The sound of Guild Wars 2

http://www.massively.com/2010/01/22/...udio-director/
The members of the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums, just like all of us, are making the wait more bearable with loads of speculation and discussion about Guild Wars 2.
A recent discussion has been going on regarding sound effects and ambient sounds, with everyone generally agreeing that those details are a wonderful addition to a game environment -- the more the better. Guild Wars is a game that already does this well, with details such as a change in the sound of footsteps depending on the surface one is walking on. Fans have the expectation and hope that things will be even better in Guild Wars 2.
As it turns out, ArenaNet's Audio Director James Ackley was keeping an eye on the conversation, and jumped in via Community Manager Regina Buenaobra to give fans a behind-the-scenes look at what the foley team has been up to for GW2.
Ackley went through the thread, and addressed each individual wish and suggestion that had come up, and then provided a handful of photos as a bonus. Take a look a the photos in the gallery below, and you can read the full Q & A here.
We at Massively join the fans in thanking Ackley for taking the time to give a behind the scenes look at some of the production process!


PS: more photo's in link at top of post
PPS: brr... guildwars2guru's forums are centered?|||Very cool! I'm looking forward with anticipation.
Thanks for the low-down, Qanar.|||found it on facebook :-)
I love the fact that they'll be using procedural sound, that's so cool (from a programmers point of view :-) )

Quote:




We’ll not only be keeping footsteps in Guild Wars 2, we’re putting an amazing amount of time and energy into them! The footsteps were one of the first things we tackled. Here’s how we did it.
From very early on, sound designer Drew Cady and I knew that an MMO the size of Guild Wars 2 was going to need a ton of sounds. We didn’t want to take the brute force approach and just make a new sound for everything - that requires an extraordinary amount of assets and it just kills memory both on disk and to be loaded in RAM. So we started talking about how to create sounds procedurally. Drew came up with an amazing system that is fully working now. It sounds amazing and has taken a lot less time and assets to create.
Every footstep in Guild Wars 2 is made up of three sounds: heel, toe and spray (spray is the kick of your toe, mostly only made with loose surfaces and running). With this set-up, each of those three sounds gets its own random parameters, so you never feel like you are hearing the same footsteps over and over. Using Drew’s system, we get these incredible results but keep the total memory footprint in check.|||Man, I'm so jealous to that guy doing this job...
*heavy breathing*
I think GW2, needs more decent rain sounds and locations... Although, in GW1 it's not the complete waste.....|||I'm glad they're spending time on sound. In films, it's half the show. It's funny that they mention working on footsteps first. It's the thing you hear the most of in a game.
One thing that I do find interesting and I hope it continues with GW2 is that I find that I have never become sic of the sounds. I don't really know what was done but, I usually get really tired of the sounds in a game after a while. I have never hit that with GW, despite probably playing it more then any other game I've bought.|||Nice find, Qanar!|||Quote:








One thing that I do find interesting and I hope it continues with GW2 is that I find that I have never become sic of the sounds. I don't really know what was done but, I usually get really tired of the sounds in a game after a while. I have never hit that with GW, despite probably playing it more then any other game I've bought.




Madness Titans cause me a great deal of madness after hearing them for too long.|||It's interesting to see that a conversation about sound was active enough on the guru forum to get a response from the team. I kind of wish we had that level of interest here.
What would interest me also as stated in other places as well is to hear if there is any interaction between the sound team and the music creation team (ak Jeremy Soule). If so what kind of interactions are going on there?
What kind of things would you like to see in terms of sounds and music?|||Quote:








One thing that I do find interesting and I hope it continues with GW2 is that I find that I have never become sic of the sounds.




With the exception of the fountain background sound in certain Vabbian outposts, QFT.
Reading the Q&A I notice they talk about procedural sound generation, making me happy (slight alterations could mean that each footstep, for example, sounds slightly different, just like for real).|||Quote:








PPS: brr... guildwars2guru's forums are centered?




Only when you link directly to a single post. It's a bit of an odd issue... I know we've looked into fixing it in the past, I'll give the tech people a nudge to see where that got to.
- JR