Behind the Audio of the Heroes of Star Wars Battlefront II

[Music] hello i think we have to start and uh welcome and good morning everyone my name is philip eriksen and i work as a sound designer at ea dice in stockholm where i've been for like four years worked on both battlefront titles and battlefield and during this talk i will talk about the heroes sounds for the heroes of star wars battlefront 2. and these are the topics that i will cover during this presentation and i will talk about the sound design direction that we had for this game and i will go through some challenges that we had during this production i will show a lot of examples both video and sound and i will go into detail showing you

the systems that i made to create these sounds and play them in the game but first let's look at some real gameplay video stuff that contains a lot of different abilities heroes and action enjoy is [Music] [ __ ] practice [Music]

get behind me i'm taking leads [Music] grass [Music] yeah thank you [Applause]

so the sound design direction that we had for this game was we wanted to try to get this far away from the game sounding gamey and let it sound more real believable immersive and really put you in a galaxy far far away it was the most of course the most important thing to stay true to the star wars universe and make the game sound like the movies and we wanted to support the stories and create feelings and enhance the characteristics of the heroes and the villains and it was very important for us that it sounded like the songs were actually created in the world interacting with the materials the different environments and the characters like the newer star wars movies for example rogue one and this made the soundscape feel a bit more realistic and a bit grittier although we at the same time strive to

make a very clean and dynamic mix and readable for the player some challenges that we had one of the big ones was mixed errors we didn't only have the original trilogy the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy we also had stuff from the cartoons and you could say that we also created a new era with the single-player story with item and we wanted these to sound different from each other and make their individual contrast stand out while still treating them with the same philosophy to make them fit into the shared soundscape in order to handle all the abilities and the scope for this project we needed to create smart solutions that would help us deliver fast but still maintain high quality so we created some versatile systems that could handle many different types of ability sounds

and these sounds they shared strategies and this system made it a lot easier to iterate and you could do both general changes to all abilities as well as individual tweaks per sound and this really helped both the design process and maintaining the sound throughout the project and the mixing stage we also wanted to focus a great deal on the gameplay feedback we created the mix that was less compressed and clean and a lot more readable with clear distance feedback and directionality and other important gameplay indications so as i said the mix was less compressed and it left more space for each sound and it was easier to give the power to a sound where it was needed we also made a distant content for all the abilities and they are affected by the environment

where they are created as well the sounds are and we also do a thing where the enemy sounds are higher in priority and louder than a or friendlies sounds and we also really tried to focus on making different perspectives so for example when you are being affected by an ability and that was something that was important and also dealing and taking damage so that you got feedback from that also in the sound design wanted to create clear characteristics between the heroes and the villains as well as an individual character's own sound signature so that you could easily spot enemies one thing that is very hard when working with star wars is the lack of variation and also the gameplay abilities being different from the reference in the movies and we always try to take the reference from

the movies and try to expand find elements and recreate sounds and a variation in perspective but still keep the character of the reference sound but just making it fit gameplay basically sometimes there was no reference or very vague reference in the films but we needed to use the same recipes to make them fit into the star wars universe lucasfilm they also wanted to approve some of our sounds and something that was very important to them was that the fourth sounds didn't sound too magical too techy or too similar to marvel and we tried to use the same principles as ben bird matt wood and david accorded to get the same feeling and the direction from lucasfilm was often less is more or the more believable it was the better they thought it was in the game as well sometimes the abilities had very little visual feedback so

and visual representation of an ability could just be an animation with a hand being lifted up in the air like darth vader's force joke for example but it's still the sound still needed to provide a diffuse but yet expected sound so let's move on to the examples and i will give three examples i will start with kylo ren and his ability force freeze and for this example i used almost exclusive the sound effects from the movie stamps and he's from the sequel trilogy next up is darth maul from the prequel trilogy and his ability force push which had a clear reference but i needed to make a hybrid with new sounds and last but not least luke skywalker and force repose and this had never been shown in any movie so i had to come up with a completely new sound but it still needed to sound original trilogy

i will show you a few scenes from the force awakens with kylo ren's force freeze so yeah kylo ren and his ability force freeze which surprisingly freezes the opponent for a duration of time which made this a looping ability it could differ in time and as you saw this ability had very clear reference from various scenes in the force awakens and i could base my sound almost entirely on the sounds from the movie stems and the sounds that lucas or skywalker sound provided me with just a gentle massage to make them fit better into the game and some added elements for different perspectives and added variation so when i started working on a new hero for this game i always just wrote down a few words as a sound design direction for myself mainly and

for this character i think kylo ren is of course evil but he's still afraid as well the sounds that david accord made for him for the movie has they have a musical tone to them they sound modern but also very distorted so i started with extracting the sounds from the movie stamps and i was quickly able to just make a loop out of the sounds and i decided to split this this looping sound into a noise layer and a tonal layer and i will play an example and then i will tell you why i did this so the first sound you will hear is the reference from the film and then my split loops [Music]

[Applause] [Music] so why did i do this yeah this um since i i split the loops i could play them in two different samplers and i could have set them in time from each other i could also apply different randomization like lfos and the pitch and the amplitude and just make a lot more randomization with quite short loops and i could also route the tonal basic layer into the subwoofer or the lfe channel without making the crisp noise layer unclear after this i needed to find some more variation for these sounds that i had extracted and but i of course wanted them to have

the exact same feeling as the rest of the sounds and especially for the affected perspective i i needed to add some some sounds so i started searching and i found this boomy canon sound that had the same kind of tonality and very nice tone to it and i also did some sound effects recordings myself i bought this huge party balloon and and i i took my ls 100 olympus recorder handy recorder and i just pushed the membrane membranes straight into the to the balloon and then ripped it away and this made a really nice ripping sound and i just added some distortion on that and then it sounded quite a lot like like kylo ren i will play those two examples as well [Music]

[Music] yeah and after this i basically just categorized the sounds that i had for the different perspectives and the different things that i needed to provide for kylo ren's close perspective the distant perspective and also when you are being affected by the ability and this is how it all sounds i would play the singles sounds first and then a combined variation [Music] [Music]

[Music] and now let's look at it in game because it doesn't matter if it sounds good as a single sound it needs to be in the mix and it needs to fit there detected [Music] died [Music]

so the next example is darth maul and i will start with showing a clip from the phantom menace [Music] um so yeah darth maul from the prequel trilogy and um and this ability force push had a clear reference as you saw during the fight with obi-wan kenobi but i wasn't really able to use this sound for the game because the gameplay ability was quite different so i needed to make a hybrid that hopefully worked equally well and again i started with the sound design direction and to me this character is angry fast

silent he doesn't speak a lot he's furious and lethal so i took the reference sound and sort of analyzed it and i found out that it's a soft kind of explosion with a lot of flanger on it and i wanted my sound to also keep that character of course but i wanted it to sound a bit more 2018 and a lot more punchy so what i did is i created some new explosions with flanger on them and i will play the reference sound and my new explosions [Music] [Music] and uh to be honest when i started making this sound i had a bit of a struggle to find the way and and really know what i wanted to create

so at the ice in my studio i always have an sm58 microphone just lying on my table so i can always grab it and just make sounds with my mouth and stuff so what i did was that i booted up the game and just performed a sound with my voice and this is very silly but it it helps and it makes just your thoughts or your sound that you have in your head you can get it into pro tools or whatever in a very sort of fast way and then you can start taking it apart and replacing it with other sounds and we'll play with the recording that i did and you will hear that it's actually not that far from the last from the final result [Music] [Music] where is

um so after this i i started thinking about what kinds of sounds that i could use to replace this and um and some evil sounds i wanted to create and one of the most evil sounding things i think is feedback it sounds super scary so i recorded some feedback basically in my room and then i also wanted to add some more sort of prequel tone to it so i got some synth sounds that ben minto had made and it added some raw power to it and the prequel character that i wanted and this sound is basically very simple it's the flange explosions the feedback and the synth sound and nothing too fancy no fancy plugins and anything and this could easily have been done by ben burritz very early and i will play you the feedback recording and then some

of the synth and then those two combined as well this is probably very nice for you who are hangover as well [Music] now [Music] ah [Music]

yeah and now let's listen to the whole sound with the flange explosion as well and the distant variation [Music] now let's look at it in game again [Music] [Music]

[Music] and my next example is luke skywalker and since this ability doesn't exist in any movie i will start with showing a clip from the game as well [Music] so luke skywalker and the fourth repos and as i said no reference at all from anywhere so i had to come up with a completely new sound but it still needed to sound very much like star wars luke skywalker and just expand the universe in a respectful way and my sound design direction for this guy was a powerful trustful

dominant natural and humane and i started with doing some sound effect recordings for this ability and i wanted to to record some earthy tones some sort of air sounds and the force from the ground because this ability basically has a short shop where the ground starts rumbling or like an earthquake and then after that you have the force repos explosion and for that i recorded some slinky uh and i will play a few of the sounds that i found found a baby alligator sound that i pitched down a lot which sounded quite cool and then some of the slinky stuff as well and i also used my balloon for this for some air crackles so yeah let's listen [Music]

[Music] ah [Music] [Music] so that was my start and i had to create a lot of the content for this ability because i had the charge up or the sort of force from the ground sound as a separate one shot and then

the force explosion as one and uh i needed to create first close and differ distant perspectives for this these sounds and also they were quite modular in game so for example if you were outside you got debris effects and stuff like that if you were inside you didn't get that so i needed to to provide the sound that fit with the vfx and the visuals in the game so we'll just uh play all the content that i made for this ability with the earthquakey stuff and then the force repos explosion [Music]

[Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

let's look at it in game again [Music] so we'll do a quick conclusion on just the sound design part but then i will talk about the system so it's not done yet um the sound design direction i think really helped making the sounds especially in an early stage of the sound design just to find the right path and it feels like it's always good to think and search with an emotional direct direction in mind the movie stems and the sound assets that we received from skywalker sound were extremely helpful even though we had to add a lot of sounds and change them it's provided us with a very good guide and also with a solid base

unique sound effect recordings to try to find and record what is actually needed for a specific ability and tailored for a specific ability it's always nicer to record something that sounds star wars or sounds correct for the ability than trying to shape something into sound sounding correctly unless it's more the more in world and the more natural the sounds were the better they fit the soundscape it felt like the basic sound design technique that we used made it feel like we were just an extension of the creators of star wars from the beginning and the vocalization sound design really helped i will definitely use it in the future as well so let's move on to the systems so for this project our general philosophy was to make master patches so we made master patches for explosions

blasters star fighters hero abilities all the big categories and we had a lot of sounds to make for this game so we needed to create solid shared systems to be able to handle the large amount of sounds and for the last battlefront game we made a lot more unique solutions but we couldn't really do that this time and this also helped keeping consistency so the sounds were more consistent and also between different sound designers since we all had to work on different parts of the game also this these shared systems um a lot of sounds they share sounds as well so it wouldn't really make sense to to redo that logic for each sound and tweak it every time this also helped the mixing process

because we could do general changes to the whole category of sounds or otherwise just go in and tweak individual sounds very fast and um we had a thing called a sound patch configuration so each sound had some patch configuration which uh inherits properties and parameters and values from the master patch but it lets you switch out the sound assets that are used even the ones that are shared actually and you could enable and disable various layers uh and you could tweak chosen properties from the master patch but still maintain the foundation of it so this is the master patch for hero abilities and i will just quickly go through and uh and tell you what these red boxes are and then we will zoom in and and go into detail what they could be used for so this is a sfx layer an add-on one-shot layer for the main force element

and this is the main force element also a one-shot and this is the loop sfx layer and add-on layer to the main loop part and this is the main loop part this box handles reflections and this abilities i've said that so many times debris i meant so let's zoom in on this box and just quickly first an explanation what it is that you're looking at so these boxes here we get a bunch of values from the game triggers and stuff we do logic processing math to modulate the amplitude and the pitch and then we send that into the sampler or sound player basically and the math and the logic that we have before it will make the sampler play the sound in a certain way so

with that this layer i generally just added to to give some gameplay feedback and in this example i used it for the force choke ability so when darth vader catches someone in his grip then i play a one-shot sound and it could sound like this let's move on the fourth main element and this consists of three samplers one fourth close one for stale one force distant and the tail one is for the looping abilities if i wanted to play a stop sound or a deactivate sound or something like that and i didn't need to have a distant one of that one because it felt like i could instead just fade out the loop on distance i will play you an example from uh force lightning let's start with the force close

and then the tail sound or stop deactivate [Applause] and a distant variation [Music] cool so the loop sfx layer this was very neat because i could just add an element but keep the the main loop quite like as a foundation i could also do stuff like fading over time pitch over time increase the pitch for example which i did for the force choke ability as well so if you're caught in a grip i will slowly fade in the loop

um with the bone crackling and also increase the pitch slightly so that it becomes a bit nastier and it could sound like this [Applause] and the next layer is the main loop layer and it consists of two samplers and they could fade in and out of each other seamlessly depending if you're running towards the sound or away from the sound and the example that i will play here is an ability called dark aura and i will start with the close one and then the distance [Music]

let's move on to the reflections a very important layer because this really makes it sound like it's coming from the world and it's the sound is being created and reverberating through the environment and these sounds were all shared amongst all the ability sounds but i had the possibility to turn it off if i didn't need it and we had five different aerial types for this game field forest canyon urban indoor small and indoor large and i will play two samples per each area type [Music] [Music]

[Music] the debris these sounds were also shared amongst all the ability sounds and the same as the reflection so i could just turn it off if i didn't need it and we had a lot of different debris sounds for different materials but i will just play three of them rock snow and vegetation

something that was also good with both these layers were that i could play them for example on the start sound i could also play them under the activate or the tail sound so i could use this for different abilities so let's move on to the processing or the dsp this box handles the lfe filtering and this was a new approach for us in previous titles we had always had a specific sample playing for the lfe but this was a bit more costly you needed a specific sample a sampler for the lfe and it could also cause phase cancellation and stuff like that so we tried this approach for this game and i think it worked out really well we could also for example adsr the lfe send so that way it didn't rumble too long in the lfe to keep it clean and this part is the distant filtering and this just helps gluing the close

sound to the distant sound and also then after a while on further distance making the distance sound even more distant and this part is a slapback delay that we do with the raycast so we have four raycasts on the player and so this raycast the slapback or the delay time and this really helps gluing the the noisy reflection layer to the more tonal uh force layer so i i just route the force one shot for example through this and this is of course depending on the environment you're standing in you will get a different slapback in quad and this part is a flanger and this i'm mainly used for the looping abilities so on angular velocity when you move your character i add a slight flinching effect just to make it get some variation and also it sounds a bit more star wars so

and these are the outputs and the lfe output in the top uh the object output placed where the sound is created and last the flat slapback in quad and as you see i didn't show you the whole patch actually so there is a big block over here that i need to go through before we're done and this is also extremely important it's the cam shake and the pad rumble or the sound driven cam shake and pet rumble so i could shake the camera and add pandra rumble to my abilities and this really helps making them powerful and i could also with this one do it on the start sound on the stop sound i could also do a slight cam shake throughout the looping ability for example

and just to make it a bit more clear what i meant with a sound patch configuration so we looked at the master patch and then i take all these values and parameters and shared sounds and stuff and the soundpatch configuration inherits those things in this view that you see so the soundpatch configuration and i could configure chosen parameters and this sound patch configuration have a sound slot so i could switch out the sounds even the shared assets if i just wanted to change one of those i could enable and disable various layers and this also made it a bit more optimized and this was also where i could start and stop various layers from each other offset from each other i could do the camshaft power sound and um since i can't go into too much detail i will just show you a picture of how it

looks and then if you are interested in more you can look at the gdc vault uh martin luxton from frostbite audio had a presentation about it and the presentation is called the smart sound design using modularity and data inheritance so i will show you a few clips of how the area types work in the game and the materials as well [Music] food [Music] and another video with how we handle the distant processing and also if the sound

is created indoor and your outdoor for example [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

so let's summarize uh for this game we had a lot more heroes you can see it was more than twice as many and to make around a hundred and eighty wave files uh with around five to ten variations so it was a lot to create and we wouldn't have been able to do this without the sound patch configuration and the shared systems we also focused a lot more on the gameplay feedback and added content for distance sounds for the abilities and the affected perspective as well as dealing and taking damage and we took one further step in making it even more in world and with the debris and the reflections and the raycast driven delay

and the mix was a lot less compressed as i said more focused and a lot more readable for the player and this was a big improvement from star wars battlefront the first one questions you had okay so let me get started i have a few nice um let's see maybe someone answers the question are you ready uh hey great presentation and great sounding game man i enjoyed it a lot um for the indoor and outdoor are you marking this up manually or you're detecting this procedurally yeah we are marking it manually

just with areas all right so now i got it uh you mentioned that there was very little visual feedback for the abilities and that lucas didn't want it to be magical yeah um how did you do that with the gameplay guys and you to make sure that it was still readable because i imagine it was especially hard for the game designers to make sure that even though there's nothing visual there that the mechanic was clear yeah that was a hard question actually yeah i'm familiar with it yeah i'm not really sure actually like i collaborated with the game designers a lot so sometimes maybe they didn't actually need to have a super visual vfx for anything because the sound could provide that that sound and you could easily know where it came from and stuff like that and i think also lucasfilm probably wanted the vfx and

the visuals to be quite sort of down to earth and simple as well in a way of course there are very sort of magical looking things as well but yeah i think it was just a combination so if we could do it with just the sound and the animation it it worked was it something that you gameplay tested a lot and and did you iterate on it like that yeah yeah absolutely yeah we created a lot of abilities that we sort of scrapped as well and just had to start over so it was we were play testing a lot and just finding the right path another question about actually the relationship with the gameplay guys and the visual guys because you mentioned that the sound was driving the camera shake which from from a perspective of making it really work sounds like a great idea but i can also imagine that some of the people in the design team or possibly on the visual side might have a bit of a problem with the sound team being responsible for the actual camera

um so how did you handle that did they have some control over it after you guys or did you just no it was just me basically but of course i i also showed them what i did and and they also do some cam shake actually but this was more for like the the actual moment where the sound is is the biggest uh but uh it's so it's very hard with the cam shake especially especially because some people don't like it at all and of course it can prevent very fast gameplay but it really does make a difference for the feel of the ability so we just found the right path and not too much but but we didn't overdo it either so was that only for the multiplayer or was it also for the single player also for the single player for sure uh and you mentioned that um you couldn't have the unique solutions that you could on the previous project was that simply because of the scope increase and the same amount of time or

was it yeah yeah we had a lot less time and we had to create a lot more sounds and we tried to to make shared systems for the first one as well but after a while it was like we had a lot of new gameplay features and stuff like that so so we just had to make it so we made a lot more sound patches with specific logic in them but this time it was like okay so we have at least stuff to base on like the first star wars game so we could make those systems shared and just improve on those so that we could use them more easily for different kinds of sounds cool thanks thank you hi uh thanks so much for the talk and like great talk great sound examples as well uh i have a curiosity about the close and distant perspective specifically in terms of the asset creation so as a process is it more about finding different sounds to work from or is it more of a

processing thing that you do within your dw or is it a mix of two or it's a mix of course but for example the explosions like a real explosion it will sound different depending on how far you are from from it so i always try to to completely change those sounds for example but also try to just uh with the plugins and stuff um modulate or like create the sort of a real world behavior for i mean some of these sounds are quite strange and there are not like a recording of this on distance so i had to make something that that worked but yeah we do try to change a lot of sounds so that they sound distant thank you um for the filtering lfe uh technique um was it really just using the filter as a crossover or was there any additional massaging processing uh to optimize the the effect it was a

crossover so yeah exactly and then we did some we don't send the full sound into the lfe we can just send like a little bump of it so we can do like the attack we don't have to rumble it all through the subwoofer thank you hi so i have a thank you for the talk i have a couple of questions so additionally to the different samples for the different perspectives uh did you add some real-time processing to the sounds like do you still have do you add reverb in real time or is it just like the yeah yeah yeah we do at the reverb uh depending but depending on the area that you're in and then also the stuff that i showed with the dsp processing like the filtering and the slapbacks and stuff like that okay yeah and uh did you have variations for uh like when you're playing a certain hero and when you're against a certain hero or is it exactly the same sounds in both cases

uh what do you mean exactly uh like um is there a difference in the in the sounds you play when you're against a certain hero i think or is it exactly the same it's it's the same but uh but when you're in third person like you have the camera you know you are the character then i play certain sounds or you most of them or you get the close perspective all the time of course but if you were an enemy or a friendly and the hero runs around you will get the different sounds all the time so okay so the perspective makes the work for us yeah exactly uh and uh so i uh some sounds are really uh long have a pretty long tail especially like luke skywalker's you can hear uh the eco in the distance so what happens to to that kind of stuff when you have the full mix and everything everybody is like firing and etc yeah i mean you can't do that for every sound but it's a glues to mix together as well and makes it just have a sort of depth to it but

[Music] that was a quite a specific case that was very long but it was a very powerful ability and i wanted it to sound big so then i made it big [Laughter] but we do sometimes as well like if you have a tail in the sound we can make the release time shorter or like you make the tail shorter for example when you're indoors so that you can add the indoor reflections on that instead of having the thunder tail you know but is it something that you drop for example if you have too many uh person firing and uh some explosions so maybe you don't want to hear the tail that time yeah i mean our hd or system uh does that for us basically and also some scoping okay and last one um so you work um the your custom audio engine is like you work 100 in it or do you okay yeah so there is no wise or not

thank you thank you hello uh thank you very much for the talk i'm wondering because there's so many super you know very natural locations like you're on um hoth and there's the snow-covered canyon or you're on endor and there's all this foliage what kind of recording was done did you to make those uh locations seem like they're they're real was there a lot of like field recording done or yeah absolutely a lot i always have my recorder with me and i know that ben minto he went to iceland for example recorded the real mod pits for the first game and also snow and stuff for hof so we tried to go to the real locations we also went to the redwood forest and but we also try to base it on what ben birth and these other fantastic sound designers made so we take their recordings and then we might change them you know and and put in a new content so that it sounds a bit fresher maybe but yeah a lot of

field recording cool thank you so two more questions uh first what was your memory budget and how did you meet that using the swapping out sounds like how dynamic was the the loading and unloading so the memory body that i can't remember it was big enough uh and second question how big was your sound team like both uh sound designers audio programmers it seems like maybe the sound designers here are doing a lot of like programming in the tool uh yeah we we were i think we peaked on like 12 people from dice but then we collaborated with the multiven criterion as well and uh so i think in total rosa how many were we like 25 ish yeah rosa is from criterion cool thank you

hey uh excellent sounding stuff i had a question about the dynamic mix i didn't see any nodes in your master patch that sort of alluded to an hdr system or the mixing and i would imagine with all the force powers in the low end the clutter of the mix uh had some challenges so how did you address that kind of dynamically in the mix yeah so we do the hdr we set the loudness or the priority of it in the outputs so there are no nodes for it basically but yeah we we definitely needed the hdr to to figure this out and also in the game mode heroes versus villains there are a lot of sounds playing all the time and they are of course quite huge as well because you are all heroes so yeah it was a tough one sure but it helped a lot with the hdr system cool that i can tell you thanks hey um so for every power how many baked

variations of every sounds would you make for one perspective um i think yeah as i said in the conclusion i think i made around five to ten variations okay every sound but then of course there were cases where i had a lot more sounds or i just found a lot more variation so then i could create that so some sounds probably had i don't know 25 even and so it could vary a lot but that's sort of the ballpark of how many variations so that you don't get too much repetition and as for one power how much time would you spend making just one power a day two days yeah um i think like a day or something sometimes i had to redo and of course i iterated on it but yeah i would say maybe a day all right or some day sometimes when it was quick and a lot longer sometimes as well but yeah

reverb related questions so for reverb are you guys programmatically sort of generating your reverb zones are you hand tuning those and uh how many reverbs are you running uh we are hand tuning all the errors and then we can set an ir a reverb to that specific area and we can i think we can have uh three irs playing at the same time but that's of course extremely costly right and also they can't be too long because that i did that once and i had a crush and people were angry it sounded very good but yeah thank you so much for coming you