Guild Wars 2

Our Audio Director wanted to chime in with some background information about the sounds in the Tequatl fight.

James Ackley, Audio Director

Hello,

First let me say thanks for listening, we work really hard for all these releases and it’s great to know people are listening.

This was a big event we knew was coming for a while, so we spent some time working out what we could do to make him sound better. We knew the designers were going to bring some great updates to the game play and the FX team would also raise the bar so we needed to as well.

From a high level we wanted to make him sound bigger and more intelligent. With all the new game play we’d have plenty to work with, so we set out creating new sounds based on the old ones that would not only sound bigger (thanks Jerry and Cody) but would also sync better with what he was doing or was about to do. Honestly getting new sounds was the easiest part, it was getting all the sounds to play when we wanted that took the most time. Now with player culling off we have quite a lot of sounds playing…really, A LOT! So we all spent a ton of time trimming sounds, cleaning triggers, and feeding Aaron (our audio programmer) coffee to get all the sounds to play when we wanted, really Aaron did the bulk of the work on this, crazy amount of back end code work to get these sounds to play. Rob even spent some time tuning our channel counts and buffers sizes to see how much room we needed and could use. We’ve made so many improvements I’m really amazed how full the big battles sound now, very proud.

More details about the sound design, since you asked. Obviously I’d say the time spent on his new sounds and implementation was worth it. Jerry, Cody and Drew did a great job pulling his old sounds and tweaking them up a to sound a more ferocious, add variety and distant based sets. The distance sounds was something most people probably won’t even realize but I think it adds to the immersion. When you run far enough away or have to run/swim in from a way point, we added reverb/delay/distant sounds of the battle that blend in as you get closer. We’ve already used that tech on a lot of the skills but I think it really helped give a sense of size for Tequatl. Then once we had new sounds we spent a lot of time getting the triggers on his animations better sync’d with what he’s doing, Cody definitely worked some wizardry on that. Drew’s wave and environment sounds add that polish it needed to fill it out in the big moments and also the quiet ones.

We now have so many people on screen that events like this are mostly “sound designed” on the fly by the players. So getting the tech to work so we could hear everything was not only the toughest, but also the most rewarding. Then after getting more sounds to play, setting the fall off and priorities took a lot of time and I’m sure we’ll continue to polish this as we go.

Thanks for listening,
James