Need for Speed Rivals (PC) Buggy Audio
I've started playing Need for Speed Rivals. I love the concept of the game, but have ran into a very annoying bug!
Game sounds effects, such as N20, Crashing, Police Sirens, and various other effects, are absent. Some effects, such as N20 and Crashing, just make a pop/scratching noise, and that's it. No sound effect.
I have found a Video on YouTube which displays the exact issue I am having (The video is not the best of quality. I apologize for that.)
One of the users commented on the video you link to, providing an EA answers ticket they had opened, concerning the problem.
EA community support have watched the very same video, and come to the following conclusion:
EA_Najat:
Thanks for uploading the video.
Please try to Clean Boot your PC and launch the game only, there must be an application or a program running in the background causing this issue.
- How to Clean Boot your PC or Mac
The same support had also previously suggested:
- deleting and reinstalling the game
- playing around with the sound card settings
- using alternative speakers
- ensuring that "surround sound" was not enabled
While it might be worth trying what you can, it is important to note that none of these suggestions worked for any of the users reporting the problem.
From looking into this game, there appears to be a lot of users reporting the same problems. On the video page alone there are several users reporting the same issues. Unfortunately, they report the above fix to offer no solution.
There also appears to be a common understanding that this particular title is riddled with bugs. I have encountered at least 3 users who have solved their problems by not playing the game1. The fact that the support staff are all trying "easy fixes" suggests they are hoping it was something simple, but did not truly have any idea what was happening.
Unfortunately, these things happen. Companies release buggy games, and with future updates, these bugs come to the surface. If I have to speculate, I believe that future updates to Windows 7 have since made it less then ideal to run this game. EA would solve this issue by releasing a patch, but companies don't always take this route. EA is especially known for abandoning older games. As is, I base this speculation off the fact that I cannot find reports of this bug showing up earlier than 1 year ago; yet the game has been out for 2 and a bit.
While I do hope a user is able to solve this problem, and prove me wrong, evidence suggests that there is currently no fix for this bug.2
1Giving up is never a good solution, but the fact that the users aiming to solve this problem went to such efforts to fix it, and that it quite literally put them off the game, is a great measure for the difficulty in solving this particular problem.
2At least, not an official solution. Unofficial patches or modification may fix this problem, but it goes "under the hood", and would not be something the layman could simply rig up.