Sound design is easily one of the most underappreciated aspects of video game development. Sure, when someone does it really well, it’s iconic, and people talk about the soundtracks all the time, but that doesn’t happen all the time. Furthermore, it’s not just the soundtracks that help make the game special, but all the little sound effects and ambient noise that can help bring a world to life. For something like Civilization VII, the team at Firaxis had quite the job ahead of them, as they needed to literally fill up an ever-evolving world with sound. In a chat with A Sound Effect, the team broke down how they did it and why it was important to go bigger than ever with the newest entry.
For example, one of the team members, Kadet Kuhne, noted:
“Sound has always been integral to Civilization, but in Civilization VII we’ve taken it to new heights through honoring the past and embracing the new. The driving force throughout our development process was to make Civilization VII sound historically authentic and dynamically responsive to players’ choices, bringing sound to the forefront of the experience to enhance the gameplay and immerse players in the world of their chosen civilization like never before.”
That’s quite a challenge to make something sound “authentic” to a world featuring numerous past cultures, while also having it be “dynamic” as things change all around them.
Part of the challenge, as Kadet noted, was that they wanted each personal civilization to have its “own identity” with its audio cues and noises. They also listened to how things were in past entries and attempted to update them or refine them so that they sounded even better than before.
Dmytro Nebesh was one such person, and he called out one particular sound he knew longtime fans would be anticipating:
“Some of the sounds I updated were mostly in the UI realm. There is a famous Civ V Wonder failed sound, and it haunts every player to this day. We thought it was an awesome design so we created a newer version with cleaner samples but still kept the same harmonic language everyone remembers, featuring the iconic horns lowering in pitch with that same iconic drum hit.”
The team also noted that part of the reason for going more “realistic” with its sound design was that this was what the fans wanted, so they worked hard to get it to “sound right” so that fans themselves would appreciate the new auditory pieces.
