leaves more to the imagination instead of giving it all away. I hear sounds of what something might sound like in my mind. I'm listening to my own music on my android while playing a single player game on my laptop with the sound off. multiplayer games is a different story where you are bound by having to listen to play the game, otherwise you are at a disadvantage.
thoughts?
Different people have different tastes I guess. Personally, I don't see how many games are enjoyable like that. To start with, it's not just multi-player games that you need the sound on for being alerted to something. Stealth games like Thief or Styx are virtually unplayable (certainly far less immersive) with no sound. RTS's often alert you to something going on elsewhere on the map. Although many such games have visual alert features for deaf people, eg, in Age of Empires an attack on your unit elsewhere is both a trumpet sound and a visual alert on the mini-map, intentionally disabling it is not the same as a deaf gamer used to adapting everything out of necessity.
Likewise, I can't see how games with amazing soundtracks / acoustics like Bioshock, Dragon Age Origins, Elder Scrolls, Tropico, etc, by composers like Jeremy Soule, Inon Zur, Kirill Pokrovsky, etc, can be "enhanced" by a different set of music. Whatever music you enjoy whilst gaming is obviously down to personal taste, but personally I find "external music" always reduces rather than increases immersion unless the game has a particularly bad soundtrack. Even old-school point and click adventures had a great deal of "character" added to the game via a particularly good soundtrack (Grim Fandango, Sam & Max, Day Of The Tentacle, The 7th Guest, etc). Doubly so where the music already "fits" perfectly or is contextual in some way, eg, 60's soundtrack for NOLF, "L'Homme Que J'Adore", etc, for 1940's occupied-France "The Saboteur", Egyptian styled tracks for Serious Sam, "Daddy's Little Girl" in Bioshock 2, "Will the Circle be Unbroken" in Bioshock Infinite, etc. Or music that changes according to enemy AI state (normal, suspicious, alerted, attack, etc) or a slightly muted version during night vs day transitions (Don't Starve) or perhaps two different upbeat vs downbeat versions of the same track changes for an ending given the world state (eg, a Dishonored style good vs bad ending depending on how many people you've killed).
And what about missing out most of the verbal humor in games like Portal? Although you can still read
what is said via the subtitles, you'd still be missing out on
how it gets said, eg,
how Glados speaks, the
"I will decorate my hallways with your carcass" taunting of Shodan in SS2, the increasingly unhinged religious "sermons" from "Father" Karras throughout the 90min long final level of Thief 2, or that scene in Bioshock where the
"fly away little moth!" 'perfect crazy voice' Sander Cohen attacks you to the tune of "Waltz of the Flowers" would just lose half of what makes the acoustics in such games memorable or unique vs the same generic "dubstep" of every other FPS.
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