sport and news: Blizzard offers an inside look at WoW's sound design

Monday, 1 April 2013

Blizzard offers an inside look at WoW's sound design

Blizzard stands out amongst other game companies in their astounding array of musical entities. From legitimate choral and orchestral works, to the dedicated professionals that bring you the realistic sounds you hear every day in game -- their multidimensional musicality is astounding. Sound is often over looked in a game, but in reality it is just as important as the visuals and the text you read; everything is about creating an emotional response to what your character in-game is doing, what they're fearing, what their heroism is forcing them to undertake.

We talk a lot about how that heroism is impacted by mechanics and lore, but little about how it's impacted by the audible stimuli of the surrounding environment and its many creatures. Take a minute while you do your dailies and raiding tonight and see if you can tell what's going on just by the sounds. I think you'll be quite surprised.

In a new post on their blog, Blizzard goes into how some of their sound design was accomplished for patch 5.3 and MoP. There's some more interesting facts that we learn in the article:

The Zandalari Battlesaur consists of three sound layers (previewed in the video above): Voice actor Jon Olson, a bear, and a tiger
There's five full time people working on WoW's sound design
The monk's "woosh" sound was made by swinging large objects around in a circle and editing them together

Then there's also this line from Blizzard's post, which stands out as potentially the best thing ever written about Warcraft:

We also did a big vegetable destruction recording session where we tore up ears of corn, smashed walnuts, hit cabbage, and twisted celery among other things to use for sweeteners. These sounds were used in various ambiences, Monk abilities, creature exertions, farming, doodads, spells and in many different quests.

Blizzard's detailed look under the hood of sound design is available on their blog.

Filed under: Blizzard