Sound is a crucial, if not overlooked aspect of a game.When done right–like in Diablo 3–it adds to the ambience and feel in a significant way. But designing for a game like Diablo is much different than designing for an MMO. In an interview with Sound + Vision, ArenaNet's James Ackley–the game's audio director–detailed the audio work on Guild Wars 2.
Most games have cues and scripted events where the audio kicks in, but MMOs don't really have many of these. Accordingly, the approach to the sound is different. And it's challenging. On that note, Ackley states:
Two of the biggest challenges in an MMO are both the diversity and amount of soundscapes. Previously, with most of the FPS games I've worked on, we put a lot of effort in to creating a single soundscape for the game. With Guild Wars 2, we have many different types of regions that need unique new sounds for each area. It sometimes feels like having 10 normal sized games all in one. The art teams work very hard to make each region look entirely different and have an artistic style that suits the climate and or inhabitants. We spend a lot of time working to match that feeling.
Some of our races are very mechanical, some are magical, some are small and some are big. The ambience in each area needs to match the lore so you feel like it is a real place. I love it when you can just wander through the game, listening to the environment and it all seems natural. Sounds weird to say, but sometimes when we do our job right, no one ever notices.
He goes on to describe the difference from a normal games' soundscape to that of an MMO, and how they tackled the issue.
The biggest challenge coming from FPS-style games is the lack of a linear story. We used to have all kinds of sneaky ways to make sure the player heard the sounds when we wanted. You might walk down a hallway, through a door, in to a room, and BANG, a big scare or something could be choreographed for the player. What most players don't realize is that when you stepped through that door and it closed behind you, it might have been for technical reasons to make sure we could purge memory or limit where the player was going.
These limitations worked great for us laying in sounds, but in an MMO, you don't get very many of these scripted events. So, we need to come up with complicated systems that track lots of game data to make sure our sounds get triggered when we want them to.
Fascinating stuff–and there's a whole rest of an interview where that came from. Read it here.
