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THE GW2 BLOG KREWE LOVE THE SOUNDS IN THIS GAME!
The Sounds of Guild Wars 2
While much has been written about the amazing graphics in Guild Wars 2, many of those visuals only come to life when combined with sound. Whether that be the sharp metallic ringing of dueling swords, the boom of a rifle shot or the dull thud as axe meets body, the sounds of GW2 make the game more realistic, immersive and enjoyable to play.
GW2 sound designer Maclaine Diemer sums up the audio team's guiding philosophy...
"The goal of any real sound designer is to make you NOT pay attention to the sound but to have it be so good that it feels real and natural"
The videos below shows the champions of ArenaNet's Audio Team working their magic on GW2. Thanks guys!
When you hear the sound a fireball makes in Guild Wars 2, it's the sound of a one-foot diameter ball of Kevlar rope wrapped in chicken wire, dipped in kerosene and gasoline and then swung around lead sound designer Drew Cady's head one night in Drew's garden. "It was this huge, big, fireball and it sounded like a jet flying by. It was amazing," recalls audio director James Ackley. "It was really cool."
Maclaine's explanation in the second video about how the windmill sounds were produced shows just how complex the audio process is for the Guild Wars 2 soundscape.
A great example of the audio team's attention to detail comes from Drew Cady. He explains how the sound of a footstep starts with a basic sound then has additional layers of sound added depending on what type of shoe you have on, what terrain you're walking on, and what armor you're wearing, so that the resulting sound actually sounds like "YOU". Another example... when the player is in a downed state, the world will sound very different than when you're up and fighting in combat. And yet another... You'll hear frogs croaking as you approach the edge of a river, but perhaps only in the early evening hours. The world ambience shifts and changes over the course of the day instead of simply playing repetitive loops.
In the search for original, realistic sound effects ArenaNet's audio director James Ackley took his team on a field trip to the inactive Satsop Nuclear Power Plant in in Elma, Washington to record audio for Guild Wars 2. They spent the entire day recording sounds at the site of a nuclear power plant that was never completed.
James explains the goals for the trip...
"Our main objective of the day was to get impulse responses to use later as big and very different reverbs. The idea of an impulse response is pretty simple: you make noise (a hand clap, starter pistol, tone sweeps) in an appropriate environment, record it, then use software to recreate that space in a reverb plug-in so you can get that specific reverb back whenever you want.
To achieve this the team brought in a load of equipment linked by more than 300ft of power cables and 700ft of XLR audio cables! This essential equipment included a Macbook Pro, Apogee audio I/O, a Zaxcom Fusion multitrack recorder, a couple of small recorders like the Zoom H4's, Sennheiser MKH 8020 and 20 Omni microphones, Soundfield SPS200 surround microphone and lots of sound FX and tone sweeps.At the business end of things, a couple of big PA speakers were blasting out a lot of random sounds in the cooling towers, water tunnels and reactor building of the power plant, allowing for some amazing "re-recording".
Fascinating stuff which really does show how dedicated the Guild Wars 2 audio team are to producing a quality game!
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