3D audio was nearly as pointless a gimmick
No it fucking wasn't, I'm talking about HRTF, and Creative's fuckery has singlehandedly destroyed the most important innovation in video game audio.
This is one of those topics that I'm very passionate and opinionated about. You can take any pair of stereo headphones, go into any game that has HRTF audio and you'll instantly feel the difference. HRTF also has an impact on gameplay.
For example in first person shooters like STALKER, with HRTF you can pinpoint the exact location of the enemy by just listening to in-game audio. I once could tell that a zombie was above me without seeing it just because I had HRTF audio and I could hear where the zombie sound was coming from. That's how realistic and precise it is. It's a true game changer.
Remember, this is technology from the 90's. Though back then you needed dedicated audio hardware because CPU's weren't up to speed to run all those calculations in real time, and that's why Creative sat on this technology until they killed it by neglect, because they wanted to sell more cards.
Oh yeah, did I mention that Creative had a thing called EAX for room reverb effects, and Aureal had realistic real time room based reverb? Their audio card would ray trace, yes, ray trace all audio sources in real time to have a realistic reverb effect. Technology from the 90's, much better than what Creative was doing, which is why they sued Aureal into bankruptcy to buy them out just to keep their monopoly on selling sound cards. They've single handedly crippled the development of this technology to sell more cards, which is why I now hold a deep hatred to their company and I wish them a painful bankruptcy, and ideally some other company buying them out just so that they can sit on their patents.
But nowadays? OpenAL Soft restores HRTF in all those old games, Steam Audio allows you to implement HRTF with environmental reverb in any game, and it all runs on the CPU. Mark Cerny upsold hardware accelerated HRTF in the PS5 as some brand new technology, yet it's exactly what Aureal did in the 90's. And did it better back then than Sony does now. And Valve also does it better, on the CPU.
And speaking of, HRTF sound is making a comeback in competitive first person shooters. CS:GO and CS2 has them, and they make a massive difference in this type of game.
You might say that "it sounds weird" or "the sound quality is worse", but here's this thing called psychoacoustics. You play with HRTF long enough, you can't tell the difference, but you have positional audio that can make all the difference in a match.
So no, it's not a gimmick, it's a genuine piece of innovation killed off by the greed of Creative which is why I fucking hate them so much.
