World of Warcraft 2.2 patch hoses Audigy and X-Fi owners
By Johnathan Neuls | Published: October 01, 2007 - 11:21AM CT Last Tuesday Blizzard released a patch for World of Warcraft, bringing the game's client up to version 2.2. News is now surfacing that this update has wreaked havoc with the audio for gamers with Creative Audigy and X-Fi soundcards. Creative places the blame squarely on Blizzard's shoulders:
Blizzard recently made changes to the WoW client that have impacted the audio experience significantly. Our developer relations group were given minimal advance warning that these changes were about to occur, and our subsequent requests to Blizzard for clarification as to why the changes were made have gone unanswered...
Many Creative soundcard owners are pointing out that their audio experience is nowhere near as compelling as it used to be, which is a great shame. We will continue to seek a better resolution to the current situation with Blizzard. In the interim, we would encourage Creative soundcard owners to let Blizzard know that they would very much like to have their audio experience restored to its former glory.
Creative claims to have worked with the audio middleware World of Warcraft uses and they have "...already implemented a hardware audio path that enables 3D audio mixing and DSP based effects processing on Audigy and X-Fi cards." The Creative representative makes specific mention of how well BioShock used this hardware path and describes it as "...relatively straightforward for developers to support."
Creative reports that Blizzard has not taken them up on any of Creative's offers to help enable this hardware audio path in the World of Warcraft client.
Users have reported various levels of impact: no sound, no character voices, garbled audio, etcetera. For the time being most impacted gamers will remain in limbo but one adventurous fellow has published a registry edit that he claims resolved the issue completely. As with all registry editing, attempt at your own risk.
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/10/01/world-of-warcraft-2-2-patch-hoses-audigy-and-x-fi-owners
