well. It’s a revelation. It feels a bit like a cheat to be using it, to be honest, which has left me a little uneasy writing about how clever it is. It’s not my discovery to talk about, and it was not specifically designed for people like me. But it has made my game experience so much better.
It’s made me appreciate Fortnite’s sound design more too, in a way. I’ve realised so much of what you read from Fortnite’s moment-to-moment gameplay you don’t actually read at all. The off-screen sound of a chest, the glider of an opponent swooping down. The footsteps nearby, the sound of your own weapon changing as it reaches the end of a clip. It’s not an exaggeration to say some of the noises the Sound Ring has visualised I did not even realise were audio cues I relied upon as a basic part of play.
