I started playing today, and I’m already having trouble with the audio balance. I’m using 5.1 surround sound, if that makes a difference.
The environmental SFX in the early game town are extremely loud, especially the wind and fire noises, so I turned the slider down to about 10% to get it to a reasonable level, where I could hear it but it wasn’t distracting nor painful. A little later, when I got into the first cave, it was completely silent. I at first thought the audio had glitched, but when I turned environmental SFX back up to about 50%, there were the cave background noises I expected. And when I left the cave, I had to turn the slider back down.
I’m also finding that the non-environmental SFX are unbalanced. The default melee combat noise is so loud as to be painful, but when I turn that slider down to about 50%, many other sounds are too quiet, especially the UI and item sounds. And the dodge sound is so quiet I often can’t hear it at all.
This is less of an issue, but I also feel that the UI elements are unbalanced. When the hotbar at the bottom of the screen is a good size to be visible but not detract from the action on-screen, everything else is too small, especially the skill menu (it’s a little difficult to read the tooltip text) and inventory. But when I scale the UI up so I can read things more easily and make out what the little skill icons are picturing, the hotbar is then much too large and gets in the way. I took a screenshot of the default size of the skill window and compared it to a screenshot from Titan Quest (since it uses a similar skill tree design), and just eyeballing it, the Titan Quest window is probably about 30% larger, even when the hotbars are about the same size. I think this works a lot better – when you’re adjusting your skills, you don’t need to see much of the surrounding area, so it’s okay to have the window bigger, filling up more of the screen.
The audio balance would probably be trickier to change if you were going to (which I of course would be thankful for, but I certainly don’t expect it), but the UI size issue could potentially be changed fairly easily by implementing separate scaling sliders for the hotbar and the UI windows, no?