Q: How big is the audio production team in total, and how do they keep up with the two week release cadence with all the voice overs in four different languages?
James Ackley: The team has grown over the near 6 years I’ve been here. When I started in 2008 there was no internal audio team, it was all outsourced. For the first 2-3 years it was mainly just Drew Cady and I doing the sounds, Jeremy Soule writing the music, Jim Boer programing the audio engine and tools with a couple of contract workers here and there. As we got closer to ship the team grew and grew, and now with our 2 week cadence we have quite a lot. In no particular order, we have Aaron McLeran working on the audio engine and some tools, Robert Gay also working on some tools and sound design/implementing, Cody Crichton as a Sound Designer/Implementer, Brecken Hipp on VO processing and import/export, Jerry Schroeder as a Sound Designer, Drew Cady as a Sound Designer, Keenan Sieg as our Audio QA, Maclaine Diemer on music, Amy Liu in audio production and myself as the Audio Director. We all do a lot and even though some may have specialties, we share the work and most of us have a few other roles as well.
Q: Who currently composes the music for GW2?
Maclaine Diemer: My name is Maclaine Diemer, and I am the in-house composer at ArenaNet. After Guild Wars 2 shipped in 2012, we contracted a composer named Stan LePard to write some music for our first few Living World releases (Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday). I contributed some music to those releases as well. Since then, I have handled the majority of new music in support of the Living World releases, and I’ve had some additional help from one of our game designers, Leif Chappelle. Leif is a composer in his own right, and has helped me with music for Wintersday, Super Adventure Box, Bazaar of the Four Winds, and some future Living World content. We have lots of big music plans for 2014, so thanks for listening!
Q: Where do you look to hire voice actors?
Bobby Stein: We work almost exclusively with L.A. talent, though we have a few actors from other parts of the U.S. in our cast. Much of the casting organization is handled via Blindlight, our VO partner, and Eve on the Editing Team.
Q: How do you record all your audio files? Do you do this locally or do you travel a lot to find the perfect piece?
James: We still go off-site for a lot of our sounds and the location is usually depending on what we are recording. Most all of us take recorders with us any time we go on vacation or just leave it in the car, you never know when you’ll get something cool. We are also fortunate enough to have a nice quiet Foley room at ArenaNet that we use a lot as well.
Q: I loved some of the videos from way-back that showed how you recorded certain sounds. The swinging fireball comes to mind. Any chance you’ll do more of those in the future or give us a tour of a VO session?
James: Yeah, I loved doing those videos and yes, we plan on doing more. It’s just time sure is hard to find lately
. We did a VO video a while ago, before we shipped, I’m not sure if we’ll do another one of those, but you never know.
Q: If you would introduce a new monster, and you would like to make it sound very new and very exciting, would you take archived assets and remix existing sound pieces, or would you start recording something new that fits your expectations?
James: There have been times in the past where we look at old assets and maybe use those as guides but I’d like to think each new creature needs a new sound set. Jerry has been hitting a lot of our big bosses lately and I think he’s done an amazing job working with and expanding the technical limitations while creating new sounds. The marionette is a perfect example. She was definitely a full new set of sounds and even a new way to play those sounds. Sometimes we record animals, people, and machines with the intent to use on a creature. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. It’s hard to know until it’s in the game. I may be jinxing myself here, but I’ve been dreaming of recording a “Jake Brake” from a big rig truck and using that as a creature sound for a long time. In my mind, they could sound like a huge creature with very little processing, but I won’t know until I get out and record one and see if it works. Maybe that will be our next video…
Q: Living World has a unique and high cadence in video game industry. How does it work for sound production in this regard? How did you manage to make the updates release pace work together with the character voiceover (since the persons giving their voices to the characters must not be available at all times)?
Bobby: We sometimes write and record ahead of schedule, though sometimes those scenes don’t make it into the game where/when we originally intended. So far we’ve been pretty lucky regarding actor availability.
James: The two week cadence has been a learning process for us all. We definitely couldn’t do it without people like Amy Liu making sure all the disciplines that affect audio (which is all of them) give us enough time to do our job. Communication is key. Talking with the teams early and continued tracking while the development is going is what seems to be working for us. If we can meet early and get an idea of what’s coming, and keep up to date as work is being completed then we have a better chance of getting our job done.
Q: What would you say is the most complicated sound effect/track in the game, and why?
Robert Gay: Amazingly, one of our most complex tracks in the game is what sonically is considered by most to be our simplest, our ambience. But it’s just a few birds and wind right? Well, what kind of wind? Cavernous wind, city wind, interior wind, forest wind, alpine wind… and birds only occupy a subset of regions in Tyria, not to mention the variety therein! Jokes aside considering the vast variety of source material and sounds themselves, when designing an audible world, ambience can be vastly understated.
It has to match the physical world it embodies feeling mechanical where fitting and organically semi-random where nature takes its course. Tyria has over 8,500 ambient audio zones and sources, all intermingling and layered in different ways. The world utilizes a plethora of game state information to breathe life into this crucial segment of sound design, including time-of-day, combatant activity, event state, boss health, and player location to name just a few. From the creaks under foot when mastering that jumping puzzle to the screams and moans of distant ghosts while exploring ancient catacombs, inhabiting a living world only works if the bed of sound it provides is believable. And if you are not listening too actively to it by default, then that’s usually a good sign we’re doing our job right!
Q: How do you go about deciding how many variations of a sound to have for an event or action?
James: We try to think about how much the player will hear the sounds and if they are something that could get fatiguing over long hours of play. Some sounds may be able to have only a few variations and be fine, but some are very unique sounding or get heard a lot and those are the ones we work on more to give variation to, either through more sound files, or random runtime dsp, or both.
Q: I have noticed some pretty special and cool sound effects during the living story. How does this work? For example, the sound of a twisted nightmare. Are the sound effects recorded after the creature and animations are done, or is it actually a part of the development process?
James: This was a perfect example of us getting a heads-up before the creature was ready for sounds. We met with the designers early and talked about what the plan was and what the lore of the creature would be. Then as the model, FX and animation were being created we were able to see and adapt our sounds. We set up a few Foley sessions, worked with the animation and FX teams to build the implementation strategies and tried our best to line up our work flow with theirs.
Q: Have you ever considered expanding the dialogue for player characters, or adding different-voice options to be purchased for further customization (giving your character a totally new voice, both for yourself and for other players to hear)?
Bobby: We’re getting a programmer to look at PC voice outside cinematics. If that works, we’ll also update/expand current PC chatter.
James: We have a lot of dreams and ideas for this and I really hope we get time to do half of what we want.
Q: How much post-processing goes into the charr voices? It’s clear that many of them are pitch-shifted and have some snarl sound effects layered in – how much work and how many effects go into this process?
James: The VO process is a lot more complex that you might think. This one could get really long, I’ll try to keep it short enough that you still want to read it. We started using the standard batch processing in Sound Forge and even built some fairly complex plug-in chains, but were never really happy. Fortunately we are lucky enough to have Drew Cady and he took it upon himself to create a custom Reaktor plug-in so we could use Nuendo for all our VO processing. Nuendo had just updated to being able to batch export from markers so we wanted to take advantage of that. So, with the help of Rob we now have this process for all our processed Voice in the game, which is a lot. Here’s an abbreviated list of what happens.
- We get the files back from the studio already named and cropped.
- We use an internal tool to import the files which also creates a concatenated file of each set of sounds that need processing. For example, the Charr will get huge Concat file(s) exported at the same time that it’s imported, and then we import into Nuendo.
- Along with the concatenated wav files, we also get and import a CSV file that holds all the file names, actors, file lengths, etc.
- The custom Reaktor plug-in then uses the wave file(s) as a guide to modify any number of other plug-ins like pitch, volume, reverb, etc. Those values get sent out as Midi controls. We can for example have pitch that modifies along with or against the pitch of the stock sound or the volume, or whatever.
We can also set the volumes on tracks to come on/off based on any of these values as well. An easy example of this is the slurps at the end of some of the charr lines. Sometimes that was the actor and sometimes it’s us. We have a track full of snarly-slurpy-slobber sounds that get turned up for a moment if the last part of the stock sound is loud enough and quick enough to make room for our sfx. We can also do things like set the pitch to climb or drop based on volume, so if someone yells maybe the pitch goes up, or if they whisper we bring in some buzzy robot sounds like on the Golem. Basically, we track the live performance to modify a lot of post processing so it’s not just a blanket batch process that always sounds the same. This gives us a lot of creative freedom, but comes with a bit of a time price. Since the “midiyoke” we use to route internal midi doesn’t run on export, we have to record real time track of all the VO we are going to export, then use the CSV to export the files. Most of the time this is fine, it’s just a double time pass, but for characters like the charr that have a lot of lines, it can take a while. Let’s just say I’ve run more than my share of 14-hour recording sessions.
(edited by Mark Katzbach.9084)
(edited by Mark Katzbach.9084)
DOLYAK EXPRESS: CHARACTERS AND RELATIONSHIPS IN TYRIA
Greetings,
Today, we have answers to some of your questions about characters and relationships in Tyria from this thread and the other language forums. Today’s answers come from Angel McCoy, Bobby Stein and Scott McGough.
Q: Do charr understand the concept of love, or do they select merely based on primal instincts like protection, best fit, alpha status and alike (much like in an animal society)?
Angel McCoy: Charr most definitely understand love, fall in love, fall out of love, and love friends and warband-mates deeply. When it comes to procreation, opinions vary. There are those who look for the partner with the best “genes,” and there are the surprise pregnancies as well. There are couples who love each other and want to make little versions of themselves. Everyone is an individual.
Scott McGough: I’d like to add that the charr are largely a military culture, so the qualities that make for a good soldier (bravery, fighting skill, leadership ability, loyalty, etc.) are considered attractive, but that is not the only criteria a charr has in terms of who they seek out as a compatible partner.
Q: I play a charr, but I can walk through Ebonhawke without getting the stink eye – where is all this sudden tolerance coming from?
Angel: The cease fire while treaty talks are under way. Humans and charr are currently under a cease fire arranged between the legions and the queen. Only renegades and separatists take action against the other race, and they’re bad guys.
Scott: Also, random open hostility by humans toward charr in Ebonhawke would raise the ire of both Divinity’s Reach and the Black Citadel, and drawing too much attention to the Separatists’ provocative underground political/martial movement is a sure way to get that movement crushed before it gets results. In other words, the anti-charr humans of Ebonhawke don’t like charr, but they know enough to bide their time and pick their battles.
Q: Are there relationships between races in Tyria? We know of Braham and Rox…but is such a thing more common or the rare exception? And is there a possibility for cross-species offspring?
Angel: That is up to each individual to roleplay. You will currently find no official cross-species NPC relationships in the game. Rox and Braham are good friends. That’s not to say we might not one day have one.
Q: Who were Taimi’s parents? What is Zojja’s role in Taimi’s education?
Bobby Stein: We intend to explore answers to both questions in future stories. Stay tuned.
Q: Why can’t Logan and Jennah love each other freely or marry each other? Is there a tradition preventing them? Can’t the queen choose her consort? Is Logan not highly born enough (he is still Gwen’s descendant)?
Angel: The nobility of Kryta is modeled on historic medieval feudalism. It’s unusual, and frowned upon, for people from different social strata to intermingle. Of course, there are always trysts between gentry, commoner, and street folk, and even love. But, socially, especially from the point of view of the gentry, it’s considered demeaning. There are also real social boundaries to it. A noble must behave a certain way and speak a certain way when in noble company. Most commoner and street people don’t dress, talk, or behave that way, and they actually disdain that kind of “snootiness.” There are stories in history of a royal loving and even marrying a commoner, but these are rare and come with heavy repercussions to both usually.
Specific to Logan and the queen, there are a lot of political machinations going on behind the scenes. They have many hurdles to overcome if they’re to be together, the least of which is that they both have bigger priorities to deal with. We’ll delve into these more at a later time.
Q: Why the focus on the characters instead of the world…
Bobby: We’ve populated most of the explorable and city maps with lots of ambient characters, creatures, events, and secret areas. I don’t believe we’ve chosen one over the other, since we’ve put a lot of resources into building an immersive, interactive world that players are free to explore at their own pace.
Q: …And why the emphasis on providing a narrative of a character before we’re really given a chance to make our own assumptions and preferences about them?
Bobby: For the Personal Story, we wanted to give players the opportunity to do a little roleplaying by letting them customize the look of their characters and pick their backstories, which affect certain chapters in their journey. This is a bit of a change from the original Guild Wars, but we felt it was an important evolution of the player experience.
Q: Recently, characters seem a lot more fleshed out and entertaining. Is this due to a specific change in how you write or just learning from experience?
Bobby: Thanks for the compliment! We actually haven’t changed too much about the writing itself, but we have put more resources into the presentation, which is probably what you’re noticing. We’ve learned a lot over time, and as a result we’ve evolved our story creation process. Our story meetings these days are a lot more involved and are very collaborative across disciplines. People on the teams are becoming very invested in these stories and characters. That makes a huge difference in the quality.
In the past, we generally didn’t build story instances where the player could interact with these characters, nor did we have the resources to build a lot of cinematics or special areas like Scarlet’s Lair. We even wrote (and voiced) a lot of character-building moments that unfortunately never made it into the game due to time constraints.
We examined player feedback over the course of 2013, and realized that we weren’t giving people enough opportunities to get to know our characters or understand the season plot. We were being a little too secretive and leaving too much to speculation. So starting with the Nightmare Tower releases we built more content specifically to impart story and develop our characters, and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Because of that, we’ve more closely partnered with designers, artists, and audio folk to continue to improve the story and characterization.
I’m especially excited about the remaining episodes of this season. We’ve got a couple of surprises in store, so I hope you’ll join us for the season finale!
Q: Do you have plans, or would you consider, adding a prominent gay male couple to the world (not sectioned off into one sylvari personal story path), and additional prominent people of color (i.e. non-white human/norn) to the world?
Angel: Absolutely. But we’re not in any hurry to do it just to do it. We’ll do it when the story calls for it.
Q: Some questions regarding Garm; how did he and Eir meet, and where specifically? And assuming dire wolves are by now extinct in Tyria (as well) with the only live specimen being him, what happened to the pack he was born into? Lastly, what happened between them that makes him follow Eir as his ‘alpha’?
Angel: That’s a big story. I’ll put it into my list of possible ideas to tackle in a blog post.
Q: Lorewise, how close is the bond between a Player and their npc Companions (Ranger Pet, Necromancer Minions, Thieves Guild, etc.)?
Angel: That depends on the character. Everyone is an individual, and it would do no good to generalize something like this. Each player can choose to roleplay their relationships as they wish.
Q: What exactly was it that caused Sayeh al’Rajihd and Trahearne to join forces the first time they met?
Angel: We’re keeping this story in our pocket for potential future release.
Q: How come Queen Jennah is so trusting towards Lion’s Arch? It is a melting pot lair of pirates ruled by the fiercest of them all, when she, on the other side, lead a battle against Kryta’s bandits who are not so different?
Angel: Lion’s Arch has been an established trade ally for a long time. She may not trust individuals from LA, but the city as a whole is very unlikely to attack Divinity’s Reach. Kryta’s bandits, on the other hand, are in the streets of DR and have damaged the DR economy as well as assaulting citizens. They are an immediate threat to DR.
Q: Which characters and their relationships inspired the developers the most?
Scott: Every developer and designer has a different answer, but (tongue firmly in cheek here), if we had to pick one answer, it would be Hobo-Tron and Minstrel Marcello.
Bobby: Lord Faren and himself.
Concerned about Captain's airship passes.
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Mark Katzbach
Concerned about Captain's airship passes.
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Mark Katzbach
Escape from Lion's Arch content too hard
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Mark Katzbach
(edited by Mark Katzbach.9084)