Not a fan of the audio change to Fleet's moves#512

I don’t know why this was called a bug fix, I’ve played since the Kickstarter Betas yet this wasn’t a thing there, and it wasn’t there in Fleet’s initial reveal trailer either, but that’s besides the point.

I understand the idea behind the change, and I think it’s cute on paper…
But I think in practice and execution I just don’t like it very much.

Sure, part of this might be because of needing to adjust to the change, it’s been half a day after all.

But in that time of testing and playing, the change has just come off to me as distracting and completely jarring. Not a bit as charming as the idea would make you believe.

If you’re not playing with music (something that’s rather common), the effect is completely lost, and instead it just differs in pitch for no reason, making it sound inconsistent between matches. On some stages the pitch is so high it makes it sound screechy. And others the pitch is so low that it muddles the sound entirely.

But even with music on, I’d argue the effect really adds nothing and is still very distracting. More times than not it misses the mark on harmonizing with the stage’s music.

This change also is applied to just, way too many moves as well. It’s applied to practically half of Fleet’s kit, some of the moves it’s on aren’t even musical in nature. Further more it doesn’t account for alternate skins that do change her sound design, notably Winter Fleet, diluting her unique chilling sound design for literally no reason as it hardly has a musical motif.

To be completely honest, this has made Fleet’s sound design substancially worse.
The idea worked best when it was just on Fleet’s humming taunt.

Ideally this could just be a toggle in the settings, maybe if more moves do this in the future (pomme?) you could have a universal “adjust musical sfx pitch” toggle

it’s really akward to me the contrast on how high and low it goes now. as a musician i know theres not much to do about that problem while keeping it in key based on the way they’re making it work in game.

We don’t have plans of reverting this bug fix for now as this is the intended way her tonal sound effects were supposed to be played, that’s why all her musical sound effects have been made in the same key from the get-go.
I want to further clarify what exactly is happening behind the scenes as this might help understanding the system better and what changed and what might be just a perception bias since it just changed.
All Fleet musical sound effects were initially created in the scale of C Major, the majority of them heavily centered in the C note/major chord but a few of them go up the scale in their variations or are more centered in F, G and A notes (but always complying to the C major scale).
The system then identifies the key of the current playing track and pitches the closest matching pitch within two semitones (either up or down). For reference, before this patch, the sounds were also randomizing everytime you used them by the same amount so the maximum amount of pitch down and pitch up was already happening (and that was something we made sure of keeping even if that meant not being precisely in the key of the current track).
There is also some extra volume/EQ changes if it’s being pitched down (or up) by two semitones to make sure the loudness stay consistent (these “extremes” only happen in 7 out of 32 possible songs in stages).

One thing that we already considered doing in the future but would take a substantial amount of extra work is pitching the moves that aren’t exactly C note/chord differently to account for how they will interact differently with the other keys but that might take a while to come.

For now, we will be monitoring how this changes get perceived over time once it had time to settle and might be back to make adjustments as needed!