Slick wrote on May 17, 2014, 18:46:
the uncompressed audio in titanfall isn't the issue. i wish that more games had uncompressed audio like the blu-rays of console games often have. it should still be an optional download, not forced, but having high quality audio IMO is never a bad thing.
Most console games use compressed audio, including the current-gen consoles. There's no reason
not to compress; the overhead is minimal (especially since consoles get dedicated decoders), and the space savings are huge. Meanwhile no one is going to be able to tell the difference between a 256Kb AAC/OGG file an a raw PCM file, so uncompressed audio vs. smartly compressed audio is a massive waste. This is the same reason games don't ship uncompressed textures anymore.
Now to be fair it's possible to harm quality with compression. But outside of handheld games where they get a little
too stingy on space, I can't immediately recall anyone who shipped a PC/console game with overcompressed audio.