"I think that the depth of the immersion in a game is what players
are looking for,” says Nick Warseck, audio lead at Rockstar New England.
"People play games to take a dip in another reality because it's fun to
escape for a bit.”
"I think that graphics and visuals are the talked about the most
because people are much better attuned to seeing if something in the
game world is correct or not than hearing if something sounds off. If
you look in a mirror or in a puddle and there's no reflection, it's a
lot more jarring than if a sound doesn't have quite the right reverb on
it, or a low-res texture versus a highly compressed audio asset. So when
you're creating the most immersive experience possible, the most
important thing is that it looks as close to reality, or what reality
would be if you were in a spaceship, because if it doesn't look right
it's not going to suck you in.”
But while a game’s visuals provide you a window into the world, it’s the audio allows you to open it.
"Audio is obviously important to that overall experience, it's pretty
apparent if you play a game with no sound how flat it feels,” Warseck
continues. "I think audio supplies more of a support role, as it
basically gives weight and truth to the art.”
"As each sound is added, even something as simple as hooking up audio
for an air conditioner, the world becomes that much more real. That air
conditioner serves a purpose in that world. If it's loud and gritty
sounding it gives you a feeling of how hard it must be working. It makes
it feel hotter outside, and adds the overall feeling of dinginess of a
building that hasn't had any maintenance and is old. The audio brings
out a lot of the unsaid feel of the world, which increases the
immersion.
"So intrinsically the audio is felt more at a subconscious level,
it's not something that dazzles you visually like a massive explosion,
but reinforces how dangerous the explosion feels. I think it will always
be in that unknown space as well, I mean, film sound design still isn't
something that's as high profile as the cinematography or music,
despite there being a lot of really creative and brilliant things
happening that really steer the overall tone of the film.”
Max Payne 3 is an incredible example of audio done right. For such an atmospheric
game, packed with ballistic sounds and iconic music cues and steeped in
noir tropes like Max’s regular narration, the audio in Max Payne 3 was
obviously a hugely important part of the equation.
The team initially spent extensive time playing the original Max
Payne, and Max Payne 2, as they wanted to keep the spirit of these games
intact while adding a modern layer of quality.
"We wrote notes on the things we felt they did really well, and the
things that we felt were iconic sounds that we would like to expand upon
and bring over to the new game,” says Steve Donohoe, lead audio
designer at Rockstar Toronto. "Those early games were quite
groundbreaking in their cinematic approach, had excellent sound design
and had a very unique style to them, so we had a really great starting
point.”
"We also set the bar really high for ourselves with some of the other
ideas we had, listing out a bunch of things we wanted to take to the
next level and checking stuff off as the project progressed. There are a
lot of details in the ambient audio that are not really obvious unless
you are listening closely for them, but we spent a ton of time making
sure the world felt alive and responsive to your actions. Dogs bark and
babies cry from inside houses when you start shooting, while birds and
insects shut up.
"It was not easy by any means but we are really happy with the end
result. Getting it to all fit into memory, and convincing the audio
programmers to write the many thousands of lines of code, was our
biggest challenge, but we feel we succeeded in achieving all the major
things we set out to do.”
One of Max Payne 3’s key drawcards is its use of BulletTime. It’s
been a part of the very foundations of the series since the beginning,
but tackling an audio system that sounds as good in real-time as it does
in BulletTime (and one that users can trigger a shift between at any
second) is not as straightforward as simply dialling down the pitch
speed. The team decided early on in the project that just allowing all
the sounds to pitch with the game’s timewarp speed was not going to
sound the way they had envisioned. The team created a custom mixer that
allowed them to manually craft the sound to suit.
"This gave us the ability to send certain sounds down different
‘paths’ depending upon what game state we are in,” says Donohoe. "Some
paths mute sounds in slowmo, others pitch slightly, while others pitch
with the game speed or get even lower.”
"We decided some sounds were never going to be as big or cinematic as
we wanted them by just slowing them down, so we created unique
crossfading sounds that blend in and out between the real-time and
bullet-time versions of certain sounds. There were some significant
technical issues to overcome... but we eventually found ways to make it
work. A ton of credit goes to the programmers for coming up with
creative solutions to very complex problems.”
Donohoe tells us part of the challenge of BulletTime was decided what it represented in an audio capacity.
"We felt it was not a magic power Max has, but rather an ability to
be insanely focused and intense. This helped us decide what we wanted to
hear in BulletTime,” he says. "A lot of the sounds we use are actually
slowed down breath sounds or pitched, filtered, and compressed
heartbeats. We wanted to keep it very organic, but with an abstract
quality to it that would keep it from being too ‘in your face’.”
But where does all this sound come from? Is the team out on fire
escapes tossing bullet casings through the metal grates and at ranges
spraying objects with bullets, or are things kept in a more controlled
environment? Or is it a bit of both? Warseck explains.
"Rockstar has a wonderful gun library that was recorded by the San
Diego team and John Fasal,” he says. "We also had a lot of material from
other projects that were used on Payne.”
Still, the team does as much field recording as possible.
"There are certain sounds that will never work quite right unless you go out and get them yourself,” says Warseck.
"When we do go into the field, I find that Google maps is a great
tool for finding recording locations. I've found dumpsters full of old
lawnmowers, canoes, and intact windows in abandoned parking lots,
highway I-beams and guardrails out in the middle of the woods, and old
factories from World War II out in the middle of nowhere that nobody
seems to know about that are just brilliant places to record.
"They also don't seem to have a lot of people around that mind if
you're running around with a sledgehammer, an axe, and a duffle bag full
of unknown objects, which on second thought is a bit of a double-edged
sword.”
Forza Motorsport 4 and Max Payne 3 may be a world away from each
other in terms of the spaces they each occupy, but incredible sound
design is something they both share. Max Payne 3 weaves a symphony of
lead but the howling engines of Forza Motorsport 4 assault your ears
with just as much force, trading hollow points for Hemis. It’s why
opening the taps on a Dodge Dart Super Stock sounds like God gargling a
squadron of WWII fighter planes and why giving a Mazda 787b all the beans sounds like Satan blending the remaining two-thirds of the world’s bee population.
"It’s interesting that you mention the engines as, at the underlying
sample level, many of the engine sounds in the game were not changed
between Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4,” says Nick Wiswell,
audio director at Turn 10. "But the implementation of those samples into
the game engine and the additional real-time processing we applied made
them sound very different.”
Recording real cars is a hugely important step for getting the sound
in a game like Forza 4 right, but it’s not quite as simple as popping a
car on a dyno and pointing a handful of microphones at it.
"Once we get those recordings back into the studio, the real fun of
processing and modifying those recordings can begin,” says Adam Wilson,
vehicle audio lead at Turn 10. "It can take 30 or 40 hours for a single
recording to make its way from raw audio to tuned, usable, in-game
assets.”
Of course, working with cars with price tags that’d have Scrooge McDuck nervously checking his wallet comes with the odd scare.
"We are pretty cautious these days about the kind of cars we will put
under load and we’ve developed a routine that puts as little stress on
the car as possible while we gather our source,” says Wilson. "But, as
with any process, there are always lessons be learned along the way.”
"The most nerve-racking moment though had to be an almost brand new,
but post-break-in mileage, Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 that, at the end
of the session, started to spit smoke from the exhaust. A trip to the
dealer and it was a death sentence for the motor. In that case however,
Lamborghini owned up to a factory fault and bought the car back from the
owner and he was more than pleased to be given the chance to upgrade to
an LP670-SV. He’s a good friend of the studio now.”
A passion for sound is something Wiswell looks for when hiring, not just creativity and technical skills.
"Making sounds for games is very similar to other forms of media, but
in games the implementation of the sounds is sometimes more important
than the sound itself,” he says. "In TV and film the content is always
the same, so the sound can be designed to fit the picture. In games, a
sound can be heard in many different ways, and it has to adapt to
changes in distance, perspective and location in a natural way in order
for it to sound believable. This is a specific skill for interactive
audio and one anyone looking to work in games needs to learn.
"I remember being on a panel a few years ago with a couple of guys
who worked on film sounds. They were both very interested in game audio
as the movie sound rulebook was already written, and almost everybody in
the industry worked in a very similar way. They said that games are
exciting as we still haven’t completed the rulebook, and new exciting
ways of doing things are constantly being developed. My goal is to keep
Turn 10 at the cutting edge of racing game audio development on every
game we release.”
So, given how crucial audio is, especially to something like a racing
game where the sound of a car is part of its very character, does it
bug sound boffins that gamers tend to focus on graphics and visuals?
"Many moons ago when I started in game audio it did,” says Wiswell,
"but over time I’ve come to realise that when people don’t mention the
sound when talking about a game, it’s usually because you have done a
good job and they didn’t find anything wrong.”
"When sound is done well in any form of media it becomes part of the
experience, and that is key thing to remember. If the sound does not
support the bigger game experience, it doesn’t matter how well it was
done, it will always sound out of place.”
