We go behind the scenes to speak with those at the forefront of what might just be videogames’ most under appreciated craft
Try to imagine playing through the entirety of your favourite game with the sound turned off. Imagine Dead Space without hearing a menacing clank in a dark corner cutting through the silence. Battlefield multiplayer without the chaos of gunfire and explosions. BioShock without the haunting deep wail of a Big Daddy. As soon as you start thinking like that, the vital importance of sound design comes sharply into focus.
Given how fundamental it is to both the emotional experience and mechanics of our favourite games, it's arguable that sound design doesn't receive the attention it deserves when it comes to evaluating what makes the games we love so great. In speaking to four members of the team behind Battlefield's exceptional audio - Ben Minto, Andreas Almstrom, Bence Pajor and Olof Stromqvist - the man responsible for the sound of Transistor and Bastion, Darren Korb and executive audio director on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Steve Szczepkowski, we discovered that there may just be a very good reason for that.
"In my opinion, when sound design is good, you don't notice it," Korb tells us. "If the sound design of a game calls too much attention to itself, even if it is cool, it can be distracting and break the player's immersion. When sound design really works, it helps make the game feel great without the player noticing it!" "It's meant to be an invisible layer that works on many levels," Szczepkowski says, echoing Korb's sentiments.
"It's the glue that fills in all the gaps as well as being the emotional compass. Occasionally audio gets to jump into the spotlight for some moments and shine, but it shouldn't be the headline.
"Good sound design should always strive to support the game's needs and never stand as a solo force," he continues. "Ultimately, when to pull back on your design is just as important as knowing when to push the creative."
For Szczepkowski, ensuring that audio is not ‘a solo force' is something that starts at the beginning of a project. "I try to absorb as much information as possible," Szczepkowski tells us. "Story is fundamental to any Deus Ex game so understanding the key narrative beats guides us in finding the emotional mood. From there, we jump to creative inspiration; themes in the visual beats including concept art, level design, character design (and much more) to push me to find a centre."
Korb takes a similar approach and offers some examples of how the themes, style and even mechanics of the games he's worked on influenced his approach to sound design. He points to the physical sounds - hammering, sawing and chopping - that you get in Bastion, a game about creation and destruction, through to the way in which the fact that Transistor's protagonist is a singer is incorporated in the game's audio. "I definitely wanted to integrate Red's singing throughout the game," Korb says. "My first idea to express that was the state change that occurs when you enter Turn mode [a turn-based combat mode that freezes enemies while you plan your moves]. The music becomes filtered, and a previously silent vocal track can only be heard in this state. The idea was to bring the player inside Red's head in this more thoughtful, tactical game state. It seemed like a logical place to go since being a singer is a part of who she is."
You might think that process of finding a game's 'sound' in a game not set in our world, such as with the future-set Deus Ex, or the fantastical Bastion. doesn’t necessarily apply to titles with a more realistic feel like the Battlefield series, but the Battlefield audio team tells us that's not the case.
"For each project we almost have a Rosetta Stone as a team, so that we can gather around and understand what the game will sound like and we try and find that right at the outset of the project," Minto explains. "It could be a clip from YouTube, a film that’s released or something along those lines and it helps us all get into the same feeling for how that title should sound."
"There was a shift from Battlefield 2 to Bad Company," Stromqvist says, providing an example. "Bad Company had a more handicam, punky sort of sound aesthetic which was quite different to Battlefield 2. Bad Company 2 was a step towards more the handicam sound of Bad Company and a little bit more of cinematic feel to it and Battlefield 3 went more towards a documentary style."
With Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 moving towards a more grounded representation of war, in contrast to the ostentatious Bad Company games, the audio design has necessarily evolved along the way, but it’s fascinating to discover that people's changing perception of war over the years has also influenced how the team has approached the Battlefield games.
"If we were making these games in the Eighties, you’d have things like Rambo and Predator as the aesthetic of what war sound likes, but these modern ones, because we've unfortunately been at war at the time, what people's understanding of what war sounds like is probably determined by the footage we see on the news and the footage that people share on YouTube," says Minto. "The quality of devices recording these events - we've seen it go from bulky cameras all the way to iPhone footage now - that transition has changed the way that people perceive war, but also of what war sounds like because of how this gear that's made for listening to dialogue, how it reacts to loads of sounds pummeling you."
"Also, it's about getting exposed to what war actually sounds like," says Almstrom, chiming in. "Hollywood has always been a like a trimmed version, then when you hear real war, it sounds very different. You're very surprised by the types of sounds you hear in real war - that’s one of the Rosetta Stones for Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4."
In striving for that sound, the Battlefield team captures everything for real - "tanks, airplanes, all the weapons we can think of, explosions, everything," says Pajor. That commitment to grabbing authentic material to work with might lead you to think that the team always takes a very scientific and regimented approach to their work, but, on the contrary, they like to embrace the rough and ready when it is in service of the sound of the game as a whole.
"One of the things that I think we've had as a concept is that we don't care too much about the individual elements, we're constantly looking at the entire soundscape, the entire experience and we're not too precious about certain elements," Pajor explains. "They have to be crafted and they have to be very good, but it's not the elements themselves, it’s how they interact with each other, that’s what makes it good and that has to fit."
"There's been a history of erasing lively recordings that might not be scientifically perfect, steady loop of a car engine or something like that," says Stromqvist as an example. Stromqvist has no qualms, however, about using "a recording that captures a more lifelike representation of an engine which might not be perfect, or as steady, or scientific, but it has some life, something else in it. I think we've had a good history of embracing those artifacts of recordings," he says.
"Those things actually capture little bits of story and real life into it," Minto suggests. "When we play those back in the game, we get all those little fragments of extra story for free, so when the player hears it all concocted back together and there's an even more complex story."
It all ties back to that desire to consider a game's sound as a whole, to make sure that everything works together as a totality, rather than fussing over each individual element, which, as Minto points out, can actually detract from what you are trying to achieve.
"If you ever look at a picture like the Mona Lisa, your eyes are drawn to her eyes and her smile and the amount of love and detail that’s there, but in the background, there’s a little smudgy bridge just above her right shoulder. If you look at that bridge in that detail, it doesn't compare to that smile," Minto continues. "The good part of sound design is to realise to not to make the most awesome bridge in the world, because that would detract from the main prize. It's all about everything sitting together and if you made everything awesome, you end up with nothing being awesome, because it’s all fighting over the top of each other. That’s a thing I've noticed about working here in Sweden is that there's not this driving pride to make everything louder and bigger and brighter, because you just run out of space. Sometimes you just have to make things not as polished as they would be as if you were looking at it is an individual item, because you are making sure to keep your eye on what the overall big picture is."
Another key to the way that the team works is in how integrated it is with other departments. Just as Korb and Szczepkowski talked about taking influence from the game's themes, story, art style and so on, at the beginning of a project, the Battlefield team emphasises the importance of staying engaged with those other elements throughout. The potential to work closely as part of a team is a real advantage for videogame sound design.
"In film, the sound is usually post production - it's put on afterwards. The beauty of the way we work - especially with the Frostbite engine - is that we're not bolted on," Minto explains. "A lot of studios might use a graphics engine where you then bolt-on some audio middleware and they’re just feeding off it. But we're right in there, usually from the start of the project as well, going, 'well, if you make this vista open up and then close like that, we have the opportunity with sound to do X, Y and Z.' Or, 'if we know round the next corner you want the player to feel threatened or scared, if we do this a couple of steps back, we can build the player up to that experience.' We’re not just sound attachers, we don’t just put sounds on things. We're interested in the experience and building up to it."
"I would say we're completely integrated with the rest of team," Almstrom points out. "We work as an artist, or a gameplay person - we’re that integrated into the processes."
"I would say even more," Pajor suggests, "we're integrated into every part of the game. We see it from the outside, the whole picture, and we intervene everywhere. We can talk to an animator and say ‘this would be better if you did it like this or that' and we are talking to the designers saying, 'if we did it like this, we could make the sound for it tell this story or that story.' I would say we influence game design a lot."
The team's insistence on the importance of working together with other departments and supporting each other in order to work towards realising a complete experience makes sense when you consider how audio permeates every aspect of a game. When it comes to the story, audio can help set and enhance the tone. For the world, audio is key in creating atmosphere and helping you to buy into the game's setting. Lest we forget that games are interactive, it also plays a vital role when it comes to mechanics.
"Having feedback for player actions is often essential not just for feel, but to give the player cues about mechanics," says Korb. "Did the attack connect? Is a power ready to use again? Am I at low health? Audio can help convey these things without getting in the way."
"What we're trying to do with the soundscape is, as well as making you believe you're there, we're encoding information," Minto says in reference to Battlefield's multiplayer. "If you stop and listen, you should be able to know where somebody is. what they're shooting, if they're going to kill you or if they're on the same side as you. Our job is to actually encode this information and make it readable by the player. The better we do that job and make the scenario more readable, the better people can decode that and make better decisions while playing. Our job is to make people be able to make those choices and therefore get more enjoyment out of the game."
The assertion that audio helps us get more enjoyment out of games is undeniable. Whether it's something as immediate as some sharp strings accompanying a scare in a horror game, something as subtle as a small musical flourish that helps an emotional moment hit home, or something as practical as hearing the footsteps that help us locate a foe in a multiplayer shooter, sound design is always there, making our experiences better.
We might not always notice it by virtue of the skill with which those behind our games' sound ensure it feels like an inseparable part of the fabric of a game’s world, but we sure as hell know how vital it is when we take a moment to think about it. Consider this a hat tip to those unsung heroes.