Given all the rightful hate towards the endings, there are some things I haven't seen brought up at all. One of them being sound.
Personally I found the sound in game - particular the guns and combat - to be by far the best in the series. Im not sure why but it really stood out to me through the entire experience.
Wondering if anyone else really noticed it when they were playing.
What did you think of the sound?
Débuté par
Wattoes
, mars 23 2012 10:24
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#2
Posté 24 mars 2012 - 06:15
Rob Blake
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- BioWare Employees
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- 63 messages
Thanks for the kind words everyone, glad you noticed the audio! We put a huge amount of work into making the audio as deep and immerse as possible. I think it was a result of a lot of things, the technology was pretty mature and meant we weren't fighting against it the whole time. We're also pretty familiar with the tech now too, so we weren't learning it anymore... but rather pushing it to it's limits. I also think that we as an audio team have got a lot better at what we do too, we're always learning!
As for the volume being quiet. Yes, this is the case and was a deliberate decision. It's hard to explain without drawing diagrams and playing examples.. but basically most games are loud because they compress and crush the sound to make it really loud. This actually has a negative effect on the audio quality, but when compared side-to-side with a quieter sound people will prefer the loud one. This is why television adverts are always really loud, same for music. As people tend to not play games side to side, I thought it would be safe to make the audio of higher quality without heavy compression and for people to turn the sound up. For more reading, look up 'loudness wars'
As for the orchestral recordings of the music. We did a few pick up sessions with individual instruments and voices (for example, the Krogan female pieces) but on the whole the music is not live. We'd planned on recording live but it's so incredibly difficult to fit this into the schedule given the Mass Effect team's 'iterative' working style, the shifting schedules and various other stuff. We'd still love to do live recordings, but we value more the ability to modify music late in the process... and if recorded live this is obviously not an option. Some of the best musical moments in the game were crafted right at the end of production when the game has really taken shape. The DA team have used live recordings and they sound fantastic, but their development methodology is slightly different to ME... you have to do what suits each project.
Thanks again everyone!
R
As for the volume being quiet. Yes, this is the case and was a deliberate decision. It's hard to explain without drawing diagrams and playing examples.. but basically most games are loud because they compress and crush the sound to make it really loud. This actually has a negative effect on the audio quality, but when compared side-to-side with a quieter sound people will prefer the loud one. This is why television adverts are always really loud, same for music. As people tend to not play games side to side, I thought it would be safe to make the audio of higher quality without heavy compression and for people to turn the sound up. For more reading, look up 'loudness wars'
As for the orchestral recordings of the music. We did a few pick up sessions with individual instruments and voices (for example, the Krogan female pieces) but on the whole the music is not live. We'd planned on recording live but it's so incredibly difficult to fit this into the schedule given the Mass Effect team's 'iterative' working style, the shifting schedules and various other stuff. We'd still love to do live recordings, but we value more the ability to modify music late in the process... and if recorded live this is obviously not an option. Some of the best musical moments in the game were crafted right at the end of production when the game has really taken shape. The DA team have used live recordings and they sound fantastic, but their development methodology is slightly different to ME... you have to do what suits each project.
Thanks again everyone!
R
